Eden-NX2 experimental emulator boots Mario Kart World and Donkey Kong Bananza

An experimental Switch 2 emulator, Eden-NX2, can now boot Mario Kart World and Donkey Kong Bananza on PC, according to reports. Developed by Takoroka, the 34MB download is a pre-release build based on the Eden emulator and the Yuzu codebase. While these titles boot, players should expect low frame rates and frequent stutters unless they use high-end CPUs and GPUs.

Mario Kart World · official art via IGDB

Other developers are working on private versions of the software. A developer named Sheepish reportedly reached the character selection screen in Splatoon Raiders using a private Eden build, though performance was very poor. On mobile, Will Faust ran Mario Kart World on macOS and an iPhone 18 Pro using a private xnative fork. Faust says that version used about 6.5GB of memory on the iPhone and suggests a device with 8GB of RAM should be able to cope. He noted that he will not release the source code for his fork. For macOS users, reports say version 15 or above is required.

Current builds face graphical issues like missing 3D meshes and glitches because several shaders are not yet implemented. Different forks of the emulator exist that favor different hardware, such as AMD or Nvidia, or different operating systems like Linux and Windows.

Background In October, a firmware dump made possible by a webkit exploit allowed for the extraction of decrypted game files. Our earlier story