Initially starting out as an
ARM64 emulator in October of 2017, Ryujinx development began in December of 2017. Written in
C#, it was the first Switch emulator to boot commercial games. In April 2018, it was reported that it was initially able to play part of
Cave Story and
Puyo Puyo Tetris. According to the creator, gdkchan, Ryujinx had a focus on
correctness, rather than adding game-specific hacks as is practiced by some console emulators. Development of Ryujinx was funded via
Patreon, with 800 members contributing $1,661 a month as of October 1, 2024. On November 26, 2022, Ryujinx announced a macOS port, becoming the first Nintendo Switch emulator to arrive on the platform. The port takes advantage of the
hypervisor present on
Apple silicon hardware to run the
ARMv8 code of the Nintendo Switch natively, unlocking significant performance benefits, as compared to standard emulation. On March 2, 2024, Ryujinx made the transition from a
GTK based
GUI to one made in the
C# native framework,
Avalonia. In the post announcing the project's end on October 1, 2024, developers revealed internal projects to bring Ryujinx to
iOS and
Android. These projects were not publicly released. == Discontinuation ==