The switch is super easy to emulate compared to past Nintendo consoles.

The only one that's difficult to emulate is the N64. Last I checked there wasn't an agreed upon project like there is for the GC/Wii and other Nintendo consoles.

What? I've been playing emulated N64 games with sixtyforce on my Mac without issues for years, easily since I was a kid in high school.

Your assertion of a social requirement for an "agreed upon" project is false: every emulator is valid, though some have their pros and cons. If it plays the game you want to play just fine, what makes it "difficult"?

>What? I've been playing emulated N64 games with sixtyforce on my Mac without issues for years, easily since I was a kid in high school.

And all those emulators use the same graphics plugin system, which only had TERRIBLE plugins until a couple years ago when angrylion and PareLLEI showed up. The RDP was always poorly emulated.

Compare to Dolphin, which is an open source emulation masterpiece, and has things like ubershaders to give you both performance and emulation accuracy.

For over a decade, you couldn't play through perfect dark with just a single graphics plugin unless you were cheating your way through a mission.

Even Nintendo's official n64 emulators for VC are mediocre

I'm about to make your day: https://www.libretro.com/index.php/parallel-n64-low-level-rd...

That is a software emulation of the RDP from the n64 that runs in a shader on your GPU. No more visual bugs, no more artifacts, no more perfect dark missing a visual effect that kills an entire mission, and accurate upscaling, and it actually runs very well even on cheap GPUs.

AMAZING!!!!

You've absolutely made my day! Going to have to try this out later, maybe try out some Blast Corps!

You can emulate it on a Steam Deck

Not at a better speed than the Switch itself. The new ASUS ROG Ally handheld seems to be the minimum you’d need to get a speed up through emulation.

Let's check back in a few months, the Yuzu devs have been making incredible progress improving performance in general, and it is not unfathomable to think that in a few months Steam Deck will be at or above locked 30fps while playing in Switch docked mode. (I already get a solid 40fps in Shrines, but those are comparatively undemanding, including on Switch)

It's incredibly easy to emulate, and at much higher resolutions than the switch. There are also patches to unlock the FPS (and to fix the occasional 20 FPS throttling that the game forces) though I haven't tried them yet. I've had a few minor graphical issues, and had occasional crashes until I updated the firmware and game version, but it's working amazingly well overall.

Your GPU won't matter too much, so long as you have a decently powerful CPU you should be fine.

I keep hearing that GPU doesn't matter, but I don't understand why. It uses Vulkan and OpenGL behind the scenes–wouldn't those rely heavily on the GPU?

They do rely heavily on the GPU, bit the game was designed (in terms of poly count, VRAM usage, shader complexity) for a several year old mobile GPU.