Patrick O'Rourke is XDA's News Editor and Entertainment Segment Lead. Previously, he was Pocket-lint's Editor-in-Chief, the Editor-in-Chief of Canadian tech publication MobileSyrup, and earlier in his career, he worked as the technology editor at the Financial Post and Postmedia. He's based in Toronto.
Over the past 15 years, he's written thousands of articles. Patrick has also interviewed dozens of tech industry executives and covered GDC, E3, Gamescom, WWDC, Apple keynotes, Samsung Unpacked events and more.
Patrick has a BA in journalism from Toronto Metropolitan University.
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Summary
- Mario Kart World runs natively on macOS via an nxnative fork — this is the first Switch 2 game to run on Mac.
- The port is playable but rough: it's missing shaders, laggy, and has broken geometry.
- The ns2jb exploit has let people dump full Switch 2 games, along with models and other data.
Last week, I reported that the Switch 2 had finally been jailbroken thanks to the ns2jb exploit, and now I'm back with some of the fruits of that effort.
Developer Will Faust recently shared a clip on Twitter of Switch 2-exclusive Mario Kart World running on macOS. Faust emphasizes the footage is real and that the project stems from a fork of nxtnative, an app that aims to allow Switch games to run on Apple's desktop operating system.
Of course, the kart racer is still a bit of a mess, as the clip below shows. Some shaders are missing, it's laggy, and the geometry is all over the place, but it's a functional version of Mario Kart World running natively on Mac. It's difficult not to be impressed by the accomplishment.
Faust says they own the game and dumped it from their Switch 2 using the ns2jb exploit. It's unclear whether they plan to keep improving the port's performance or release it publicly at some point.
This is the first time a Switch 2 game has made its way to Mac
More titles are likely coming
The recent Switch 2 exploit has allowed people to dump full games and extract files from titles, but so far, only the full version of Mario Kart World has appeared. There's also a 3D model of Princess Peach from Mario Kart World, alongside data from Deltarune and Duskbloods floating out there, too.
Faust says that this port isn't a decompilation or a recompilation. Instead, it converts "HOS syscalls to iOS, nvn to metal, ect." They say most of the work to get Mario Kart World up and running was already done by nxnative, and the most difficult part was getting NVN2 support running. NVN2 is Nintendo's proprietary graphics API for the Switch 2.
Nxnative is an experimental project that aims to run Nintendo Switch games natively on ARM64 devices, including Macs with Apple silicon and iPhones and iPads. Both Nintendo's Switch 2 and Apple's Macs utilize Arm64-based processors, eliminating the need for CPU instruction-set emulation. That said, Nintendo's graphics APIs still need to be translated to work on macOS.
In other PC port news, the Link's Awakening remake for the original Switch recently got the static recompilation treatment, making the game playable on PC. Someone also ported Halo: Combat Evolved to the Nintendo 64, including four-player multiplayer. Wild, right?