RyujinX – Open Source Nintendo Switch Emulator

Right. In my experience, in nearly any professional discipline, words like 'passionate' and 'hungry' are often management euphemisms for 'has trouble drawing boundaries with work, and cares more about getting it done than work/life balance and their own wellbeing.' I think most of us get nerd sniped and spend half the night working on something every now and then, but that's not something any employer is entitled to.

That's a nice story yo. I'm happy for you.

I fell into professional programming basically by accident... was a web developer by education and ended up being offered a position as a mobile developer for iOS as my first out-of-college career. Wasn't what I intended but they extended the offer and said offer included paid education in the field, so who was I to argue?

Years on I've gone through a few jobs and basically never used my web development degree for my day job, only really using it for side-gigs building websites for local businesses.

Life is weird.

" i dont know how anyone gets paid to do this and yet there is so much incredible depth to learn that is probably undocumented because of legal issues"

- There IS a path to commercial emulator development. Most of these "retro collections" you see being sold on video game online shops are a frontend, a custom made emulator to avoid any legal/license issue (Avoiding GPL code as much as possible), a cool frontend and some extras depending on how much the team could unearth and license from the original developer/publisher/rights owner. Hell, Nintendo and Sony had teams making official emulators for the Playstation 1 emulation on PSP/PSVita/PS3 or almost every nintendo console before the GameCube for Virtual Console games

- Each country has its own set of laws, but using US cases as an example, developing an emulator for research purposes only (or at lease not competing directly with whatever you're emulating) and not using any file or code snippet from the original hardware can get a pass.

That's how some emulators go by without getting a Cease and Desist from Nintendo or Sony. And that's why they never bundle the BIOS with the emulator, even if it needs it to emulate... well... Basic Input and Output Systems.

Beyond what some of the other comments mentioned, Nintendo also took a different approach to their consoles compared to Microsoft and Sony which kind of forces them to lock down their first-party titles.

The Nintendo Switch is very underpowered compared to the other consoles of the same generation (PS4/5, Xbox Series X) but has a huge advantage of being the ultimate handheld / travel console. While Sony and Microsoft consoles can generally push out more FPS or better graphics (usually they lean towards better graphics), the Switch is very limited since it needs to strike a balance of form factor (less space for hardware) and battery life (what's the point of the handheld if you can only game for 30 minutes?).

For a big chunk of their user base, including the folks interested in these type of emulators and using them legally, they would probably prefer to use their other consoles and/or a PC/Mac from a pure performance perspective.

I also suspect that they would get less revenue per copy sold on other platforms compared their own platform, especially with games released by in-house studios.

With the above in mind, releasing a game on other platforms will cut into their revenue stream pretty significantly.

It just performs better.

Also Yuzu has asynchronous gpu shader building which means you don't need to find and download a pre-built shader cache for a game for it to run smooth. Yuzu can build itself a shader cache while playing and it doesn't cause the game to stutter and hitch like crazy.

Yuzu just seems to me to be the technically superior option at this time.