Nesting Dolls of Emulation

Nesting Dolls of Emulation

Show: NPC, Episode 104
Date: November 10, 2026
Hosts: Federico Viticci, John Voorhees

Switch 2 Sales 0:00

John 0:01: Hello and welcome back to NPC, that’s Next Portable Console. I’m here with Federico Viticci. Federico, how are doing?

Federico 0:08: Hello, I’m good. I’m good. How are you, John?

John 0:11: I’m doing very well, thank you. The sun has just come out on a rainy day, so I’m feeling like I’m going to get outside a little bit later. But for now, we’ve got some handhelds to talk about and some news

Federico 0:22: items. It not be about Zelda Ocarina of Time Remake, which I have started. We can talk about that in NPC XL. You still haven’t.

John 0:34: I haven’t. It came out at midnight, of course, and then I got up and I had some things that I had to do first thing this morning. So I haven’t had a chance yet, but I’m hoping to a little bit later today.

Federico 0:43: Okay, okay. We have some news items. We have a bunch of little things here and there to cover. What is it about the Switch 2 sales that you added at the very top of our document?

John 0:56: Yes, I just was scrolling through while we were waiting to connect here and get our episode started. And I noticed that, and Engadget was reporting, that sales of the Switch 2 dropped 40% after the increase in prices, which is a pretty significant drop and says to me that they had probably picked a really good price the first time around, right? They picked a price that obviously was pretty sensitive, that going much higher than that almost dropped the sales half, which is a shame. I mean, I hope that we get into a position where those prices could come down again, but they haven’t as of today. So I don’t know. It’s just one of those things.

I mean, we’re all kind of subject to higher prices of all kinds of consumer electronics right now. And it’s cutting into Nintendo sales, which is not great for them, I suppose.

Federico 1:53: Yeah, I mean, it’s happening everywhere, so it’s not really a huge surprise. Yeah, I mean…

John 2:01: Yeah, it wasn’t a surprise to me, but I guess the magnitude of it was a little bit of a surprise. I didn’t expect that the prices would be that sensitive to the increase, but, you know, it’s video games. It’s unlike maybe your laptop. It’s more of a want than a need, as we talked about a couple of weeks ago.

Federico 2:22: Yeah. Can we talk about this project that I’ve seen

AI Is Eating Software 2:26

Federico 2:28: on social media and YouTube a bunch? So, okay. So it’s about Steam on macOS. Before we get to that, so this show has obviously evolved over time. And as you can tell, this topic of… It started with the Pokémon recomps and decomps, right?

John 2:41: Yes.

John 2:49: Yep.

Federico 2:49: We’ve been observing this scene, these changes in this area of video game emulation and not even emulation anymore, but like even the idea of like putting games that were not supposed to be on a certain platform to play them on that platform, like Super Smash Bros. Melee on Apple TV.

John 3:12: Or putting Mario in a Final Fantasy game,

Federico 3:15: for instance. Pac-Man in Elden Ring, like those kinds of things. This entire scene, while obviously there are differences between these projects, the common denominator is that, like it or not, there’s a community of developers, tinkerers, enthusiasts, with a subscription to Claude or ChatGPT, tokens and money to burn, and a question that basically revolves around, what if I put this on that?

John 3:18: Yeah.

John 3:47: Right.

Federico 3:50: This is happening every week, every other day, everywhere.

John 3:56: Yeah. I just saw a Mario game on the Apple TV. I forget which Mario game.

Federico 4:00: Yeah. Look, I’m not surprised. Wind Waker on your phone. Yeah. Dreamcast on a GameCube. I’ve seen all kinds of things.

John 4:04: Yeah.

John 4:10: Yeah.

Federico 4:12: Latest is interesting. So this project, which launched as FX Steam Launcher. I think the GitHub repo, it’s obviously open source. And Claude is listed in the contributors, obviously. It’s been replaced to Steam Mac. It’s not clear. Like, is it called FX Steam Launcher or Steam Mac? The GitHub repo is called Steam Mac.

Anyway, the idea is that this is official SteamOS. I believe it’s the Steam Frame image. So the Steam Frame operating system running in a VM on Apple silicon with GPU acceleration and crazy performance. And by crazy performance, I mean 200 frames in Left 4 Dead 2 on an M4 Max MacBook.

John 5:01: Wow. Wow. That’s amazing. So what’s

Federico 5:04: interesting here is this is not just any VM. They’re using the Apple native hypervisor framework, which is the Apple made API and framework for creating virtual machines on macOS and emulating other operating systems.

John 5:23: Right. It’s used for emulating Windows on the Mac, right? What’s interesting to me, too, is you might think to yourself initially, well, wait, I thought that there was already like a Steam app on the Mac. Well, this is obvious. This is obviously to play the Windows games that aren’t available on the Mac version of Steam on macOS.

Federico 5:26: Right.

Federico 5:42: Right, right. Because now get this. So if this is the Steam Frame build. Right. So it’s for Android, right? And it’s compiled initially for ARM64 architecture. So think about for a second the nesting doll situation that we have going on here.

John 5:48: Yeah.

John 6:01: Yeah.

Federico 6:01: We have, and I just needed to memorize this paragraph by video cards. So if you want to play Windows games on a Mac, this is a very roundabout way to do it, but it actually works. Because what you’re doing is you have Proton for the ARM64 compatibility.

John 6:23: Right.

Federico 6:24: Then you have FEX, which is a Valve-made open source project. translate those x86, so Intel, instructions to ARM64. You have DirectX 9, 10, 11, and 11 going through DXVK. DirectX 12 games going through VKD3D Proton. You have the graphics instructions, right? Because you’ve got to go through the Android ARM64 graphics pipeline. So you have MoltenVK that is…

This is so ridiculous. You have Molten… Stay with me. So the Mesa graphics instructions need to go through MoltenVK that is then bridged to Metal on macOS.

John 6:29: For Android.

John 7:22: Right. So you’re going from Windows to Android to Mac. Through those different layers of compatibility and…

Federico 7:26: Yes.

Federico 7:32: Yes. Yes. And incredibly, this all works. It’s

John 7:37: amazing to me it works. I guess it’s a testament to Apple silicon and the power of it because this is just brute

Federico 7:43: force. Exactly. You can just brute force your way into multiple layers of emulation.

John 7:48: I’m amazed that that can do 200 frames.

Federico 7:51: I’m going to give you some numbers. Skyrim 1080p high 60 frames. The Witcher 3 1080p high 70 plus FPS. Left 4 Dead 2 1080p high 200 plus frames. Red Dead Redemption 1080p medium 70 FPS.

John 8:11: Okay. That’s pretty good. Do they have any like really recent games like maybe Cyberpunk or…

Federico 8:17: I don’t see this. ETA Prime obviously tested this on YouTube. Go check out the ETA Prime video

John 8:22: on YouTube. Is this… I assume that this is still early days for this and it’s probably not super easy to set

Federico 8:28: this up. Yeah. It looks kind of… Let me see the instructions. Looks kind of… I don’t want to say janky. They actually have a pretty nice website. You got to know what you’re doing. Right? They have a growing list of compatible games. It’s very early. This is reminiscent of another project that I’ve seen mentioned lately which is Droid Deck. Droid Deck is this new project for Xbox and PC Game Pass games on Android. Similar idea.

John 8:44: Okay.

John 9:03: Yeah. Yeah. Xbox. I was just reading about this the other day that there was this expectation that it was going to take a lot longer for Xbox and PS3 emulation to really get there but that it’s accelerated quite a bit and it’s again the same kind of AI story I assume that people

Federico 9:17: are throwing. I saw this post a few days ago and it’s kind of scary as a thought and the post was watch as what’s happening to software where anybody can just reverse engineer anything and emulate anything. Watch as the software industry increasingly locks everything down, moves everything to the cloud and nothing runs locally anymore. Which is a scary prospect.

John 9:43: Yep. Yeah. No. I think that that is I mean that would be how I would react to it if I was a software manufacturer at this point because how else can you can control it? I mean one of the other stories we have this week that’s worth noting is that Anthropic has added instructions to Claude to try to prevent people from remaking games.

Now you know it remains to be seen how effective that is and there are only one frontier lab that’s going And the other thing is is like is that going to prevent somebody who is trying to make a game inspired by another game? You know something that wouldn’t constitute copyright infringement that would be just like a souls like or whatever another you know game that has a particular genre. Will it prevent those games being from being made or is it really only going to keep you from putting Mario in Final Fantasy or moving Smash Brothers to the Apple TV? know?

Federico 10:46: Right. Right. I saw that also before that Anthropic putting some guardrails to prevent people from hacking their televisions. You know the whole like oh I created a custom OS.

John 10:57: Oh really? I didn’t know that they had done that.

Federico 10:59: I think they put in some guardrails for that.

John 11:02: The story in Ars Technica that I that I’ve linked in our show notes it’ll be in the show notes. It’s a good one because it also talks about how the whole decomp scene has been around forever and that one of the stalwart websites that was dedicated to it and by doing and dedicated doing these things by hand is shutting down because they feel like there’s just no community left to the process that it’s just people throwing compute at these problems.

Federico 11:29: Right. Right. That’s also an interesting angle because like you don’t need a community aspect which is sad but you don’t need it because you can just plug in your you know you can just open your computer sign up for a $20 Claude plan and just say hey I have this Wind Waker ROM can you make it run on my I don’t know Lenovo tablet or like whatever like you can just you can you port it as a native iOS game that uses metal and sure like maybe now Claude will have some guardrails but like I’m sure you can find some other model that will happily do it for you without those guardrails.

John 12:10: including the open weights models I think. So

Federico 12:13: like look I think it’ll probably get messy very soon. Right now as they say as handheld people and tinkerers we are eating good very good at the moment because like this is this is paradise we have these projects every other week and they actually work and they’re they are also actually maintained because it’s so trivial to just say you know look at the issues that people are reporting in the projects repo and fix them.

Like so it even goes beyond the the assumption that like oh people are just making these things and they’re never going to update them again. No that’s not the case.

John 12:56: Well and that’s been a false assumption in kind of the iOS world too that we cover at MacStories is I think that a lot of people worry about vibe coded apps because they’ll never be maintained but there is a path a pretty good path actually now to maintain apps and I have actually talked to a couple of developers who are seeing vibe coders copied their apps which is I feel like we’re at the cutting edge seeing this in gaming and it’s just going to spread to all software.

Federico 13:22: This is absolutely a preview of what’s going to happen elsewhere soon. I also think there’s an interesting angle here if you are a handheld manufacturer. If you’re an AYANEO you must be so happy that this sort of like enthusiasts and people who like to live at the bleeding edge are pushing their handhelds further and further in terms of emulation because all of this stuff now finally justifies the high end of those devices. Right. That’s And it finally gives something like you know an AYN Odin 3 Ultra which they don’t make anymore. They make the portal now.

But like it justifies having a lot of RAM and a powerful CPU and a powerful GPU and tons of storage because you can say well you know what I am just going to put PC games and Steam games on my handheld and they’re just going to run.

John 13:54: true.

John 14:23: Do you think this leads to a company like Anbernic not boosting the existing ROMs of existing games but starting to pull games off of these projects from GitHub and pack those in with their devices?

Federico 14:40: Oh that is…

John 14:41: Do you see where I’m going?

Federico 14:43: Oh you’re the devil. Yeah. Yeah.

John 14:47: Instead of ripping off Nintendo isn’t it easier to rip off a bunch of people who are on GitHub who don’t probably have the wherewithal to fight back to begin with?

Federico 14:56: I wish you hadn’t said this.

John 14:58: I’m sorry it just came to me.

Federico 15:01: Yeah I mean I obviously we do not advise for that but that is another scary thought.

John 15:11: There’s just like and that’s just the thing that we’ve unleashed a genie out of a bottle and the implications of where this goes can spin off in all sorts of directions and that’s really what I’m getting at.

Federico 15:22: And we haven’t even talked about any feel so I think it’s funny because it kind of feels like we’re having our psychosis moment. Right? But like this is actually happening in the video game scene. Like just take a look at the links that we put in the show notes. There’s articles every other day. We haven’t even mentioned on this topic and I feel like I know that it kind of sounds like we’re losing our minds. I promise you we’re not. We haven’t even mentioned what’s happening to jailbreaks. Like this the same AI.

So you may be wondering right how are these people finding software exploits for the Nintendo Switch 2 or the PlayStation 5? Both of them have been kind of jailbroken the PS5 more so than the Switch 2.

John 15:52: Yeah.

John 16:08: iPhone 18 Pro just got jailbroken I think.

Federico 16:10: The iPhone Duo was jailbroken on launch day. Like how are these people finding these exploits if the big models, ChatGPT and Claude, prevent you from doing this kind of like cybersecurity stuff?

John 16:26: Right.

Federico 16:27: Have you ever heard of ablated models? So these are open source models that you can run on your computer. If you have a modern MacBook Pro you can run a pretty powerful open source model on your laptop. And it means that those open weights models, usually from China, they have been taken by somebody. All of the weights, so all of the parameters inside the model that deal with blocking certain requests or cybersecurity.

John 16:27: Yes.

John 16:55: safeguards.

Federico 16:55: All the safeguards have been removed. And so you can use the pure model without safeguards. Don’t ever do it. It’s scary. I have tried one.

John 17:07: This is where the hacking comes from. Websites are getting hacked.

Federico 17:12: Yep. So if you wonder how do these people figure out these exploits?

John 17:16: Right. How do they find these things for PHP, these weaknesses in PHP or Railway or all these other services?

Federico 17:22: And especially like, because like for those proper cybersecurity like jobs, there’s an argument to be made. Like, oh, maybe they’re using one of the actual cybersecurity programs by OpenAI, like Daybreak, for example.

John 17:36: Right. Or using Mythos.

Federico 17:38: Or using Mythos by Anthropic. sign up. You say, I’m a security researcher. I want to do security research. And they give you access to the model without safeguards.

John 17:46: prove who you are. You have credentials. Financials.

Federico 17:49: These people who are hacking the Nintendo Switch 2 are not part of a cybersecurity program. So I 90% guarantee you that they’re using some of these large language models on their laptops, on their computers with the safeguards removed. They plug in their Nintendo Switch 2 and they’re like, go have fun. Find me an exploit. And

John 17:56: No.

John 18:13: look, that’s how the PHP exploits were found. Someone actually literally said, find a bad vulnerability in PHP. That was the prompt. That’s all that someone has to really do.

Federico 18:25: And from personal experience, I can tell you that running these Chinese models without safeguards, it is scary. Imagine having a little super intelligence on your computer that has absolutely no concern of what you’re going to ask. And I’ll leave it at that. I deleted it within like 10 minutes. It’s a scary thing to run.

John 18:46: because it could just wipe out your whole computer.

Federico 18:48: It doesn’t care. It has absolutely no safeguards in place. Anyway, so this will continue to happen in good ways and bad ways. The good ways are fun because like we get to run, you know, Steam on our Macs and Xbox on Android. It’s now, it’s quickly reaching the point where it, what is the term, John, when you get like overexposed to something? Like you get desensitized, right? Because like you see these projects now and you see, oh yeah, they put the Dreamcast on, I don’t know, an arcade cabinet from the 2000s. Sure.

Okay.

John 19:32: Yeah. Yeah. No, I mean, there’s a continuum here. I mean, I think there are, there’s like historical preservation maybe on one end of the spectrum. And there’s just pure slop where people are, you know, on the other end of the spectrum or just straight up piracy, you know, even beyond that.

Federico 19:50: Yeah. I think more than ever, at least my hope is that we will be able to tell the projects that are actually developed with AI, sure, but with care and with taste and with a sense of direction. Rather than, you know, a person who’s like, ah, I put 20 games on GitHub and you can run them on your phone.

So like there are pros and cons, of course. I’m actually interested in, in trying out the Droid deck.

John 20:10: That’s it.

John 20:21: Yeah, that’s interesting to me. I mean, I’ve got a laptop that could run that, I’m sure.

Federico 20:26: Yeah. Anyway, before we jump to NPC XL, where, by the way, I totally forgot. I have an update on my gaming PC to share. Oh, have a story to tell.

John 20:37: Oh, tell me, tell me. I, I, you and I haven’t talked about this. I, I saw something somewhere that you’re working on.

Federico 20:43: fixed my gaming PC. With the help of Silvia and another friend of mine.

John 20:43: Okay.

John 20:49: Oh, yeah. What, how did, how did Silvia come into it?

Federico 20:52: you the story on NPC XL.

John 20:54: All right, all right. All

Federico 20:55: all right.

John 20:56: I, yeah, I meant, I heard you mentioned that you were working on it, but I didn’t know what happened.

Federico 21:00: happy. I’m streaming games from downstairs.

John 21:02: Right. Right. No, that’s the part that I knew about, that you were doing it. So I knew you had fixed it, but I didn’t know how you fixed it.

Charging the Odin 3 21:09

John 21:09: Before we go to XL, though, we should mention that the Odin 3, this is yet another little tidbit of information. The Odin 3 is charging at 45 watts, not 60. That was something that was like wrong in some part spec or something and found its way out of 45 watts is a, is pretty good charging speed.

You know, so I don’t think this is a huge deal of difference between 45 and 60 on an, I think it’s a 9,000 milliamp hour battery. It’ll still be quick, but that, you know, it’s worth noting that that has actually been changed and that’s the case. What else, Federico?

The RedMagic 12 Pro Is Out 21:45

Federico 21:45: The Red Magic 12 Pro exists now and it’s got more RGB lights.

John 21:53: It’s got 12 probably,

Federico 21:55: I just wanted to tell you this. It’s more expensive than before. So they got a $200 increase from the 11 Pro. So it now starts at $949. Still looks very, very nice. But I mean, at this point you are approaching iPhone territory and or any other Android flagship territory. 12 or 16 gigs of RAM. The 24 gigs variant is gone. This is the one that I had on my 11 Pro. You can choose between 256, 512 or 1 terabyte of storage.

Big chunky battery, 8,400 milliamp hour with 80 watt fast charging. So looks like a pretty good, oh, and obviously it comes with a, with a brand new Snapdragon 8 Elite Extreme Gen 6. Yes. It’s the new

John 22:10: Right.

John 22:42: one.

Federico 22:43: It’s the, it’s like the most bleeding edge, bleeding edge Android gaming phone you can get now with more RGB lights with less RAM because nobody can get their hands on a 24 gig stick and well, not a stick, but like a component anymore. Right. And it’s more expensive than before still. So.

John 23:01: And there’s probably not the drivers that you need for it to do much.

Federico 23:06: My advice, if you can find a good price on a 10 Pro or an 11 Pro, get those.

John 23:11: Yeah, I agree. I agree.

AYASPACE 2 23:12

John 23:12: Hey, we should mention AYANEO too. We can’t let an episode go by without them.

Federico 23:11: Yeah.

Federico 23:16: Obviously.

John 23:17: AYANEO has this new, I guess it’s called AYASpace? AYASpace. AYASpace 2. And I think this is actually a really neat angle and something that we’ve talked about, think, especially last year about where these companies are going to go in terms of their software and how they package things for consumers, which is, this is a front end, it’s their operating system essentially for their Android devices that allows them to autumn, you know, you, you, you put a game on there and it automatically will detect the game. You don’t have to do like the scraping of the artwork.

Um, it does all that kind of stuff for you. just takes a lot of that friction out of the process of adding your games to these devices. And I thought that’s kind of a, kind of a neat way to approach it. They, they kind of theme it as a, as a, an arcade museum. It’s, you know, you know, whether you like the design or not, I think the idea of trying to reduce the friction and not require people to like sign up for accounts to scrape box art and, you know, do all this stuff with the files tree and copying things. It’s, it’s a, it’s a good approach, I think.

Federico 24:24: Yeah. Yeah.

John 24:26: Um, the, KONKR Pocket BLOCK is out too, Federico.

Konkr Pocket Block Early Impressions 24:27

John 24:30: And the early reviews are thumbs up. It looks like a nice, it looks like a nice device. The, the one thing I saw was some comments that the buttons are kind of mushy, which not great if that’s the case. I’m not a big fan of mushy buttons, but it looks nice. They were showing off the white one in this article that I have in the show notes. And I think the white one looks particularly good. That would be the one that I would get if I were doing it. And you know, for a hundred dollars for an Android handheld, that’s pretty good. Pretty good deal. think.

Federico 25:01: Pretty good. Pretty good. All right. Well, that’s, uh, that’s a whole lot of links for this.

John 25:08: It is a lot of links.

Federico 25:10: We will have more on Zelda, more on next week. We’re going to talk about the comeback of my Steam Deck.

John 25:21: Oh,

Federico 25:23: I’m talk about that. There’s a story. I’m going to talk about steam and streaming in NPC XL, but yeah, we’re going to be talking about those things. Approaching the end of the year. So we will need to make a decision about our handhelds of the year.

Our favorite accessories of the year. Games of the year. We’re going to be busy.

John 25:37: Yeah.

John 25:42: I have an accessory to talk about it. An NPC XL.

Federico 25:46: Oh, okay. Let’s do it. All right.

John 25:46: All right. You

Federico 25:47: can find NPC XL for just $5 a month on Patreon. You get a whole extra episode every week. That’s the deal. Pretty simple.

John 25:54: Yep. That’s it. And in the meantime, if you want to read all the stuff that we’re doing over at MacStories, it’s been a very busy fall. Fall is always busy for us. Like 2x busy compared to most. Just go to MacStories.net or look for me and Federico over on social media where he is @viticci. That’s V I T I C C I. And I’m @johnvoorhees. J O H N V O O R H E E S. Talk to you next week, Federico.

Federico 26:20: Ciao, John.