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Horizon Linux: arm64 Linux patched to run programs for the Nintendo Switch

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11–20 of 38 posts

Re: Horizon Linux: arm64 Linux patched to run programs for the Nintendo Switch

#11
post #5

It's a little funny that after all this brilliance, he's still limited by Apple. Either way, remarkable. I truly hope Nintendo leaves him alone though..

It's a bit of a shame the author didn't dig more into it, I am pretty sure MoltenVk gives you a reasonably up-to-date Vulkan on Mac, and I've seen progress lately on zink-over-MoltenVk, which should enable OpenGL 4.6 on macos.

On the other hand, that's not really the point of this work.

Re: Horizon Linux: arm64 Linux patched to run programs for the Nintendo Switch

#13
post #11
post #5

It's a little funny that after all this brilliance, he's still limited by Apple. Either way, remarkable. I truly hope Nintendo leaves him alone though..

It's a bit of a shame the author didn't dig more into it, I am pretty sure MoltenVk gives you a reasonably up-to-date Vulkan on Mac, and I've seen progress lately on zink-over-MoltenVk, which should enable OpenGL 4.6 on macos. On the other hand, that's not really the point of this work.

> It's a bit of a shame the author didn't dig more into it, I am pretty sure MoltenVk gives you a reasonably up-to-date Vulkan on Mac, and I've seen progress lately on zink-over-MoltenVk, which should enable OpenGL 4.6 on macos.

Whilst true I don't think there's any way to use that to get better graphics support in a Linux VM - for that you're going to be at the mercy of either VMWare or Parallels. QEMU doesn't do 3D acceleration on macOS hosts AFAIK.

Re: Horizon Linux: arm64 Linux patched to run programs for the Nintendo Switch

#17
post #14

What are the implications of this? Can I now run breath of the wild on my m1?

As I underdtood it, not yet, but possibly at some point in the future! See the Reddit thread someone else linked, the dev goes into some detail on the current state.

Re: Horizon Linux: arm64 Linux patched to run programs for the Nintendo Switch

#18

Whoa, this is awesome! Looks like the author posted a full writeup (with videos) on Reddit: https://www.reddit.com/r/linux_gaming/comments/wnuh3u/introd...

> as (I believe) is the case is for the Mesosphere project

Just to clarify, the developer is correct - Mesosphere runs natively on the switch, and now has 1:1 compatibility with Nintendo's kernel. It can run every commercial game. There have been some intents/attempts to port mesosphere to non-switch hardware, but I don't think anyone has got meaningful results there, yet.

Re: Horizon Linux: arm64 Linux patched to run programs for the Nintendo Switch

#19
post #14

What are the implications of this? Can I now run breath of the wild on my m1?

Yes, you can run it.

Is it playable? No, it probably won't even load the main menu without additional work. This is alpha level software.

Re: Horizon Linux: arm64 Linux patched to run programs for the Nintendo Switch

#20
post #8

I think the Linux kernel is getting support for something like how this works, but letting userspace emulate the syscalls, for Wine: https://lwn.net/Articles/824380/ Probably that mechanism could mean this project could work on mainline Linux at some point.

Its funny that both of these things happened at almost the same time but reminds me of the chat found earlier today https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32458744 which has some great comments regarding this and the (g)libc relationship.

Thanks for also pointing this out.

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