NXNative runs Switch games on my Mac without an emulator. I love it, and it worries me

Two weeks ago a repository called nxnative showed up on GitHub. It takes a Nintendo Switch game you own, plus your own console keys, and turns it into a Mac app or an unsigned IPA you can sideload on an iPhone. Mario Kart 8 Deluxe at 60 fps on a phone. It's at almost ten thousand stars at the time of writing.

I've been playing with it since the first week, and yesterday I opened my first pull request. I also think it's one of those projects where the thing that makes it great is the same thing that makes it uncomfortable. Both of those things are true at the same time, and I want to write about both.

It's not an emulator, and that's the clever bit

Every Switch emulator so far has done the same thing: pretend to be the Switch's ARM CPU, pretend to be its GPU, and translate everything at runtime. That costs a lot, which is why emulators need beefy hardware and still stutter.

NXNative skips the first part completely.…