One of the first public Switch 2 emulators is already running Mario Kart World shockingly well

Published Oct 31, 2026, 1:43 PM EDT Patrick O'Rourke is XDA's News Editor and Entertainment Segment Lead. Previously, he was Pocket-lint's Editor-in-Chief, the Editor-in-Chief of Canadian tech publication MobileSyrup, and earlier in his career, he worked as the technology editor at the Financial Post and Postmedia. He's based in Toronto. Over the past 15 years, he's written thousands of articles. Patrick has also interviewed dozens of tech industry executives and covered GDC, E3, Gamescom, WWDC, Apple keynotes, Samsung Unpacked events and more. Patrick has a BA in journalism from Toronto Metropolitan University. Sign in to your XDA account Summary Experimental Switch 2 emulator Eglantine runs Mario Kart World at decent/full speed on powerful PCs. Eglantine is FOSS and derived from Eden/Yuzu/Sudachi. Switch 2 emulation is moving extremely fast following the recent release of a jailbreak. It's been a wild few weeks in the gaming world. We've seen several AI-assisted Switch PC ports land, including Zelda: Link's Awakening and the Pokémon: Let's Go games, along with a tool called Nxnative that lets Switch games run directly on Mac. While clips of Mario Kart World running on Mac and PC have been floating around the internet for the past few days, an emulator for Nintendo's Switch 2 hasn't dropped publicly — at least until now. First, modder Takoroka released an experimental Switch 2 integration for Switch emulator Eden called NX2. Takoroka says their Switch 2 version of Eden is still a work in progress and needs a lot more work. That said, it laid the groundwork for Eglantine, a fork of NX2 and the emulator that seems to run Mario Kart World best right now. While Eglantine seems to be the most capable Switch 2 PC emulator currently (as long as you have a powerful gaming PC), several other similar projects are also in development. The emulator is described as "very experimental," but its compatibility description says it's capable of "running Mario Kart World at decent/full speed depending on specs and configuration." There are also reports that Splatoon Raiders boots, though at a low frame rate. Of course, to use an emulator like Eglantine, you need a compatible Mario Kart World file, which you'd need to dump from your legally obtained copy of the game. Like similar projects, Eglantine's development is heavily AI-assisted. "Eglantine is a free and open-source (FOSS) Switch 2 emulator, derived from Eden, Yuzu and Sudachi — started by developer Camille LaVey. It's written in C++ with portability in mind, with builds for Windows, Linux and macOS," reads the project's GitHub page. This is likely a good sign for the future of Switch 2 emulation We'll likely see game compatibility improve at a rapid rate In a clip shared on YouTube from Techno Ninja (check it out above), Mario Kart World seems to run reasonably well in Eglantine. There are a few stutters, but there aren't any major graphical glitches, and the overall experience seems like a notable step up from what we saw a few days ago. Splatoon Raiders runs far more poorly, and the entire game seems to crash toward the end of the clip shared by YouTuber ewnicky, but it doesn't seem to boot in Eglantine. Still, the fact that one game is already pretty playable and another boots up is encouraging given the Switch 2 was just jailbroken a little over a week ago. In other AI port-related news, Anthropic seems to have introduced an instruction telling Claude not to recreate specific existing games, even if they're renamed, potentially limiting the explosive growth the retro and modern PC port space has seen over the past few weeks.