GameCube Coming To Nintendo Switch Online With 3 Games At Launch
GameCube Coming To Nintendo Switch Online With 3 Games At Launch
It's something I've been hoping for a while now, and Nintendo have officially confirmed that Gamecube games are heading to NSO once the Switch launches. Nintendo have announced that The Legend of Zelda: The Wind Waker, F-Zero GX, and Soul Calibur II will be launching first with other games such
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Is the Switch even powerful enough to emulate Gamecube? Or are they porting them?
They used some kind of hybrid solution for Super Mario 3D All-Stars but I can’t imagine Switch 2 won’t be powerful enough for regular emulation. Even relatively old Android phones can run Dolphin now.
I was emulating the GameCube on a athlon64 15 years ago; the switch is underpowered but not that underpowered
I used to bullseye womp rats in my T-16 back home. They're not much bigger than two meters.
I don't exactly keep up with the latest in emulation, and who knows how Nintendo is going to do things, but my understanding that in a lot of ways GameCube (and WII for that matter) emulation has been in a better place than N64 for a while now, so I'm not too concerned about the switch being able to run it.
While the console itself was less powerful, the N64 is kind of a monster to emulate, it basically speaks a totally different language than any computer (or phone, console, etc) you might try to emulate it on, and there's a lot of weird special code in individual games that the console needs to deal with, so there's a lot more for the emulator to do and so you kind of need a comparatively beefy device for the emulation to run well.
GameCube and later consoles work a lot more similarly to how your computer and other devices work, so it's a lot easier to emulate them.
I've seen it explained sort of like if the N64 spoke Chinese, the GameCube spoke Spanish, and your computer speaks Portuguese.
If a Spanish speaker slows down and throws in some hand gestures, a Portuguese speaker will probably more-or-less get the gist of what they're saying, and Google translate can pretty much fill in the rest. That's your computer emulating a GameCube game. There's not too much the emulator actually needs to do, just some minor corrections here and there but mostly things translate pretty cleanly 1:1 between the two languages.
Chinese and Portuguese are wildly different languages though, almost no shared vocabulary, different languages families, even some of the hand gestures may have different meanings, and Google translate is probably going to spit out some weird garbled nonsense if you try to translate anything too complicated through it. It takes a lot more to facilitate communication between the two languages.
The have N64 games on Nintendo online, which are still pretty Emulation resistant, so I assume they're using a different method.
Nintendo has already been selling a small selection of GameCube and Wii games that run emulated on Switch's processor (Tegra X1) in 1080p.
- On the Switch itself: Super Mario 3D All-Stars runs emulators for Mario Sunshine (GC) and Galaxy (Wii)
- On the Nvidia Shield TV, which uses the same processor: Twilight Princess (GC), NSMB Wii, Punch-Out (Wii), Mario Galaxy (Wii), Donkey Kong Country Returns (Wii). Only available on Shield systems sold in China.
The Dolphin emulator can be installed on Nvidia Shield (Android) and, thanks to modding, on exploitable Switch systems as well.
However, this newly announced library of GameCube games is only for Switch 2, which has drastically more powerful hardware than the 8-year-old original Switch.
Pikmin 1 and 2 run great on Switch. I also never ran into any issues with Sunshine.