The development of a Wii U emulator has been besieged by rumors and fake executables infected with malware. After the community's success in emulating Nintendo's previous systems, all interest naturally shifted to the latest platform. This brings us to the Cemu project, which, despite its limitations, is currently the most promising Wii U emulator.
All emulators start out working badly. Very badly. Some never manage to escape that condition. Others end up providing a much more complete and advanced experience than the original console. I was genuinely surprised by the extraordinary work of projects like VisualBoyAdvance (GBA), NEStopia (NES), and CCS64 (Commodore 64), but these three are tied to platforms with relatively low processing power. A few months ago I decided to download Dolphin, without a doubt the best Nintendo Wii emulator on the web. Playing Mario Kart Wii at near-native speed did nothing but leave me very excited about the prospect of Wii U emulation, even if Nintendo doesn't like that idea at all.
The feeling was that Dolphin would become the foundation for the next emulator, but after learning additional details about the Cemu project, nothing could be further from the truth. According to its developer Exzap, Cemu is an emulator written from scratch, sharing no aspect with Dolphin, a fact confirmed by Delroth, who worked on Dolphin. In fact, Delroth added in a Reddit comment that the only common element between the Wii and Wii U is the CPU architecture. The presence of two different graphics chips already makes things much more complicated.
What can we expect from Cemu? At this moment, not much. It doesn't support audio, nor controls, and its execution of NES Remix leaves much to be desired. Graphical errors are the order of the day, and honestly, there's no point in dwelling too much on speed... though deep down, it's a good start. Everyone hopes for a rapid and healthy evolution for Cemu; however, the biggest risk is Nintendo. Its reputation is well known.
Official site and download: Cemu releases
