New Project Lets Nintendo Switch Games Run Natively on Apple Silicon Macs

An open-source project called nxnative lets Nintendo Switch games run natively on Apple Silicon, without an emulator in between. Built by developer seedds, the tool takes a user's own game files and prod.keys and turns them into an app for iPhone, iPad, or Mac. YouTuber Andrew Tsai put it to the test on Macs, where Monster Hunter Rise held a locked 60 FPS on a base fanless M1 MacBook Air with 8 GB of RAM. Unicorn Overlord, Dragon Quest XI S, and Dark Souls Remastered also ran, though Doom Eternal refused to boot.

Since the Switch and Apple's chips both use the Arm64 instruction set, nxnative rewrites the game's code to run directly on the Apple chip, swaps the Switch's Horizon OS for a small stand-in host, and rebuilds Nintendo's NVN graphics API on top of Metal. Shader translation is borrowed from Ryujinx, the Switch emulator that Nintendo shut down in 2024. The approach itself comes from d2r-mobile, which did the same for Diablo II: Resurrected. The README now lists around 70 tested games, mostly aimed at the iPhone 15 Pro or newer and iPads with M1 or later, and Mac apps need an extra build step. There's also no online play or amiibo support. Read full story