Hey Patrons! We’ve got an exciting update for you today – We’re thrilled to announce that we’ve been secretly working on an Android port of yuzu for the past few months and are now ready to make it public! It’s available for you to try today via the Play Store. We’ve also attached the APKs to this post for those who would prefer to install manually.

Continue reading about this on our website!

One important note that we’d like to bring to your attention is the differences in how we intend to manage release channels between Android and PC.

Like PC, we’re releasing right off the bat with both a free, mainline version of yuzu Android, and a paid Early Access (EA) version. At launch, these builds are based on the same code, and offer the exact same features. Unlike PC, both builds will continue to be based on our main source code branch, with Android-specific changes included as they are vetted. Both release channels will include more thoroughly tested content, so we recommend that you just stick to one or the other. EA will get more frequent updates, while mainline will be updated when we think that there are good milestone releases.

Furthermore, we do not have the same level of control over releasing builds on Android as we do on PC. Currently, to use Android EA, we require a one-time purchase on the Play Store. After this single purchase, you are entitled to all future updates. We anticipate that the Android port will take some time to mature, and as such do not plan on having a subscription model for Android EA.

Which brings up another important note – We do plan to bring Android EA to our Patrons for no extra cost, but do not have the infrastructure setup to do this yet. In the coming days, we’ll be setting up a system to grant one-time Android EA redemption codes for our existing subscribers. Until then, please enjoy the exact same features and support with our free mainline release, or download the EA APK below!

As always – thank you! We would not be able to work on yuzu as much as we do without all of your amazing support. Again, a very special thanks to you, our Patrons, for making our Android release possible and helping us to continue this amazing project for years to come. Cheers!

- The yuzu development team

Hey Patrons! On behalf of the entire team, we'd like to thank all of you – our incredibly generous supporters and community – for an amazing year for yuzu & Switch emulation as a whole. We wish you a Happy New Year and hope that you are having a great start to 2023.

It's been a few months since we checked-in with you here, but we hope that you've been following all of the great end-of-year yuzu updates via our website, Twitter, and Discord!

In particular, we just released our December 2022 Progress Report. December was an exciting month for the project – You can expect tons of graphical improvements, covering both accuracy and performance, with a focus on our Vulkan backend. Furthermore, we've added our own custom Joy-Con driver that gives us much more freedom to accurately emulate the Switch's user input, and added support for emulation on ARM64 devices (Linux only, for now!). There are many kernel accuracy improvements, and a boat-load of other fixes.

Continue reading this progress report on our website! 

We'd also be remiss if we didn't make sure you had a chance to catch our other end-of-year Progress Reports! In order:

• September 2022 Progress Report 
• October 2022 Progress Report 
• November 2022 Progress Report 

As always – thank you! We would not be able to work on yuzu as much as we do without all of your amazing support. Again, a very special thanks to you, our Patrons, for making this project such a success in 2022 and helping us to continue this amazing project for years to come. Cheers!

- The yuzu development team

Hey, Patrons! We hope that you've been having fun with online multiplayer in yuzu for the past week with the recent release of Local Wireless Multiplayer! We've just released this feature to the general public, and furthermore expanded our server capacity to accommodate more regions and users. Expect a lot more players online to enjoy your favorite games with! Thank you to all our Patrons for bug testing, server stressing, and help making this release possible! As always, please leave a comment here or on Discord if you have any feedback on the experience, or suggestions to make it better.

As we go full throttle into Autumn (for those of us in the Northern Hemisphere!), we'll be wrapping up Summer with the August 2022 Progress Report! August was jam-packed with many exciting improvements – These include a huge swath of graphical fixes (particularly for the recent release of Xenoblade Chronicles 3!), kernel and file system improvements, and more.

Jump in and we hope you enjoy all of the work that our amazing team has put in these past few weeks!

Continue reading this progress report on our website! 

As always – thank you! We would not be able to work on yuzu as much as we do without all of your amazing support.

- The yuzu development team

Hey Patrons! It's finally here – Online multiplayer in yuzu by emulating the Wireless Multiplayer (LDN) feature of Switch over the internet! Right off the bat, yuzu supports most games that work with wireless multiplayer. We also provide public servers to join matches in your favorite games across various regions. This is such an anticipated feature of yuzu, it wouldn't do it much service to summarize here – Jump into our blog post to learn more!

Continue reading about this feature on our website! 

This feature is currently available in yuzu Early Access while we continue to test and refine the feature for broader release. We'll make this fully available in our mainline releases in the coming days. Try it out and let us know what you think!

As always – thank you for your support! We could not accomplish releases such as this without your generosity.

- The yuzu development team 

Hey, Patrons! Another month, another wave of amazing progress for yuzu! If you missed our other release channels, we'd just like to share a plug here for the recent yuzu monthly Progress Report!

July was crammed packed with many new features, code rewrites, bug fixes, and more! Among the most noteworthy changes, we've completely rewritten our audio emulation, making it more accurate than ever. Furthermore, we discuss many recent GPU, kernel and other usability fixes. We also give a sneak peak at some of the projects that are soon to be released... some of which we've previewed here already!

Continue reading this progress report on our website! 

As always – thank you! We would not be able to work on yuzu as much as we do without all of your amazing support.

- The yuzu development team

Hey Patrons! We've got some great news – After many requests from the yuzu community, we're excited to share that we now officially support Linux with our yuzu Installer, for both the Mainline and Early Access release channels! 

Continue reading about this feature on our website! 

Please let us know how this works for you, and if you have any feedback on issues or suggestions for improvements! As always – thank you for your support! We could not accomplish releases such as this without your generosity.

- The yuzu development team

Hey Patrons!

It has been a wild few months for yuzu development, and a hot minute since we’ve shared any updates here. The reality is, we’ve just been so busy with development that we’ve been struggling to keep up with the changes on Patreon. Heck, we’ve even had a difficult time capturing everything in our normal monthly Progress Reports. Compounding this, a number of our writers, testers, and developers have recently been ill with Covid (among other things), but fortunately, we’re all starting to get healthy again!

With this update, we’ll be giving you a preview of several brand new yuzu projects you can try today. Furthermore, we’ll dive into some in-progress feature work that should be coming to Early Access in the coming months!

Monthly Progress Updates

While this isn’t exactly new news, we realize that some of our Patrons do not regularly visit our website or follow our other social media channels. If you haven’t been keeping up with all of the latest improvements to yuzu, we’d recommend checking out the last three monthly progress reports!

• Progress Report June 2022 – Last month, we made a ton of improvements fixing the latest versions of GPU drivers with yuzu, various GPU accuracy fixes (spoiler, you can now play Skyrim in yuzu!), and finally we fixed some long standing frame-pacing issues with games like Super Smash Bros. Ultimate. For our developer friends, we also added a brand new GDB stub implementation, which fixes nearly all shortcomings of our previous (now defunct) stub. Lastly, we cover various improvements to user-input, as well as kernel emulation accuracy.
• Progress Report May 2022 – With May, the highlight of the month is emulating emulators! Here we cover improvements making Super Mario 3D All-Stars titles running nearly perfect, as well as fixes to allow Nintendo Switch Online (NSO) Nintendo 64 titles to be enjoyed in yuzu. We also touch on our recent decision to drop support for EOL Windows versions, and the move to the future: Making our Vulkan GPU backend the default!
• Progress Report April 2022 – With April, a big highlight is again Super Mario 3D All-Stars – This time fixing various issues allowing Super Mario Sunshine and Super Mario 64 to be playable! We also cover various improvements in support of the Skyline modding framework, improvements to overall Super Smash Bros. Ultimate stability (which can now be played indefinitely without kernel crashes!), and various improvements to the user interface, user input, and kernel emulation.

Project “YFC” – GPU Emulation & Accuracy Overhaul

Onto the up-and-coming changes part of this post – and some you can start playing around with now! For many months, we’ve teased Project YFC – AKA “yuzu Fried Chicken”. This is a major overhaul of various parts of our GPU emulation, with broad goals to improve both accuracy and performance. What you may have missed is that the first part of YFC landed a few weeks ago and is already available for you to enjoy in Early Access!

YFC – What exactly is it?

YFC came about originally when the Skyline Emulator team (an open source Nintendo Switch Emulator for Android) implemented a much more accurate version of NVDRV (Nvidia Driver service) than we supported, and then graciously offered their implementation to be part of yuzu. yuzu developer Blinkhawk integrated this, which not only matched Nintendo Switch behavior much more closely, but fixed one highly requested thing – Super Smash Bros. Ultimate World of Light!

Around this same time, yuzu developer Breadfish jokingly made a version of the yuzu logo that featured a chicken. The team thought this was so great that we needed to theme a project around it (spoiler: this is how our creative process usually works). With Blinkhawk having many more GPU experiments and improvements he intended to combine into a new project, and a theme now in place, yuzu Fried Chicken was born!

The chicken that inspired it all! (Or is it a turkey?!)

YFC – What to expect today

As mentioned above, the first round of YFC changes are now already available for you to enjoy! These primarily focus on accuracy improvements, which include:

• Full rework of the GPU driver based on the reverse-engineering and code from Skyline Emulator with full permission from the respective team.
• Full rework of GPU memory management.
• Initial implementation of GPU Channels, which fixes Super Smash Bros. Ultimate “World of Light” mode, Deltarune, and several other games.
• Fixes and performance improvements to the GPU DMA engine.
• Several fixes for Vulkan, the GPU Buffer Cache, and the Shader Decompiler, all of which affect multiple games.
• Rework host frame presentation to be considerably smoother (improves Xenoblade Chronicles: Definitive Edition).

Please let us know what other improvements you see with these changes!

YFC – What is coming next

YFC continues to be in active development, with several iterations coming in the future, primarily focusing on performance improvements. These will include:

• Rework the GPU Buffer Cache, which will fix issues with Fire Emblem: Warriors.
• Rework the GPU Macro (small GPU programs that specify rendering commands) HLE emulation, which will improve performance in Monster Hunter: Rise and Koemo Techmo games.
• Rework GPU fences with asynchronous buffer and texture downloads, which will improve performance.

Now for the important question – When will these be ready? Unfortunately, the primary developer behind these changes, Blinkhawk, is currently swamped with real life work commitments. As such, we do not have an exact estimate for release. That being said, many of the changes are already implemented and going through regression testing, so some improvements should land in the near future!

Project “Andio” – Audio Rewrite

This one may have slipped under your radar a bit – But did you know that yuzu just released a complete rewrite of our Audio emulation? Try it out in Early Access right now!

Driven by yuzu developer Maide, “Project Andio” brings our audio emulation up to speed with Nintendo Switch firmware 14.0.0. Our audio emulation has never been this accurate! The goals of this rewrite included:

• Implementing several missing audio playback features, such as audio effects.
• Implementing microphone support.
• Supporting newer revisions of Nintendo Switch’s audio engine, which fixes many newer games.
• Aligning our code structure more closely with the official implementation, which will make it easier to update the code base as Nintendo releases future audio revisions.

This change closes out nearly 20 longstanding audio bugs in yuzu and fixes many games (some of which would not even boot due to Audio inaccuracy). These include EVE Ghost Enemies, Seven Pirates H, Yomawari 3, Fire Emblem Warriors: Three Hopes, Atelier Sophie 2, Nintendo Switch Sports, Triangle Strategy, Moero Chronicle Seven Pirates H, Pokémon Brilliant Diamond/Shining Pearl, Zelda Skyward Sword, among others! (Note: Some of these games are still not fully playable, and just now have their audio fixed, your mileage may vary!).

Please give it a try and let us know what you think! If you find any regressions, please share them on the PR. If you know of other games that still have issues, please file a bug!

Project “londnon” – Multiplayer Support (LDN)

Or is it Project London? (We can’t really spell.)

Yet another project in the works, which does not have a finalized quirky name yet (okay, it is definitely londnon), is progressing quite nicely: Multiplayer support with LDN!

LDN is a Nintendo Switch feature that enables multiplayer using your local wireless network. yuzu will be leveraging this feature to support multiplayer over the internet, much like Citra did with 3DS local multiplayer. We’ll also support the same quality-of-life features that Citra has, such as a lobby for matchmaking.

Early matchmaking in yuzu!

Supporting LDN in yuzu has been a background effort for the team for a while now. However, not much traction was made until developer FearlessTobi made some breakthroughs in getting game lobbies working. This was quickly followed with developer Narr the Reg chipping in to fix a number of bugs, helping to get LDN fully functional.

Many games use LDN for multiplayer, among them are most of the Pokémon titles, Mario Kart 8 Deluxe, Monster Hunter Rise, ARMS, Bayonetta 2, Super Smash Bros. Ultimate, Mario Tennis Aces, and the list continues to go on!

Functionality wise, the team has already implemented the basics of LDN support, and are now regression testing, fixing bugs, and handling edge cases to make the experience stable and seamless. While we do not have an exact ETA for when this will be available in Early Access, progress is moving very quickly and we hope to have it in your hands in the coming months!

As an early preview, here is Puyo Puyo Tetris multiplayer working great across two instances of yuzu!

I do not have the dexterity to play myself in Tetris.

Wrap-up

That’s all folks – We hope you’ve enjoyed this overview of the great changes to yuzu that you can enjoy today, as well as a sneak peak of in-development work coming soon. As always, thank you for your continued support, we would not be able to work so much on yuzu without your help. Cheers!

- The yuzu development team

Hey, Patrons! As usual, we just wanted to give you a heads up that our February Progress Report was released a few days ago!

With this past report, we discuss some major kernel improvements which now make Super Smash Bros. Ultimate matches completely stable in yuzu, as well as a new memory layout that allows for more advanced game mods. We also cover some awesome GPU fixes (some targeted for Steam Deck!), performance optimizations, and UI improvements. Among these changes, we also have greatly improved Amiibo support!

Continue reading this progress report on our website!

As always – thank you! We would not be able to work on yuzu as much as we do without all of your amazing support.

- The yuzu development team

Hey, Patrons! On behalf of the entire team, we'd like to thank all of you – our incredibly generous supporters and community – for an amazing year for yuzu & Switch emulation as a whole. We wish you a Happy New Year and hope that all of you, and your families, are having a safe and healthy start to 2022.

In case you may have missed it, this is just our monthly plug to check out the recently released Progress Report! This time around, we wrap up 2021 with some awesome input improvements (see Project Kraken, the killer user input rewrite!), fixes for recent driver updates, kernel accuracy changes, performance and stability fixes, among other things!

Continue reading this progress report on our website! 

And of course – It wouldn't be a progress report without a few teasers. While the past few weeks have saw slow and steady improvements, rest assured, we have some awesome projects in the works: Project Gaia and Project YFC are knocking at the door. While the developers of these respective projects have been tight-lipped about sharing with the public exactly what they are yet, we promise you they will make some amazing strides with regards to the accuracy, stability, and usability of yuzu.

As always – thank you! We would not be able to work on yuzu as much as we do without all of your amazing support. Again, a very special thanks to you, our Patrons, for making this project such a success in 2021 and for many years to come. Cheers!

- The yuzu development team

Hey, Patrons! Just a quick plug that we shipped the latest yuzu monthly Progress Report, this time covering all of the great improvements from November!

This time around, we bring you some detailed coverage of Project Kraken – our User Input (game input, game pad support, etc.) rewrite, recent improvements made by new contributors for Skyline (a modding framework for Super Smash Bros. Ultimate) support, many graphical fixes, UI and kernel improvements, and more! Please learn about all of the amazing changes that yuzu has made this past month thanks to your incredibly generous support:

Continue reading this progress report on our website! 

As always – thank you! We would not be able to work on yuzu as much as we do without all of your amazing support. We hope all of you can enjoy the upcoming holidays, and we look forward to bringing you some incredible improvements in 2022!

- The yuzu development team