Ryujinx Switch Emulator May Live On in Posthumous Project Fork

After being forced to shut down at the beginning of October, it looks like the open-source Nintendo Switch emulator, Ryujinx, may have found a new home. Late last week, a new fork of the Ryujinx emulator popped up online. The original Ryujinx project’s lead developer, known online as gdkchan, took down the GitHub page after a mysterious offer from Nintendo. Although there was speculation that the creator of the project was offered money to shut the emulator down, the wording on the new GitHub project seems to suggest that Nintendo forced Ryujinx to shut down. The GitHub page for the new project is run by a developer that goes by GreemDev, who doesn’t seem to have been involved with the original Ryujinx before it shut down.

GreemDev’s Ryujinx is starting out as a direct fork and continuation of the original, although there are hints that the new Ryujinx will take on a slightly different nature in the future. For starters, it doesn’t look like GreemDev plans to offer any documentation for the Nintendo Switch emulator—at least not yet. This is likely partially to avoid Nintendo’s ire and because creating documentation is a lot of additional work for developers. Instead, the GitHub directs readers to the former Ryujinx documentation on Archive.org, indicating that, although there are intended changes in-store for the future of Ryujinx, the current forked version basically picks up where the original left off.

GreemDev isn’t the first developer to fork Ryujinx, and the Ryujinx-mirror project on GitHub is still available to download, although, since that was a downstream hard-fork, it will likely not continue to receive updates, improvements, or additional game compatibility. When the original Ryujinx shut down, it was very much still in active development, despite claiming a massive list of 3,550 playable games. Given Nintendo’s strict copyright and anti-piracy policies, it wouldn’t be surprising to see the new Ryujinx also be short-lived.