NXbox runs a Switch emulator natively on Xbox Series X, but nothing is playable yet

NXbox is a new experimental Nintendo Switch emulator that runs natively on an Xbox Series X. It’s a port of Eden, a Switch emulator, to the Xbox UWP sandbox (Universal Windows Platform, the app environment Xbox uses). To try it at all, the console has to be in Developer Mode.

The short version: no game is playable from start to finish yet. Persona 5 Royal boots, plays its cutscenes and reaches the first playable area, the casino, with audio. It still stutters on loads and has serious bugs. Breath of the Wild gets through the intro and renders the first area at about 5 to 10 FPS, which the author says is too slow to play. Mario Kart 8 Deluxe boots, but the GPU gets lost after under a minute. Super Mario 3D World boots, but its menus and gameplay don’t render correctly. Bayonetta hasn’t been tested yet.

The technical side is the interesting part. Switch ARM64 code runs through the Dynarmic JIT (a just-in-time recompiler) inside the sandbox. Graphics go through OpenGL 4.6 on top of Direct3D 12, using a patched Mesa d3d12 driver. Mesa is the open-source graphics driver project. The author writes up some hard bugs they found on the console. A driver bug stopped every command list from closing, which meant a black screen for weeks. The kernel hit the 5 GiB app memory limit by zeroing guest memory. Shaders were compiled on first use, which caused a stutter at every scene change. Shaders now precompile at boot.

How to try it: you need an Xbox Series X|S in Developer Mode, plus your own game dumps, firmware and keys. NXbox ships none of them. There’s no setup screen, no compatibility list and no public release. Builds come from CI (automated build servers) and install through the Device Portal. The console’s internal developer storage is only a few GB, so the author suggests a USB drive for games. There’s no release date. Releases will show up on the releases page once there’s something worth testing.

My take: this is one person’s spare-time project, built with AI coding tools on a small budget, and progress comes in bursts. Still, getting a Switch game to draw on Xbox at all is a real step. The GPU bug write-ups are worth reading even if you never install a build. Check the releases page when something working shows up.