The Switch 2 has its first PC emulator. A build called Eden-NX2 went up late on October 29, and it already boots Mario Kart World and Donkey Kong Bananza. Playable is another word entirely: the racer stutters and crawls, and Bananza can't reach 60 fps. Still, it took exactly one week to get from a public jailbreak to a working emulator build, which is faster than anyone expected. Nintendo included, I'd guess.
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Jailbreak on October 22, emulator on the 29th: where Eden-NX2 came from
On October 22, security researcher Sammy Hajhamid, better known as pepsipu, showed off ns2jb, a software-only Switch 2 jailbreak for firmware 23.0.1. The way in was SmileBASIC 4, a coding toy from the original Switch that still runs on the new console. It's a tethered exploit: you need a PC, and a reboot puts the console back to stock. Dexerto reports he had OpenAI's Codex help find the bug. Shortly after, SmileBASIC 4 vanished from the eShop in the US and Europe, and nobody has confirmed whether Nintendo or publisher SmileBoom pulled it.
A week later, at 22:39 UTC on October 29, a release titled "NX2 release" showed up on the Eden project's own code server. Eden is an open-source emulator for the original Switch, and Eden-NX2 is a fork of it with experimental Switch 2 support. The uploader goes by Takoroka. That account was created the same day, about six hours before the release. The build is flagged as a pre-release, it's a 36 MB zip, and it's Windows only.
The author promises nothing. The release notes say it needs a lot of fixes, some meshes are missing because shaders aren't implemented yet, and it has only been tested on Windows.
What boots: Mario Kart World stutters, Bananza misses 60 fps
There's no official compatibility list, so for now we're going on user footage. DSOGaming rounded up two clips:
- Mario Kart World. Loads and races, with constant stutter, poor speed and visual glitches. The test comes from the Techno Ninja YouTube channel.
- Donkey Kong Bananza. Starts and runs, but slowly. 60 fps is out of reach for now.
Requirements, straight from the release page: 64-bit Windows 10 or 11, the Microsoft Visual C++ Redistributable (x64), a Vulkan GPU with at least 8 GB of VRAM, and 16 GB of system RAM or more. The zip holds eden.exe, the normal app with menus, and eden-cli.exe for the command line. You load a game through File, Load File, and point it at exefs\main inside the game folder. So no cartridge images and no familiar ROM format: it wants an extracted copy pulled from your own jailbroken console.
Should you grab it now? If you don't have a jailbroken Switch 2 with your own games dumped from it, no, because there's nothing to run. We don't link game files and won't let them through in the comments. If you do and you're curious, take the build only from the release page on git.eden-emu.dev. News like this always brings "free download" clones on GitHub and file hosts, and what's inside is rarely an emulator (we saw exactly that with PS5 emulators).
Personally I'd wait. I haven't seen a firmware update that closes ns2jb yet, but Nintendo doesn't usually sit on these for long, and once it lands, dumping new games gets harder. The emulator itself isn't going anywhere, the code is out under GPL v3. We'll note new builds here, and the first game that actually holds 60 fps.
Sources
Eden-NX2 release page: date (October 29, 2026), requirements, archive contents and the author's notes on the build. pepsipu's blog on the ns2jb jailbreak. Dexerto, October 23, 2026: SmileBASIC 4, firmware 23.0.1, Codex and the eShop removal. DSOGaming, October 30, 2026: Mario Kart World and Donkey Kong Bananza in the emulator. Images: official Mario Kart World screenshot; Switch 2 photo by Crisco 1492, Wikimedia Commons, CC BY-SA 4.0; chart by FramesGames.
