Cemu – the Wii U emulator that recently went open-source while at the same time adding support for Linux – recently received a commit to add online features for the Linux version. Going by the pull request, it seems like there was very little back and forth to it. One of the developers commented, “Looks good to me. No regressions encountered while testing on Windows.” As such, the PR has been merged into the main branch and already available for download.

EmuDeck, the popular application for getting emulators set up on your Deck quickly and conveniently, has just received a brand new 2.0 update. Features with this update include: the addition of a GUI to make it easier to use it doesn’t need to be re-installed to apply customizations, thanks to a Quick Settings menu saves can be backed up to the cloud support for Vikta3K, ScummVM, and Doom performance improvements across all emulators revamped controller schemes and hotkeys bug fixes and “under the hood” improvements Best place I could find the patch notes was on their Twitter.

As someone who is quite fond of Metroid Prime, I had an opportunity to chat with a few of the developers/artists behind Metroid Prime Remastered (MPR). MPR is an unofficial mod that, as the team brings out in this interview, greatly enhances the lighting, shading, and overall graphics quality of the gem that was released 20 years ago. And because it’s using PrimeHack, it also incorporates all the benefits of that, including keyboard and mouse controls, dual-stick controller support, and an adjustable field of view slider.

When you’ve heard or looked up the term “Nintendo Switch emulation,” chances are you’ll come across one of two emulators: Ryujinx, and Yuzu. But you’re probably more familiar with the latter, as it tends to be the more popular emulator. After all, Valve themselves showcased Yuzu’s logo on one of their Steam Deck videos, only to quickly take it off after the Internet took the news by storm. However, I like to give the more niche projects the spotlight they deserve.

EDIT (2/12/2023): this is for the UNOFFICIAL remaster. Not the official. If you’re like me, you were probably left with a bad taste in your mouth after this year’s Nintendo Direct. No Metroid announcements whatsoever. There were rumors of an official remaster of Metroid Prime coming this year. It would have made sense considering this year marks the 20th anniversary of the beloved title. But, of course, our expectations got crushed.

Since the news about Cemu going open-source and available for Linux went viral a few weeks ago, we’re already starting to see improvements to the Wii U emulator with version 2.0-1. To start, the update is mostly bug fix-related. Many of the issues present with 2.0 should no longer be a problem with this update. The patch notes also mention “lots of smaller Linux improvements,” although it doesn’t go into detail concerning what exactly has been improved.

One thing that always turned me off about Cemu – the Wii U emulator – was the fact that it was closed-source. Nearly eight years after the creation of the emulator, it is now fully open-source and licensed under the Mozilla Public License 2.0. Not only this, but the emulator now has Linux builds available, although for the time being you’ll have to compile the emulator from source: Right now you still have to compile Cemu yourself for most distros.

Denuvo knows how to ruin everything about the digital gaming economy. Just a few months ago they started DRM’ing DLC. Now they’re expanding to emulated Nintendo Switch games. How on earth they’re going to be able to figure that out is beyond me. By preventing piracy on Switch while blocking unauthorized emulations on PC, studios are able to increase their revenue during the game launch window, which is the most important period in regard to monetization.

EmuDeck version 0.17.6 just came out a few days ago. For those who aren’t aware, EmuDeck makes it incredibly easy to get emulation of retro to more modern titles set up on the Steam Deck. And what’s nice is combined with the Steam ROM Manager, roms can get added to the Steam Deck UI with nice cover art, and you can launch the game directly through this interface. At any rate, the latest update adds support for the Anbernic Win600 and some other goodies.

Since Vulkan has been merged into the mainline Ryujinx build a few days ago, curiosity got to the better of me and I wanted to do a comparison between this and the older OpenGL API. Vulkan, particularly on AMD – and therefore the Steam Deck – supposedly has a huge number of benefits over OpenGL, including faster shader compilation. I tested the following games: Metroid Dread (please be aware there are spoilers here!