SamoZ256 , a young and talented developer passionate about gaming on Apple platforms, has created Hydra , a new open-source Nintendo Switch emulator designed exclusively for macOS.

Although the project is still in its early stages, Hydra is already capable of running some games, with limited but constantly improving compatibility.

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The emulator offers two graphical interfaces: a lightweight and minimalistic one based on SDL3, and a more modern one optimized for macOS, developed with Apple’s SwiftUI framework.

Besides Hydra , the developer also contributes to other notable projects such as Cemu (Wii U emulator) and Panda3DS (Nintendo 3DS emulator), developing specific backends to improve performance on macOS and iOS.

The emulator supports only NRO, NSO and NCA formats, while you can extract an NSP file to NCA format using this tool .

To run official games, you need to download a set of patches that prevent crashes during startup. The patches, along with an installation guide, are available here .

Hydra User Guide

Addictions

To use Hydra , you need to install some dependencies. The developer recommends using a package manager like Homebrew. For example, on macOS you can run:brew install fmt

Compilation

First, you need to clone the official repository and initialize the submodules:

git clone https://github.com/SamoZ256/hydra.git
cd hydra
git submodule update --init --recursive

Next, we proceed with configuring the project via CMake and compiling it with Ninja:

cmake . -B build -G Ninja -DMACOS_BUNDLE=ON
ninja -C build

Those who want to use the modern interface built with SwiftUI instead of the SDL3 version can add the option:-DFRONTEND=SwiftUI

Execution

If Hydra was compiled as a macOS bundle, the app will be available inside the path build/bin/Hydra.app. Alternatively, it can be run from the terminal with the command:build/bin/hydra

With the SDL3 frontend, you can boot a ROM by dragging it into the emulator window, or by specifying the path to the ROM as a command line argument.

Configuration

Once run at least once, Hydra will automatically generate a configuration file located at:/Users/NOMEUTENTE/Library/Application Support/Hydra/config.toml

This file allows the user to customize various parameters of the emulator’s behavior and interface.