Halo: Combat Evolved Lands on the Nintendo Switch via New Universal Port

Halo: Combat Evolved is making its way onto the Nintendo Switch through an early testing port developed by thelinkin3000, with releases hosted on GitHub. If you own a modded Switch and want to see how Bungie’s classic shooter runs on handheld hardware, the project is currently open for testing.

What You Need to Run It

The port requires either an original Xbox Halo CE ISO placed inside the /switch/halo folder on your SD card, or the maps folder copied directly from the PC version of the decompilation. Because SD cards are often formatted to FAT32 and the original ISO exceeds 4GB, many players prefer preparing the map files on a PC beforehand.

Testers note that running the game smoothly requires a bit of patience and specific setup:

1. Make sure your release folder is renamed precisely to halo and placed in the /switch directory.
2. If you are launching via a menu forwarder like Sphaira, ensure your address space is set to 36-bit and CPU cores to 3.
3. Overclocking your Switch to 1.7GHz helps make the experience mostly playable, though maps take a moment to load and checkpoint lagging still occurs.

Recent Updates and Multiplayer

Recent builds have added handy features like an auto-update option, a deko3d renderer, shader cache improvements, and an online server browser. While single-player levels still feature long load times without user feedback, multiplayer performance has seen a substantial boost, with recent tests handling 16 to 24 players reasonably well and online co-op functioning.

The project is moving fast with an active developer presence in the Open CE Discord (linked via the project’s GitHub page), so expect plenty of iteration if you jump in to test it today.