Cemu Emulator Plans For 2022 With Going Open-Source, Aiming For Linux Support

Cemu as one of the leading Nintendo Wii U video game emulators is planning to go open-source this year and is also working on Linux support and related cross-platform advancements.

Cemu is a Wii U video game console emulator that has been out for Windows since 2015 and has garnered much success albeit criticism for being closed-source. A Phoronix reader has written in about their newly-published 2022 road-map that holds much interest for the year ahead. In particular for 2022 they plan to publish the source code of Cemu and open up its development process to community contributors. They are planning for this open-source milestone to happen this calendar year.

Cemu

Cemu is also still working on its Linux port to which it's about "70%" completed but various other items need to be addressed to make that a reality. Cemu has been working on switching to a Makefile build system with modern C++ codebase, a Cubeb audio back-end to make it more platform agnostic rather than DirectAudio/XAudio, H.264 software decoding support rather than being tied to Windows' DXVA2, and more.

An interesting undertaking as well is a new shader compiler for going from Wii U shader binaries to GLSL or SPIR-V. Rounding out their interesting plans/ideas is also a CPU JIT back-end using LLVM for going from the Wii U PowerPC code to native x86 code. Right now Cemu relies upon a custom translator for going from the Wii U binaries to x86 execution but the hope is to be able to leverage LLVM and that would also open up Cemu to running on more architectures.

More details on Cemu's roadmap and planning via cemu.info.