Getting Started with Emulators
Been recently playing around with lot of the Nintendo Switch Emulators like Yuzu & Citron and to my surprise there is pretty vibrant community of people who are creating mods for Popular Switch games. In this article we’re going through step by step how to install this stuff (It’s very simple & identical on every Emulator basically).
First of all you need to have emulator downloaded and installed, there are multiple options but i’m going to list these on personal ranking order
- Citron – Supports over 1,500 Nintendo Switch Games which 85% are categorized currently playable and 60% perfectly playable
- Yuzu – Open source emulator that you can use on Windows, Android and Linux
- RyujinX – One of the older Emulators that got lawsuit from Nintendo & has stopped development (May have issues with newer games potentially)
Setting Up Directories and Installing the Mods
After you have downloaded the emulators and have unzipped them I recommend creating a custom Document folders for the actual Switch games which will be the directory C:\Users\Putachi\Documents\Switch-Emu something like this basically. The experience for Citron and Yuzu will be 1:1 same so we are going to focus in this tutorial on these two emulators particularly!
- First you have to download the actual mods for your game and most popular place is GameBanana & other alternative where people sometimes post mods is GBATemp
- When you have placed actual games in the folder they should appear as like icons below in Yuzu & Citron, now proceed to unzip the mod file into a temporary folder or just straight up to the proper location i’m giving below
- Right click a game in the emulator screen and choose “Open Mod Data Location” in case of citron and yuzu it should look something like this C:\Users\Putachi\Documents\Citron-Windows-Canary-Refresh_0.6.1\Citron-Windows-Canary-Refresh_0.6.1\user\load\0100453019AA8000 the last number string being the Title/Game ID
- Proceed to move your mods inside this folder and in some scenarios you should have two folders named cheats & exefs which both might/will contain files. In other scenarios it might have folders named like “Graphics” or something akin to that, don’t need to pay attention to this that much long as there aren’t any viruses included lol.
- File formats for the mods can be things like PCHTXT, TXT, PNG or PAC file and that is all dependant what type of mods you are downloading (graphical, FPS etc.)
- Now for the final step you have close this folder and go back to your Yuzu / Citron emulator and choose game again and choose “Properties”
Now we are literally in the last step here where we can toggle on/off the mods we want to use. After this hit “OK” and then launch the game and you will be able to see the mods actually in effect inside the game. You cannot to my knowledge deactivate/activate any mods midgame, so you have to close the session before you can alter this stuff.
Note: Certain mods might not be compatible with each other especially when created by a different Modder. By default these mods should be enabled the minute they are dragged inside the mod folder for that game. Also pay in mind that some of the mods might be ONLY WORKING for certain version of the game, so if you are patching it or using different version you might be cooked.
