219
Nintendo Switch emulators Yuzu and Ryujinx can already run Red Dead Redemption on PC
(www.dsogaming.com)
this post was submitted on 19 Aug 2023
219 points (97.4% liked)
Games
16751 readers
904 users here now
Video game news oriented community. No NanoUFO is not a bot :)
Posts.
- News oriented content (general reviews, previews or retrospectives allowed).
- Broad discussion posts (preferably not only about a specific game).
- No humor/memes etc..
- No affiliate links
- No advertising.
- No clickbait, editorialized, sensational titles. State the game in question in the title. No all caps.
- No self promotion.
- No duplicate posts, newer post will be deleted unless there is more discussion in one of the posts.
- No politics.
Comments.
- No personal attacks.
- Obey instance rules.
- No low effort comments(one or two words, emoji etc..)
- Please use spoiler tags for spoilers.
My goal is just to have a community where people can go and see what new game news is out for the day and comment on it.
Other communities:
founded 1 year ago
MODERATORS
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
view the rest of the comments
Switch's operating system is based on the OS from 3DS. The ARM architecture was already well documented and emulated. Tegra has documentation from NVidia.
With all that, making a Switch emulator was relatively "easy". They took Citra, the 3DS emulator, and worked from there.
Xbox 360 is a different beast. Even its OS was only kinda Windows, so they couldn't just take Wine and a PowerPC emulator and call it a day. Taking long is IMO not much of a surprise because of that.
IIRC the original Xbox has even worse emulation, to this day, despite being infamously close to a stock PC.
What makes RDR's emulation struggles noteworthy is that it's a highly desirable game that still took ages to unfuck. Most nightmare cases for emulators seem to be random D-list titles. Pinball Fantasies on Game Boy had incomprehensible crashes, early and reliably, for no discernible reason. True Crime New York on Gamecube was a white whale for Dolphin despite being absolute garbage.
RDR was a huge deal for its own sake - and it ran bad, looked worse, and stayed that way for a while. Back in the day it was common for emulators to only work properly for big-name games. NESticle and SNES9X absolutely cheated to run major titles. Early N64 development was nothing but. So having this killer app refuse to work, year after year, was a lingering presence in people's minds.
Finally getting it working, only to have a nearly painless alternative drop, is pretty goddang funny.
Aside from poorly documented hardware, one reason why Xbox emulation is in such an early state was simply lack of interest. The Xbox had a meager first-party library and what exclusives there were, were already available to play on every Xbox released ever since via back compat.
I think a more tragic case would be if MGS4 was ever re-released as part of the Master Collection ports. That game was designed from the ground up for PS3, and runs terrible even on the custom RPCS3 builds designed specifically for it.