© NintendoYou may not know the name of Nintendo European Research & Development (NERD), but you will certainly be familiar with its work. Having created emulators for the NES and SNES Classic editions, and Wii / DS games for download on the Wii, NERD recently helped with Super Mario 3D All-Stars, also.
Including emulated versions of Super Mario 64, sunshine, and Galaxy, many of you will know that 3D All-Stars is being removed from the list next week, but – although it went unnoticed at the beginning – before that happens, NERD gave us more details on how they got it running on the Switch .
Specifically, this latest update focuses on Sunshine, describing the technical challenges of emulating GameCube games on the Switch. It’s a short read and you can find the original post here, but here’s what was said in full:
NERD’s own 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 old but powerful MPU (microprocessor) of the Nintendo GameCube on the Switch’s custom processor: several optimization tricks were needed to make the game run 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. This includes 16: 9 HD rendering, updated control links for an optimal Joy-Con experience and more … The game’s videos have also been upgraded to HD using NERD’s own deep learning engine.
Taking advantage of the similarities between the Nintendo GameCube and Wii hardware architectures, NERD also supported the Super Mario Galaxy’s portability efforts by providing audio and graphics emulation technologies.
It also offers a potential insight into why we haven’t seen more GameCube games on the Switch (so far). Homebrew emulators have achieved this for a long time, but getting them to run on the Switch’s custom processor with superior quality seems to depend on “optimization tricks”.
Considering that Sunshine has proven how well the Switch can handle this, we remain hopeful that more GameCube games will eventually appear.