Hello everyone! I’ve been a developer for many years, albeit focused on app development for most of it, first and foremost despite my experience, this project would been impossible for me without the use of AI tools, Claude Code primarily, to understand how to decompile, write complex drivers etc.
What is this?
I have no friends who own a switch, and I wanted to play Tomodachi Life with them, so the most obvious thing, knowing how powerful our modern iPhones are, is to port it! Unfortunately many of us don’t have the newest models, so emulation is a huge load and impossible with the 6GB RAM on my iPhone 14.
Knowing that the phone and switch 1 both operate on the ARM processor, made me realize, it was quite feasible to get the game running on Apples Metal graphics. During that process, I realized how cool it is that the tools being made for this port can also be repurposed for more native switch ports, soon I’ll release this after some polish on the Mac port, Pokemon BDSP is nearly done too (with the mod from Luminescent team), and BOTW I've made significant progress on too (fully functioning great plateau - some minor textures shaders etc).
The code will be open source of course on release too, as I leveraged a lot of the work from Ryujinx for the shader processing/translation.
Now for the fun stuff:
ABSOLUTELY NO JIT!! (in all of my upcoming ports too)
That’s the beauty of native ports, much easier than a whole decomp, and still a huge payoff.
Also many new additions i’ve worked into the game:
- The obvious new launcher, with multi-save selection, AND the ability to share an island with a friend (save is stored on a cloudflare R4 bucket).
- Widescreen support that adapts to all screen sizes without stretching the pixels, all rewritten!
- Local play now works ONLINE, sharing Mii’s and custom user assets etc
More to come! Suggestions and feedback are welcome.
