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2026-11-05 · News and analysis
Affiliate disclosure: This article contains affiliate links. As an Amazon Associate, we earn from qualifying purchases at no extra cost to you. Learn more.
On 2 November 2026 we updated two pages on this site to say that commercial Switch 2 games had run off the console exactly once, under an emulator fork that never published a single download and was archived three days later.
That was accurate when we wrote it. It is not accurate now, and the gap is only three days wide.
The project we wrote off did not die. It forked, twice, and both descendants are publishing versioned builds for Windows, Linux and macOS, including ARM ones. One of them is on its ninth release in five days. So the honest headline is that you can now download a Switch 2 emulator, run it, and watch commercial games render.
Whether you would enjoy that is a separate question, and the answer is mostly no. The numbers are below, and some of them come from the project's own changelog contradicting its own announcement.
Everything here assumes you are playing games you already own. We do not link to game files, key files, firmware, or dumping tools, and we do not explain how to obtain any of them.
The Short Version
- A downloadable Switch 2 emulator now exists. Two of them, actually. Lichii and Eglantine, both forks of the same brief ancestor, both actively developed, both shipping tagged releases.
- We got this wrong for three days. Our previous position was that nobody had cleared the "ship a build anyone can run" milestone. That milestone is cleared. The correction is live on both affected pages.
- Real games render. Donkey Kong Bananza, Mario Kart World, Kirby Air Riders, Star Fox, Mario Tennis Fever, Pokopia and the Switch 2 version of Ocarina of Time all boot and play to some degree.
- The announced frame rates and the changelog's frame rates do not match. The launch post says most games hit 60 fps. The same build's known issues list says 12 to 22 fps on a Ryzen 5900X with an RTX 3080.
- It wants a real desktop. A Vulkan GPU with 8 GB of video memory, 16 GB of system RAM, and one documented failure mode is a single 14 GB allocation.
- ARM builds exist, and a handheld still cannot do this. Somebody ran the official ARM build on an AYN Thor. It black screens and eats 8.6 GB of RAM trying to compile shaders. Details below, with their measurements.
- There is no official Android build at all. Not a performance opinion, just a fact about what the release pipeline produces.
- It needs keys, firmware and games from your own console. No console, no emulator.
- Nintendo has done nothing publicly. As of today there is no takedown, no notice, no legal action against either fork that we can find.
Where This Came From
The lineage matters here, because the name on the download changed twice in a week and the coverage has not kept up.
It starts with the Switch 2 jailbreak in late October 2026, which we covered in the Switch 2 has been jailbroken. That gave people decrypted game data to work with.
Within a week, somebody forked Eden, the mature Switch 1 Android and desktop emulator, into a Switch 2 target called Eden-NX2. It booted Mario Kart World and Donkey Kong Bananza on Windows around 29 October. It never published a build. Its author archived it on 31 October. That is the story we told, and at the time it was the whole story.
What we treated as an ending was a handoff. Two things grew out of it:
- Eglantine, which picked up the work almost immediately and kept the Switch 2 focus. It is the larger of the two by audience and it reached a release candidate on 4 November.
- Lichii, a fork of Eglantine that first appeared on 31 October under its creator's own copy of the Eglantine name, then rebranded in early November. Its stated purpose is to merge the useful fixes from the other forks into one build.
Both descend from Eden, which descends from yuzu and Sudachi. Lichii's own documentation credits that whole chain, which is more care than this scene usually takes.
One confusing detail worth knowing if you go looking: there are now several repositories called Eglantine, maintained by different people, and the most popular one is not always the one with the working build. We have been caught by that pattern before. Judge these projects by whether they publish release files and when they last changed, not by how many stars they have collected.
What Actually Runs
This is drawn from the projects' own release notes, not from our testing. We have not run this software.
- Donkey Kong Bananza. The flagship demo. Its crash after cutscenes was fixed and the stutter from the split GPU thread was reduced. The notes describe it as running well but not at a locked 60 fps. A separate open bug report has it reaching about 57 fps and then aborting silently.
- Mario Kart World. Reported at 60 fps on desktop PCs by several outlets. Also the subject of an open bug titled "severe performance regression" in the newest build, which is a good illustration of how fast this moves.
- Star Fox. Went from 30 to 60 fps once the emulator started reporting Ampere GPU timestamps in nanoseconds. Still has an audio bug that makes voices sound robotic, because the sound mixer accepts a constant fraction of its output.
- Kirby Air Riders. The "white world" bug is fixed, along with texture arrays using separate samplers.
- Ocarina of Time, in its Switch 2 form. The newest build gets it through the intro and into play. The release notes call it "the green hat kid adventure," which is a choice. The known issues say outdoor areas are far hazier than on console, with too much fog and glow.
- Mario Tennis Fever, Fire Emblem: Fortune's Weave, Pokopia and Switch Resorts all appear in the notes as booting or playable.
That is a genuinely surprising list for software that is less than a week old. It exists because none of this was built from nothing. It is a nine year old Switch 1 emulator being pointed at a new console, which is a far smaller job than starting over.
The 60 FPS Claim and the Project's Own Changelog
Here is the part that matters if you are deciding whether to spend an evening on this.
The announcement post for the newest Lichii build, which has been seen around 80,000 times, leads with "up to 2x FPS, most games hit 60 FPS." It lists Pokopia and Switch Resorts by name.
The release notes for a build published three days later, written by the same project, contain this under known issues:
Performance is low, about 12 to 22 fps on a Ryzen 5900X with an RTX 3080, and three rare shaders are still unsupported.
That is about Ocarina of Time. A Ryzen 5900X and an RTX 3080 is a strong desktop gaming PC. It is not a budget machine, and it is roughly two orders of magnitude more graphics hardware than anything in a handheld.
Both statements can be true at once, because they are about different games. That is exactly the problem. "Most games hit 60 fps" and "12 to 22 fps on an RTX 3080" are describing the same emulator in the same week, and only one of them is in the announcement.
To the scene's credit, this did not go unchallenged. A well followed retro account flagged it at the time, noting that the memory and frame rate figures were the author's claims and had not been verified. That is the correct response, and it is the one we would encourage for every build announcement in this space for the next few months.
Our position: treat per game frame rates from any Switch 2 emulator right now as unverified until someone outside the project measures them. The changelog is a better source than the announcement, and the issue tracker is better than both.
Can Your Handheld Run It?
No. But the reasons changed, and the new ones are more interesting than the old ones.
Our old answer was that no ARM build existed, so handhelds were spectators by default. That was a clean argument and it is now dead. Both projects publish linux-aarch64 builds, as AppImages and as tarballs, alongside the x86_64 and Apple silicon ones.
So somebody tried it. The result is the most useful document in this entire story.
Somebody ran it on an AYN Thor
There is an open bug report from a tester running the official ARM build on an AYN Thor: Snapdragon 8 Gen 2, Adreno 740, 12 GB of RAM, on a Fedora based ARM Linux distribution. That is a real handheld from our catalogue, running the real build, on an OS new enough to meet the requirements. About as fair a test as this gets.
It does not work, and the report is unusually rigorous about why:
- The game boots, reaches the video stage, and sometimes plays audio. The screen stays black in every run.
- Three shader pipeline threads pin at 94 to 99 percent inside the Adreno graphics driver for minutes at a time. The tester sampled those threads and found 23 of 24 samples sitting inside the driver library.
- Memory use climbs to about 8.6 GB and available memory falls under 100 MB, at which point the process disappears.
- Four different versions of the graphics driver were tried. All black.
- The ARM build compiled with profile guided optimisation cannot load the game at all, which is a separate open bug.
Read that memory curve again, because it is the whole answer. A 12 GB handheld ran out of room compiling shaders before it drew a single frame. Shader compilation is the hard unsolved problem in Switch 2 emulation, and it is the thing a handheld has the least headroom for.
The desktop requirements say the same thing
- A Vulkan capable GPU with at least 8 GB of video memory. No handheld has 8 GB of dedicated video memory. The Steam Deck and its rivals share 16 GB between the system and the GPU.
- 16 GB of system RAM, with one documented error being a failed request for 14,336 MiB of backing memory. A single 14 GB allocation is more memory than a Steam Deck has in total.
- DLSS only works in one specific Windows build, which we cover in DLSS 5 across emulators. That is not an option on ARM at all.
There is no Android build
This is worth stating precisely, because it is the question most readers actually have.
The release pipeline for Lichii produces four targets: Linux x86_64, Linux ARM64, macOS ARM64, and Windows x86_64. No Android package is produced. Your Odin, your Retroid, your Anbernic cannot install this, because there is nothing to install.
Third party Android builds do exist, from small unaffiliated forks, with download counts in the hundreds. We are not recommending them and we are not linking them. They have no track record, no corroborated reports of a Switch 2 game actually playing, and the one rigorous ARM test result we have is the black screen above. If that changes we will cover it.
What to buy if you want Switch emulation now
Switch 1 emulation on Android is genuinely excellent and has been for a while. That is the realistic path, and it runs on hardware you can buy today.
- AYN Odin 2 Portal Pro ($399). Snapdragon 8 Gen 2, 12 GB of RAM, 7 inch 1080p OLED. Still our most consistent Switch 1 recommendation.
- Retroid Pocket 6 (from $244). The value pick, and it handles most of the Switch 1 library well.
Our full comparison of the Switch 1 options is in Eden vs Kenji NX vs Citron, and the device by device view is in Switch 2 emulation status on handhelds.
What It Asks You For
The emulator is free software and it is useless on its own.
To run anything, you must supply decryption keys, console firmware, and the games themselves, all from a Switch 2 you own. The projects state this plainly in their own documentation, and both are explicit that none of it is included.
We are not going to tell you how to get any of that, and we do not link tools that do it. What we will say is the practical consequence: if you do not own a Switch 2, and a jailbroken one at that, none of this is available to you at any price. That filters out the overwhelming majority of people reading about it.
The legal backdrop has not softened either. The Switch 2 is a console Nintendo is actively selling, which is a very different situation from emulating something discontinued. We cover how that has already played out in the 2026 Switch emulator takedowns and the legal status of emulation.
As of today, neither Eglantine nor Lichii has been hit with a takedown that we can find. Given the history, we would not assume that holds.
Watch Out for the Download Sites
A predictable thing has already happened. There are now search optimised websites built around these project names, offering a "free Switch 2 emulator download."
We are not naming or linking them. The pattern is enough to recognise: a domain that is the emulator's name plus the word "emulator," a download button above any explanation, and no connection to the people writing the code. Real projects in this space publish their builds on the code host where the source lives, and nowhere else.
This matters more than usual right now, because the real projects are days old, their names are changing, and nobody has a settled idea of where the official build lives. That is ideal conditions for a fake installer. Our guide on downloading emulators safely covers how to check.
One Honest Thing About How It Is Built
Lichii's documentation says its donations help pay for "the AI tools and build machines used to develop this open source project faster."
We note that because it is unusual. Plenty of projects in this scene are clearly using AI assistance and say nothing, and we have written about several of them. Declaring it in the README is the more honest posture, whatever you think of the practice. It is not a judgement on the code either way, and the release notes carry the kind of specific, verifiable detail that is hard to fake.
What it does not change is the advice. Judge the build by its issue tracker.
What Is Still Not Cleared
We keep a milestone list for judging Switch 2 emulator headlines. Two of its steps fell this week, so here is the updated version.
- A working shader translation pipeline. Cleared. Games render.
- Booting console firmware. Cleared in practice by the forks, though not by the two long term projects, oboromi and Pound.
- A first commercial game reaching a title screen. Cleared on 29 October 2026.
- A versioned public release anyone can run. Cleared. This is the one we said was the step that mattered most, and it fell within a week of us saying so.
- An ARM build. Published, but not working. The build exists and the one careful test of it black screens on a 12 GB handheld.
- An ARM build that renders a frame. New step, because step five turned out not to be the finish line we thought it was.
- An Android build. Does not exist from either project.
The thing to notice is that steps 4 and 5 fell in days, and step 6 may take a very long time. Shipping a build is an engineering milestone. Making shader compilation fit in a handheld's memory budget is a different kind of problem.
Frequently Asked Questions
Answers to the questions people actually ask about this.
Related Reading
- Switch 2 emulators in 2026 — the full state of the space, now corrected
- Switch 2 emulation status on handhelds — the device by device view
- The Switch 2 has been jailbroken — where the game data comes from
- Switch 2 games are being dumped — and what those dumps lead to
- Switch games running natively on Apple and Android — the route that is not emulation
- Pokémon Pokopia running on an iPhone — the same game, a completely different method
- Eden vs Kenji NX vs Citron — the Switch 1 emulators that actually work today
- Nintendo Switch emulator takedowns in 2026 — the legal backdrop
- DLSS 5 across emulators — why only one of these builds has it
- How to download emulators safely — avoiding the fake build sites
Related reading
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