© NintendoYou may not know the name European Research and Development Nintendo (NERD) by name, but you will certainly be familiar with its work. After creating emulators for the NES and SNES Classic Editions and Wii / DS downloadable games 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 are removed from the list next week, but – although it certainly flew under the radar at first – before this happened, NERD gave us more details about how in which they operated on the Switch.
Specifically, this latest update focuses on Sunshine, highlighting 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 Nintendo GameCube emulation technology was used in Super Mario 3D All-Stars to bring Super Mario Sunshine to the Nintendo Switch.
One of the biggest challenges was emulating the old but powerful Nintendo GameCube MPU (microprocessor) on the Switch’s custom processor: a series of optimization tricks were required for the game to run at full speed.
In addition, NERD has worked with the Super Mario 3D All-Stars team on several functions to give Super Mario Sunshine a modern twist. These include 16: 9 HD playback, updated controller links for an optimal Joy-Con experience and more … In-game videos have also been updated to HD using NERD’s own deep learning engine.
Taking advantage of the similarities between the Nintendo GameCube and Wii hardware architectures, NERD has also supported Super Mario Galaxy porting efforts, offering graphics and audio emulation technologies.
It also provides a potential perspective on why we haven’t seen more GameCube games on the Switch (so far). Homebrew emulators have done this for a long time, but their commissioning on the Switch’s custom processor at a higher quality seems to be based on “optimization tricks”.
Given that Sunshine has proven how well the Switch can handle, we remain hopeful that GameCube games will finally appear.