1-2-Switch is the 1st Nintendo Switch Exclusive to be Emulated Through Yuzu Emulator

The Nintendo Switch’s firmware has really been blown open in the last few months, and now there’s been quite possibly the biggest breakthrough yet - the Yuzu emulator has successfully booted its first Switch exclusive, the launch title 1-2-Switch!.

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As it currently stands, there are two Nintendo Switch emulators in development concurrently; Yuzu and RyujiNX. Both are achieving similar levels of progress, with Yuzu revealing it can currently run The Binding of Isaac: Afterbirth+, Puyo Puyo Tetris and Cave Story+, as well as boot 1-2-Switch.

“First, we are trying to get more games booting further, to the point that they are trying to render frames, and second, to try to emulate the Nvidia Maxwell GPU,” said the Yuzu team in an update. “Even for simple games such as these, Maxwell emulation has shown to be quite challenging - and we suspect that this will be our biggest focus in the coming months.”

The breakthrough from Yuzu comes just days after the Switch was hacked via an unpatchable hardware-based exploit that was achieved via a complete dump of the console's boot ROM. Console hackers ‘fail0verflow’ achieved the ROM dump and then subsequently released the exploit to the masses of April 24th.

"Choosing whether to release an exploit or not is a difficult choice," wrote fail0verflow. "Given our experiences with past consoles, we've been wary of releasing vulnerability details or exploits for fear of them being used primarily for piracy rather than homebrew.

"That said, the Tegra bootrom bug is so obvious that multiple people have independently discovered it by now; at best, a release by other homebrew teams is inevitable, while at worst, a certain piracy modchip team might make the first move. 90 days ago, we begun the responsible disclosure process with Google, as Tegra chips are often used in Android devices. The disclosure deadline has now lapsed. The bug will be made public sooner or later, likely sooner, so we might as well release now along with our Linux boot chain and kernel tree, to make it very clear that we do this for fun and homebrew, and nothing else."

As it’s hardware-based, the only defense Nintendo has is to release a new hardware iteration of the Switch with a revised Nvidia Tegra X1 processor. As it stands though, there are almost 20 million Switch consoles in the wild with this hardware vulnerability, and likely many more than have already been produced.

Due to this breakthrough, hackers have also been able to open up the portable console and use it for all sorts of homebrew code. Linux and Windows have both been booted on the device, as has the Dolphin emulator running with working Gamecube games. In short, we're very close to the Nintendo Switch and its games being busted wide open, so it's certainly an advancement that'll have Nintendo worried.

And now, of course, we’ve got the first full Switch games being emulated on PC. Performance of 1-2-Switch! is pretty terrible at this early stage, but it’s undoubtedly an impressive achievement so shortly after the Switch’s launch.