this post was submitted on 05 Apr 2025
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I was right about Nintendo Switch 2 Backward Compatibility | Modern Vintage Gamer (www.youtube.com)
submitted 4 months ago by misk@sopuli.xyz to c/games@sh.itjust.works
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Nintendo has confirmed backward compatibility on the Nintendo Switch 2. Let's discuss how it works in some detail.

  • 00:00 - Recap
  • 02:35 - Switch 2 confirmed to be using emulation/translation layer
  • 08:59 - A closer look at the compatibility list
  • 14:32 - Conclusion/Outro
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[โ€“] BlackEco@lemmy.blackeco.com 14 points 4 months ago* (last edited 4 months ago) (1 children)

Most likely they use a translation layer (think Wine, Proton or DXVK) rather than emulation, since the Switch 2 hardware is not completely different from Switch 1 and it's not as costly as emulation, so I would say neither.

Edit to clarify emulation vs translation layer:

Emulation re-creates the entire hardware, while translation layer translates programming instructions intended for one platform to another, just like you would translate "one plus two" from English into "um mais dois" in Portuguese for exemple.

Since both Switch don't have completely different hardware (unlike PS3 and PS4 for example) it's probably easier and much more efficient to simply translate instructions that were specific to Switch 1 into Switch 2 instructions.

Edit 2: also Yuzu and Ryujinx are designed to emulate Switch on the x86 architecture, and since Switch 2 (and Switch 1) run on ARM, I'm pretty sure these emulators wouldn't run on Switch 2 without massive re-engineering efforts. Also, as someone else said, these projects are reverse-engineered, it makes much more sense that Nintendo engineers create an emulator from scratch using their own internal documentation of Switch 1 architecture (again, it's unlikely they went for emulation as I stated above) so the result is much more reliable than both Yuzu and Ryujinx.

[โ€“] sugar_in_your_tea@sh.itjust.works 3 points 4 months ago

Exactly this. It would be a lot more work to port something like Yuzu or Ryujinx than build a small library that translates syscalls and whatnot from Switch 1 to Switch 2.