MythosOfs/Orchid

What it is

Orchid is an experimental Nintendo Switch 2 emulator written in C++. It began as a fork of Eglantine and has since diverged, with its own fixes for shader lowering, kernel thread handling, graphics descriptors and per-game defaults. The stated development focus is a short list of target titles headed by Mario Tennis Fever, including Hyrule Warriors games, Pokémon Pokopia, Star Fox, Super Mario Bros. Wonder and several Kirby titles; being on the list does not imply a game is fully playable.

Quick start

Releases are published on the releases page. Pick the archive for your platform:

• Linux: orchid-<version>-linux-x86_64-pgo.AppImage (preferred) or the non-PGO AppImage; chmod +x it and run. Requires glibc 2.39 or newer.
• Windows: the PGO zip or plain zip; extract and run orchid.exe.
• macOS: orchid-<version>-macos-arm64.zip, experimental, macOS 15+ on Apple Silicon.

There is no in-README explanation of firmware/keys or game-file setup; the user handbook is the entry point for actually loading content.

To build the newest commit instead, install the listed dependencies (Arch/CachyOS package line given in the README; other distros via Deps.md), then:

git clone https://github.com/MythosOfs/Orchid.git
cd Orchid
cmake -S . -B build -G Ninja -DCMAKE_BUILD_TYPE=Release -DYUZU_TESTS=OFF \
  -DVulkanHeaders_FORCE_BUNDLED=ON -DVulkanUtilityLibraries_FORCE_BUNDLED=ON
cmake --build build
./build/bin/orchid

The first configure downloads extra dependencies into .cache/cpm. The README also points to a faster local build for repeated testing, and the build guide covers Windows/MSVC and macOS.

Compatibility and performance caveats

Reported results come from a single hand-run session in November 2026 on a Ryzen 7 5800X3D with a Radeon RX 9070 XT, 32 GB RAM and CachyOS with a git Mesa RADV driver at 1x resolution scaling. Under those conditions some titles hit 60 FPS after shader compilation while others crash or fail to launch; the compatibility table includes games such as Star Fox crashing quickly and Nintendo Switch Sports Resort having broken lighting. Other hardware will behave differently, and many target titles are still unstable or partially rendered.

Release and update behavior

Commits are frequent but do not trigger builds; releases are started manually, so the latest release may lag behind main. Release builds have an update checker that only offers builds from their own channel. A self-built binary has no update checker, and git pull followed by cmake --build build is the update path.

Project lineage and license

The project is distributed under GPLv3 or later and builds on Eglantine, Eden, yuzu and Sudachi. The README keeps a detailed credits list of individual fixes ported from Eglantine and Lichii forks, with commit references; a fork-scan tool lists what changed upstream after each release. Orchid asks users not to report its bugs to Eglantine or Eden.

HotRepo's take

HotRepo has no daily all-language ranking for Orchid, but the new-project records show rapid early attention: it gained about 53 Stars over a three-hour window on the 2025-11-05 C++ new list and about 140 Stars over the 2025-11-06 all-language new list, passing from roughly 156 to 296 Stars inside the sampled curve. That curve is a short observation around launch, not evidence of long-term adoption. The more useful signal for prospective users is the README's own narrow compatibility table: it is an experimental emulator working title by title, so treat the star movement as interest in Switch 2 emulation rather than a maturity claim.