Mamma Mia, What-a-Mess: Nintendo tried to obliterate the Switch emulation scene by going against a popular open-source project in 2024. A couple of years later, the offspring of that project is capable of running commercial games released for the brand-new Switch 2 console. Nintendo's lawyers are likely going to get rough, but the Japanese company has only itself to blame for this mess.
A year after Nintendo released its popular Switch 2 console, resourceful developers have already started to bring the brand-new gaming experience to PC through AI-assisted emulation. The Eden-NX2 emulator can already run popular, Switch-exclusive games such as Mario Kart World and Donkey Kong Bananza, though there is still a lot of work to do before compatibility and performance can improve.
Either way, the emulation scene is now racking up an impressive list of never-before-seen milestones on both old and new gaming machines. Developer "Takoroka" stated that Eden-NX2 is a fork of the Eden emulator with experimental Switch 2 support. The emulator was released a few days ago, and Nintendo enthusiasts are providing plenty of video evidence that Switch 2 emulation on PC has officially become a thing.
How did developers turn a brand-new console into a virtual gaming experience in such a short timeframe? In this particular case, AI-assisted coding is just part of the equation. Nintendo mostly kept the same base hardware architecture and operating system as the original Switch, making code hackers' lives much easier.
– Centro LEAKS (@CentroLeaks) October 30, 2026
According to people working on the Switch 2, updating existing Switch emulators to support the latest console is just a matter of adding a few new Arm64 CPU instructions to the program's dynamic recompiler. Existing rendering engines based on the Vulkan API are mostly compatible with the Switch 2 graphics architecture, and the same goes for audio rendering.
The Switch has never been a particularly powerful machine, and existing emulators can now run a lot of commercial games with excellent performance – even on older PC systems. When it comes to the Switch 2, the experimental Eden-NX2 build still requires a fairly powerful CPU and GPU combo to render compatible games in a somewhat playable state.
Eden is a capable Switch emulator that came out of the Yuzu disaster. Nintendo tried to eradicate Switch emulation by threatening the Yuzu team through its well-funded legal team, but open-source projects stay dead only if their code is unmaintainable spaghetti or no one is interested in them anymore. Eden, Suyu, Ryubing, and other active forks of the original programs are progressing fast, despite Nintendo's readiness to unleash the lawyers when it comes to protecting its gaming IPs.
As the Eden-NX2 case clearly shows, the Switch 2 might just be the same. Despite being in the early stages of its commercial lifespan, the new hybrid console has already been jailbroken. Modding, reverse engineering, game dumping, and emulation can only improve at this point.