Hydra is an experimental Nintendo Switch emulator for macOS.

The emulator is still in very early stages. A few homebrew apps work perfectly, and some official games get in-game with various degrees of playability.

Only the NRO, NSO and NCA formats are supported. You can extract an NSP file into NCA with this tool.

In order to run official games, you will need to download a set of patches to prevent crashes. You can get the patches together with a guide on how to install them here.

You can download the latest release from here.

You can install Hydra dependencies with a package manager of your choice, like brew.

brew install cmake ninja sdl3 fmt

First, clone the repository and update submodules.

git clone https://github.com/SamoZ256/hydra.git

cd hydra
git submodule update --init --recursivee

Now configure CMake and build with Ninja.

cmake . -B build -G Ninja -DMACOS_BUNDLE=ON
ninja -C buildd

You will find a macOS app at build/bin/Hydra.app. If you want to use the SwiftUI frontend instead of SDL3, you can use the -DFRONTEND=SwiftUI option.

You can find a config file at ~/Library/Application Support/Hydra/config.toml after launching the emulator at least once.

Some games require firmware files from a Nintendo Switch console to function properly. The firmware files need to be decrypted, which can be done with this tool.

To use the firmware, set the firmware_path option in the config file to the path of the decrypted firmware files.