Cemu, one of the leading Nintendo Wii U video game emulators, plans 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 released for Windows since 2015 and has been very successful, although criticized for being closed-source. A Phoronix reader wrote about their recently released 2022 roadmap which is generating a lot of excitement for the year ahead. Specifically for 2022, they plan to release Cemu’s source code and open its development process to community contributors. They anticipate that this open source milestone will occur this calendar year.

Cemu

Cemu is also still working on its Linux port for which it is about “70% complete”, but various other things need to be ironed out to make this a reality. Cemu worked on moving to a Makefile build system with a modern C++ code base, Cubeb audio back-end to make it more platform independent than DirectAudio/XAudio, H. 264 rather than being tied to Windows DXVA2, and Suite.

An interesting undertaking is also a new shader compiler to convert Wii U shader binaries to GLSL or SPIR-V. To complement their interesting plans/ideas, a CPU JIT back-end uses LLVM to transition from Wii U PowerPC code to native x86 code. Currently, Cemu relies on a custom translator to take Wii U binaries to run x86, but the hope is that we can leverage LLVM, which would also allow Cemu to run on more architectures.

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