© NintendoYou may not know Nintendo European Research & Development (NERD) by name, but you will certainly be familiar with its work. After creating emulators for the NES and SNES Classic Editions and downloadable Wii / DS games on the Wii, NERD recently helped with Super Mario 3D All-Starsalso.
Includes emulated versions of Super Mario 64 Sunshine, and universemany of you will know that 3D All-Stars will be dropped next week, but – although it flew under the radar initially – before that happened, NERD gave us more details on how they got it running on Switch.
In particular, this latest update focuses on Sunshine, outlining the technical challenges of emulating GameCube games on Switch. It’s a short reading and you can find the original post here, but here’s what was said in full:
NERD’s proprietary Nintendo GameCube emulation technology was used in Super Mario 3D All-Stars to bring Super Mario Sunshine to Nintendo Switch.
One of the biggest challenges was emulating the Nintendo GameCube’s old but powerful MPU (microprocessor) on the Switch’s custom processor: it took some optimization tricks to run the game at full speed.
In addition, NERD worked with the Super Mario 3D All-Stars team on several features to give Super Mario Sunshine a modern twist. These include 16: 9 HD rendering, updated controller bindings for an optimal Joy-Con experience and more … The in-game videos have also been upgraded to HD using NERD’s proprietary deep learning engine.
Taking advantage of the similarities between Nintendo GameCube and Wii hardware architectures, NERD also supported Super Mario Galaxy porting efforts by offering graphics and audio emulation technologies.
It also offers a possible insight into why we haven’t seen more GameCube games on Switch (so far). Homebrew emulators have long achieved this, but getting them to run at higher quality on the Switch’s custom processor seems to rely on “optimization tricks”.
Since Sunshine has proven how well the Switch can handle this, we remain hopeful that more GameCube games will eventually emerge.