Nintendo Switch Emulator Released For Android

There's a Nintendo Switch emulator in testing for Android right this minute, and it goes by the name MonoNX. This might be a surprise to some Nintendo Switch users, the lot of which already own the system and can't likely imagine wanting to use an Android device to play the games they've already got on their Switch. But for the Android emulator-loving universe, the question was never IF there'd be a Nintendo Switch emulator, but WHEN it'd be made a reality.

The Nintendo Switch runs an NVIDIA processor under its hood – a mobile processor, the likes of which came previously to NVIDIA-made hardware like the NVIDIA SHIELD tablet. The processor rolls with an NVIDIA Tegra X1 mobile processor – and the Nintendo Switch "Pro" has been rumored to come with NVIDIA Tegra X2 (but that's beside the point.) Today we're talking about Android.

It's not exactly NVIDIA's situation that's to seek for the way this emulator is made possible. Instead its the base of MonoNX, made possible by the Ryujinx Team, and finally ctrninja over at GBATemp, an independent gaming community of some repute. It doesn't even really need an NVIDIA processor to run, just ARM64 CPU/OS and at least 4GB RAM.

If you head over to the original GBATemp thread right this minute, you'll find the APK download and a temp ROM download. Any downloading and loading you do is your own responsibility. As is true of every emulator, you take the legalities into your own hands as well – and the best place to start is actually owning an Nintendo Switch before you do anything. But that's all up to you!

If you'd like to get in on the development expansion of this project, there's a Discord project started right now as well. Note that this emulator currently has... "absolutely no graphics" and "only console output" for now. That might mean you're not going to even want to begin using it – but only keep an eye on its development. It also only runs "old homebrew" tests for now – so no games! This... should be interesting.