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Nintendo Switch emulator yuzu gets a nice Steam Deck upgrade

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The team working on the Nintendo Switch emulator yuzu have released some Early Access upgrades, this time around for the Steam Deck. With their Early Access updates, these are available to people who support development on Patreon before rolling out to all users in their main public releases.

From the Early Access 3604 release notes via their Discord:

  • Tweaked garbage collector to be more aggressive in favour of steam deck.
  • Automatically detect system timezone.
  • Yuzu now automatically sets the system timezone based on the desktop operating system clock.
  • Limit device access memory for integrated devices to 4 GB.
  • Prevent vram usage from filling up in integrated devices like steam deck.

Great to see developers improve things on my favourite Linux-powered handheld.

Have you been doing much emulation on Steam Deck or desktop Linux? Let me know in the comments how you've found the experience to be. I don't do much at all myself.

Article taken from GamingOnLinux.com.
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20 comments
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Techjunky May 23, 2023
Quoting: FireBurnI've been playing ToTK and I'm amazed at how much more beautiful it looks on my 6800M under Yuzu than natively on my switch, but I guess doubling the resolution has its merits

Can't wait for a Switch 2 or for Nintendo to finally make some money from platforms like Steam

You're probably more than doubling the resolution. This game uses AMD FSR & runs at a low resolution. Just look at the trailers, looks like 480p being upscaled.
Luticus May 23, 2023
I emulate pretty much everything on my steam deck. My deck is basically a portable nostalgia machine. Pick a period in my life and I can play games from the time on my steam deck. It's crazy. So far, I'm able to get pretty much everything I've tried working. Even got SNES Scope game Metal Combat working with gyro motion control. Haven't messed with trying to get NES gun working yet though.


Last edited by Luticus on 23 May 2023 at 9:22 pm UTC
Pengling May 24, 2023
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QuoteHave you been doing much emulation on Steam Deck or desktop Linux? Let me know in the comments how you've found the experience to be. I don't do much at all myself.
I used to be a major real-hardware-only person, even to the point of having owned a JAMMA cabinet (I don't recommend it - they're huge, noisy things, and they're a maintenance nightmare - even more so now that CRTs are out of production) and still owning a Retrode and a tape-player that can correctly handle old microcomputer data-cassettes (I still have boxes, bags, buckets, and binders full of old tapes, cartridges, discs, and arcade-boards hanging around, too), so a hell of a lot of my Linux-gaming is emulated, as once emulation improved I always saw it as a simple format-shift.

Anyway, the experience of emulation on Linux is better than ever these days, though I can still remember the bad old days when people would say "Oh, you wanna stick Windows XP on that." (no, I didn't want to). It felt like that changed for the better very rapidly once the Raspberry Pi spread like wildfire - something that it now feels like the Steam Deck is doing for PC-gaming on Linux. (Myself and fellow GOL'er StoneColdSpider often joke in the Weekend Players' Club forum-threads that we're from Emulationville, a bustling suburb of Linuxtown, as well, since it became fairly common for people to get into Linux-gaming thanks to emulation on the Raspberry Pi. )

That said, I haven't emulated the Switch - I sold mine in late 2021 because very little on it interested me in the end, and as others have mentioned the ergonomics are quite painful, and then I went all-in on Linux-gaming after that, with most of the few Switch titles I enjoyed being available on Steam and working via Proton, so I just re-bought them there.
StoneColdSpider May 24, 2023
Quoting: Pengling(Myself and fellow GOL'er StoneColdSpider often joke in the Weekend Players' Club forum-threads that we're from Emulationville, a bustling suburb of Linuxtown, as well, since it became fairly common for people to get into Linux-gaming thanks to emulation on the Raspberry Pi. )
Emulation on the Raspberry Pi is how I got my start with both Linux and emulation...... And started me on the road that ended here..... GOL....... And in fact me getting into emulation all started thanks to Nintendo......

So if you want someone to blame (or thank) for me being on GOL....... Its Nintendo.......

Also... Pengling...... Im still waiting for my cookies for moving to Emulationville........
Pengling May 24, 2023
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Quoting: StoneColdSpiderAlso... Pengling...... Im still waiting for my cookies for moving to Emulationville........
Here you go.
fenglengshun May 24, 2023
Can someone give me a link/guide to the Yuzu versioning? I don't know which mainline build that early access build 3604 will correspond to, or what features current Yuzu mainline would have in comparisong to the early access.

I just use yuzu-early-access (and use the other source as well) because I can't be bothered to look up the difference, but I don't mind playing by the rules as long as it's clear when I'd get those features and what features I do currently have.
Zelox May 24, 2023
I think Valve will soon get another suing from Nintendo.
Even if Valve aren't supporting piracy, they are not doing anything about it.
And Im not supporting piracy at all, but they way Nintendo works,
If u buy a game, you have to use it on there hardware is a pretty old way of doing things.
Piracy will be a thing as long as they don't release it on more platforms.

And what is a better more open and free system, but gives u about the same console feel as a switch?
The steam deck. And the pc community is pretty know for modding, changing and tweaking stuff.
So that piracy would happen was almost expected.
I don't emulate and never have done, so I don't know if there is a "legal way" to emulate.

But Im sure Nintendo is against emulating.
Just imagen Nintendo on steam, or Nintendo launcher on a pc.
Ooh well, nice to see yuzu getting some updates for there garbage collector :).


Last edited by Zelox on 24 May 2023 at 10:43 pm UTC
fenglengshun May 25, 2023
Quoting: GuestWhat do you mean by "playing by the rules"? Yuzu is GPLv3 so you can build the source, redistribute it, redistribute binaries, and so on. This "Early Access" stuff is just a way to get some funding, you can totally get the latest version of Yuzu legally, even in binary form, without paying any money.
I know, but pineappleEA and Fan the Deck got criticized for sharing the way to get them for free (that I think EmuDeck switched to requiring the code given from patreon to get EA builds), so I'd imagine that they'd rather only people who pay the Patreon only use it.

And I might not mind, if there's a clear list of what I'm losing, when I'm getting it, and it isn't like 6 months of wait or something.
DanglingPointer May 26, 2023
I build the latest yuzu-mainline tag once a month optimised for my cpus (znver3, they're Ryzen 5800x and 5600g).

On the 5600g with the igpu it runs perfectly at 1080p with 1x native resolution with no AA and default AF! I've got it plugged to a 55" Toshiba Regza as a couch rig for my son. It plays switch games perfectly on iGPU!

Been playing BOTW wanting to finish it completely before I go TOTK. That will give the Yuzu devs enough time to iron out the idiosyncratic kinks from TOTK!

For those that know how to build stuff, or want to know how to build stuff optimised for your architecture, I can't recommend it enough!!!! Go down the rabbit hole and give it a shot! Learn something about building an emulator, may take you a day or two and you'll feel like a million bux when you see what you have accomplished!

You'll get more FPS as the emulator would leverage what your CPU instruction set can do rather than accommodating the lowest common denominator which are the old chips running SSSE3 and SSE4.x.
In my case it ensures that AVX2 and FMA3 are used wherever possible which really accelerates asynchronous shader compilation on cpu.

Those with even newer cpus using znver4 can leverage the avx512 instruction set!

You'll get more bang for the buck from your hardware for a lot longer!


Last edited by DanglingPointer on 26 May 2023 at 11:36 pm UTC
shibuya Jun 13, 2023
Quoting: Purple Library Guy
Quoting: shibuyaew-zu
That seems kind of rude. You got something against the project?

Touchy touchy. They steal code from ryujinx and others without credit. Their behaviour often helps nintendo..."patsy"
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