For example Mario Kart 8 can be run in 4K resolution on compatible hardware, with The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild playable in 4K resolution. The emulator has received positive reception on its ability to play Wii U games on PC at higher resolutions than 1080p, the base resolution of the console, via the usage of community graphics packs. Cutscenes were made available with a community-made add-on called Cemuhook, though Cemu 1.18.0 removed the need for the plugin. Developers of Cemu expected that The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild would be playable with only a few months worth of work, and had a rudimentary version of the game's tutorial playable within weeks of its release. The anticipation for emulation of The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild caused the emulator's Patreon to increase monthly donations to $7,400 per month and later $22,317 per month. The emulator would rapidly progress from this state and increase its compatibility with the Wii U game library and add more features.Ī couple of days after The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild released, Cemu was able to boot the game - though running at a sluggish framerate, without audio, and filled with many glitches. Despite the Wii U sharing a similar name as its predecessor, the Wii, the emulator was built independently from Dolphin, a Wii emulator, as the systems only shared their CPU architecture in common. Cemu could run on 64-bit Windows operating systems and only supported OpenGL 3.3 on release. Development ĭesigned as a proof-of-concept, the initial release of Cemu could successfully boot Mario Kart 8 and The Legend of Zelda: The Wind Waker HD yet lacked Wii U GamePad support and audio and suffered from stutters and video glitches. The popularity of the emulator spiked with the release of The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild in 2017 as Cemu successfully booted and ran the title within hours of its release.

Though still under development, it is able to run the majority of games smoothly, assuming compatible hardware. Experimental builds currently support Linux, and experimentally macOS in addition to the Windows environment available from launch. Microsoft Windows, Linux, macOS (experimental)Ĭemu is an open-source Wii U video game console emulator, first released Octofor Microsoft Windows as a closed-source emulator developed by Exzap and Petergov.

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