Patreon Preview - YFC, Audio & LDN (Patreon)

Hey Patrons!

It has been a wild few months for yuzu development, and a hot minute since we’ve shared any updates here. The reality is, we’ve just been so busy with development that we’ve been struggling to keep up with the changes on Patreon. Heck, we’ve even had a difficult time capturing everything in our normal monthly Progress Reports. Compounding this, a number of our writers, testers, and developers have recently been ill with Covid (among other things), but fortunately, we’re all starting to get healthy again!

With this update, we’ll be giving you a preview of several brand new yuzu projects you can try today. Furthermore, we’ll dive into some in-progress feature work that should be coming to Early Access in the coming months!

Monthly Progress Updates

While this isn’t exactly new news, we realize that some of our Patrons do not regularly visit our website or follow our other social media channels. If you haven’t been keeping up with all of the latest improvements to yuzu, we’d recommend checking out the last three monthly progress reports!

• Progress Report June 2022 – Last month, we made a ton of improvements fixing the latest versions of GPU drivers with yuzu, various GPU accuracy fixes (spoiler, you can now play Skyrim in yuzu!), and finally we fixed some long standing frame-pacing issues with games like Super Smash Bros. Ultimate. For our developer friends, we also added a brand new GDB stub implementation, which fixes nearly all shortcomings of our previous (now defunct) stub. Lastly, we cover various improvements to user-input, as well as kernel emulation accuracy.
• Progress Report May 2022 – With May, the highlight of the month is emulating emulators! Here we cover improvements making Super Mario 3D All-Stars titles running nearly perfect, as well as fixes to allow Nintendo Switch Online (NSO) Nintendo 64 titles to be enjoyed in yuzu. We also touch on our recent decision to drop support for EOL Windows versions, and the move to the future: Making our Vulkan GPU backend the default!
• Progress Report April 2022 – With April, a big highlight is again Super Mario 3D All-Stars – This time fixing various issues allowing Super Mario Sunshine and Super Mario 64 to be playable! We also cover various improvements in support of the Skyline modding framework, improvements to overall Super Smash Bros. Ultimate stability (which can now be played indefinitely without kernel crashes!), and various improvements to the user interface, user input, and kernel emulation.

Project “YFC” – GPU Emulation & Accuracy Overhaul

Onto the up-and-coming changes part of this post – and some you can start playing around with now! For many months, we’ve teased Project YFC – AKA “yuzu Fried Chicken”. This is a major overhaul of various parts of our GPU emulation, with broad goals to improve both accuracy and performance. What you may have missed is that the first part of YFC landed a few weeks ago and is already available for you to enjoy in Early Access!

YFC – What exactly is it?

YFC came about originally when the Skyline Emulator team (an open source Nintendo Switch Emulator for Android) implemented a much more accurate version of NVDRV (Nvidia Driver service) than we supported, and then graciously offered their implementation to be part of yuzu. yuzu developer Blinkhawk integrated this, which not only matched Nintendo Switch behavior much more closely, but fixed one highly requested thing – Super Smash Bros. Ultimate World of Light!

Around this same time, yuzu developer Breadfish jokingly made a version of the yuzu logo that featured a chicken. The team thought this was so great that we needed to theme a project around it (spoiler: this is how our creative process usually works). With Blinkhawk having many more GPU experiments and improvements he intended to combine into a new project, and a theme now in place, yuzu Fried Chicken was born!

The chicken that inspired it all! (Or is it a turkey?!)

YFC – What to expect today

As mentioned above, the first round of YFC changes are now already available for you to enjoy! These primarily focus on accuracy improvements, which include:

• Full rework of the GPU driver based on the reverse-engineering and code from Skyline Emulator with full permission from the respective team.
• Full rework of GPU memory management.
• Initial implementation of GPU Channels, which fixes Super Smash Bros. Ultimate “World of Light” mode, Deltarune, and several other games.
• Fixes and performance improvements to the GPU DMA engine.
• Several fixes for Vulkan, the GPU Buffer Cache, and the Shader Decompiler, all of which affect multiple games.
• Rework host frame presentation to be considerably smoother (improves Xenoblade Chronicles: Definitive Edition).

Please let us know what other improvements you see with these changes!

YFC – What is coming next

YFC continues to be in active development, with several iterations coming in the future, primarily focusing on performance improvements. These will include:

• Rework the GPU Buffer Cache, which will fix issues with Fire Emblem: Warriors.
• Rework the GPU Macro (small GPU programs that specify rendering commands) HLE emulation, which will improve performance in Monster Hunter: Rise and Koemo Techmo games.
• Rework GPU fences with asynchronous buffer and texture downloads, which will improve performance.

Now for the important question – When will these be ready? Unfortunately, the primary developer behind these changes, Blinkhawk, is currently swamped with real life work commitments. As such, we do not have an exact estimate for release. That being said, many of the changes are already implemented and going through regression testing, so some improvements should land in the near future!

Project “Andio” – Audio Rewrite

This one may have slipped under your radar a bit – But did you know that yuzu just released a complete rewrite of our Audio emulation? Try it out in Early Access right now!

Driven by yuzu developer Maide, “Project Andio” brings our audio emulation up to speed with Nintendo Switch firmware 14.0.0. Our audio emulation has never been this accurate! The goals of this rewrite included:

• Implementing several missing audio playback features, such as audio effects.
• Implementing microphone support.
• Supporting newer revisions of Nintendo Switch’s audio engine, which fixes many newer games.
• Aligning our code structure more closely with the official implementation, which will make it easier to update the code base as Nintendo releases future audio revisions.

This change closes out nearly 20 longstanding audio bugs in yuzu and fixes many games (some of which would not even boot due to Audio inaccuracy). These include EVE Ghost Enemies, Seven Pirates H, Yomawari 3, Fire Emblem Warriors: Three Hopes, Atelier Sophie 2, Nintendo Switch Sports, Triangle Strategy, Moero Chronicle Seven Pirates H, Pokémon Brilliant Diamond/Shining Pearl, Zelda Skyward Sword, among others! (Note: Some of these games are still not fully playable, and just now have their audio fixed, your mileage may vary!).

Please give it a try and let us know what you think! If you find any regressions, please share them on the PR. If you know of other games that still have issues, please file a bug!

Project “londnon” – Multiplayer Support (LDN)

Or is it Project London? (We can’t really spell.)

Yet another project in the works, which does not have a finalized quirky name yet (okay, it is definitely londnon), is progressing quite nicely: Multiplayer support with LDN!

LDN is a Nintendo Switch feature that enables multiplayer using your local wireless network. yuzu will be leveraging this feature to support multiplayer over the internet, much like Citra did with 3DS local multiplayer. We’ll also support the same quality-of-life features that Citra has, such as a lobby for matchmaking.

Early matchmaking in yuzu!

Supporting LDN in yuzu has been a background effort for the team for a while now. However, not much traction was made until developer FearlessTobi made some breakthroughs in getting game lobbies working. This was quickly followed with developer Narr the Reg chipping in to fix a number of bugs, helping to get LDN fully functional.

Many games use LDN for multiplayer, among them are most of the Pokémon titles, Mario Kart 8 Deluxe, Monster Hunter Rise, ARMS, Bayonetta 2, Super Smash Bros. Ultimate, Mario Tennis Aces, and the list continues to go on!

Functionality wise, the team has already implemented the basics of LDN support, and are now regression testing, fixing bugs, and handling edge cases to make the experience stable and seamless. While we do not have an exact ETA for when this will be available in Early Access, progress is moving very quickly and we hope to have it in your hands in the coming months!

As an early preview, here is Puyo Puyo Tetris multiplayer working great across two instances of yuzu!

I do not have the dexterity to play myself in Tetris.

Wrap-up

That’s all folks – We hope you’ve enjoyed this overview of the great changes to yuzu that you can enjoy today, as well as a sneak peak of in-development work coming soon. As always, thank you for your continued support, we would not be able to work so much on yuzu without your help. Cheers!

- The yuzu development team