Homebrew software has enabled classic Windows titles to run on the Nintendo Switch, with a recent clip on X showing Need for Speed Underground 2 operating smoothly on the hybrid console and maintaining consistent performance during races.
The effort uses Wine-NX, a port of the Wine 11 compatibility layer built for the Switch’s native Horizon OS. Distributed as a homebrew package in NRO format (the same executable container the system uses for native apps), Wine-NX avoids full-system emulation by running directly on the console.
Several components combine to make this possible. CPU-side translation from x86 to ARM64 is performed by the Box64 dynamic recompiler, while graphics are driven by the nouveau driver from Mesa 20.1. The build also supports audio and the touchscreen, and Switch controllers can be mapped to act as mouse and keyboard or to emulate an Xbox 360 gamepad.
According to posts on the Wine-NX forum, NFSU2 runs at about 20–45 frames per second on default detail settings when the Switch CPU is overclocked. A status overlay displaying CPU and GPU load appears in the video as well.
- OpenTTD (the open-source reimplementation of Transport Tycoon Deluxe) reaches 60 frames per second
- Quake III Arena runs at roughly 37 frames per second at 1280 x 720 resolution
- WarCraft III remains a work in progress, but menus, campaigns, and cutscenes are already functional
Those results are in part explained by the Switch’s hardware profile. While modest compared with modern PCs, the Tegra chipset is capable enough to handle many early-2000s PC games, whose requirements are well within the chip’s performance envelope.
There is a major caveat: Wine-NX requires the ability to load custom firmware and run homebrew NRO packages. That means it will only work on unpatched early Switch revisions or consoles that have been modified to allow homebrew execution.