NERD explains the challenge of getting Super Mario Sunshine to change

© Nintendo

You may not be familiar with the name of Nintendo European Research & Development (NERD), but you will certainly be familiar with its work. After creating emulators for the classic NES and SNES editions, and downloadable Wii / DS games for Wii, NERD recently helped with Super Mario 3D All-Stars, too much.

Including emulated versions of Super Mario 64, Sunshine, and Galaxy, many of you know that 3D All-Stars will be taken off the roster next week, but – although it flew under the radar at first – before that happened, NERD gave us more details on the way they made it work on Switch.

Specifically, this latest update focuses on Sunshine, outlining the technical challenges of emulating GameCube games on Switch. It’s a short read, and you can find the original post here, but here’s what was said in full:

NERD’s Nintendo GameCube emulation technology was used in Super Mario 3D All-Stars to bring Super Mario Sunshine to Nintendo Switch.
One of the biggest challenges was mimicking the old but powerful MPU (microprocessor) of the Nintendo GameCube on the Switch’s custom processor – a number of optimization tricks were needed to get the game to run at full speed.

Additionally, NERD worked with the Super Mario 3D All-Stars team on several features to give Super Mario Sunshine a modern twist. These include 16: 9 HD rendering, updated controller links for the best Joy-Con experience, and more… The in-game videos have also been upgraded to HD using the company’s own engine. deep learning of NERD.

Taking advantage of the similarities between Nintendo GameCube and Wii hardware architectures, NERD also supported Super Mario Galaxy porting efforts by providing graphics and audio emulation technologies.

It also offers a potential glimpse into why we haven’t seen more GameCube games on Switch (so far). Homebrew emulators have been successful in this for a long time, but running them on the Switch’s custom processor at a higher quality seems to be based on “optimization tricks.”

Considering Sunshine has proven how well the Switch can handle this, we’re hoping more GameCube games will appear eventually.