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Nintendo Switch emulators Yuzu and Ryujinx can already run Red Dead Redemption on PC
(www.dsogaming.com)
this post was submitted on 19 Aug 2023
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Switch's operating system is based on the OS from 3DS. The ARM architecture was already well documented and emulated. Tegra has documentation from NVidia.
With all that, making a Switch emulator was relatively "easy". They took Citra, the 3DS emulator, and worked from there.
Xbox 360 is a different beast. Even its OS was only kinda Windows, so they couldn't just take Wine and a PowerPC emulator and call it a day. Taking long is IMO not much of a surprise because of that.
IIRC the original Xbox has even worse emulation, to this day, despite being infamously close to a stock PC.
What makes RDR's emulation struggles noteworthy is that it's a highly desirable game that still took ages to unfuck. Most nightmare cases for emulators seem to be random D-list titles. Pinball Fantasies on Game Boy had incomprehensible crashes, early and reliably, for no discernible reason. True Crime New York on Gamecube was a white whale for Dolphin despite being absolute garbage.
RDR was a huge deal for its own sake - and it ran bad, looked worse, and stayed that way for a while. Back in the day it was common for emulators to only work properly for big-name games. NESticle and SNES9X absolutely cheated to run major titles. Early N64 development was nothing but. So having this killer app refuse to work, year after year, was a lingering presence in people's minds.
Finally getting it working, only to have a nearly painless alternative drop, is pretty goddang funny.
Aside from poorly documented hardware, one reason why Xbox emulation is in such an early state was simply lack of interest. The Xbox had a meager first-party library and what exclusives there were, were already available to play on every Xbox released ever since via back compat.
I think a more tragic case would be if MGS4 was ever re-released as part of the Master Collection ports. That game was designed from the ground up for PS3, and runs terrible even on the custom RPCS3 builds designed specifically for it.