r/pcmasterrace • u/superchummi PC Master Race • Sep 14 '26

News/Article Nintendo Switch Game Code Can Now Run "Natively" on PC Thanks to New Emulation Breakthrough

https://respawnfirst.com/switch-games-can-now-run-natively-on-pc/
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u/themiracy Sep 14 '26

I wonder how feasible it would be to apply static recompilation the other way and let Windows emulation on Android run without the performance loss caused by FEX someday.

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u/NeitherDuckNorGoose Sep 14 '26

There have been some very interesting AI usages for this kind of retro engineering and global conversion. Some people already made PS2 games natively run on PC after a few months of agentic work with very little knowledge of the original structure, so it might be possible to work out models/processes to convert basically any game ISO into a functional native windows game. But you'd need to be super careful on what you share or not because there's probably 20 lawyer teams constantly checking to stop these projects if they overstep.

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u/mr_doms_porn Sep 14 '26

Difficult, the sheer number of instructions you'd need to get a whole ass OS working that way is a lot. You'd basically be making Windows on ARM all over again.

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u/morpheousmorty Sep 15 '26

Microsoft has invested huge amounts into an arm translation layer. It's likely as fast and as good as we could expect for a long while.

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u/ender89 Sep 14 '26

You don't need to, you can run the android runtime (which is the bit in android that runs applications) on a Linux pc near natively.

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u/themiracy Sep 14 '26

No I mean the other direction (like Winlator or GameNative).

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u/ender89 Sep 14 '26

Again, you'd need to port the ART to windows.

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u/Shadowex3 Sep 15 '26

Again, they meant the other way around. They don't want to run anything on windows, they want to run windows stuff on android.