On Friday, February 14, 2026, Nintendo filed a single DMCA sweep against 13 Switch-emulator projects on GitHub — the biggest action since the Yuzu settlement of 2024, and the community quickly named it the 'Great Takedown.' Projects had roughly one business day before GitHub disabled the content. It looked, for a weekend, like the end of Switch emulation. It wasn't. Several of those projects are alive and actively developed in mid-2026 — and the most important detail is this: Nintendo never argued the emulators themselves are illegal, because it can't. It used an entirely different legal wedge.

Feb 14, 2026

The sweep

13 emulator repos, ~1 business day to comply

DMCA §1201

Legal basis

anti-circumvention — NOT emulator copyright

4+ projects

Still maintained

Eden, Ryubing, Kenji-NX, Citron

zero real ones

Switch 2 emulators

anything claiming otherwise is malware/vaporware

Who's alive in mid-2026

Eden — the one that fought back and won on survival. Ships weekly builds, the top pick for Android, now developed off GitHub on its own self-hosted git.

Ryubing — the most polished Ryujinx successor for Windows/Linux desktop; community testing had it running roughly 75% of games.

Kenji-NX — actively updated, with optimizations for newer mobile silicon like the Snapdragon 8 Elite.

Citron — its git was restored, and recent builds show unusual cross-collaboration between the Citron, Ryujinx and Eden developers.

Who didn't make it

  • Yuzu — settled with Nintendo and shut down back in March 2024; the domino that started all of this.
  • Ryujinx — discontinued October 2024 after Nintendo contacted its lead developer.
  • Sudachi — development halted since August 2025.
  • Skyline and Pomelo — already dormant before the February sweep even landed.

The Eden lesson: doing it by the book still lost the repo

Eden is the case worth studying, because it did everything a project is supposed to do — and still lost its GitHub presence. Eden filed a formal DMCA counter-notice, arguing that only its GitHub Releases page was targeted (not its source code or build workflow) and that it never hosted Nintendo's keys or BIOS. The counter-notice failed: GitHub disabled the repository anyway and didn't engage with the counterclaim. Eden survived only because it had already mirrored itself onto self-hosted infrastructure. The lesson the whole scene took from it: against a DMCA §1201 anti-circumvention notice, GitHub complies first and asks questions never — so the emulators that live now are the ones that stopped depending on GitHub.

So is Switch emulation actually legal? The part that matters

The emulators themselves are legal, and that's not a hot take — it's settled US law. Clean-room emulation was protected in Sony v. Connectix (2000) and Sony v. Bleem, and Nintendo has never won a case ruling that an emulator is illegal. What Nintendo actually attacks is narrower and cleverer: the cryptographic layer. Switch emulators need Nintendo's console keys (dumped from real hardware) to decrypt games, and Nintendo's §1201 argument is that decrypting its games circumvents a technological protection measure. That's the wedge — not the emulator's CPU and GPU code. The genuinely illegal part is unchanged and unambiguous: downloading or sharing copyrighted game files or Nintendo's encryption keys is infringement, and in the US there is no 'I owned it once' or 24-hour-backup exemption that makes distribution okay.

So the honest state of play: Switch emulation is alive, legal at the emulator level, and now living on self-hosted git and mirrors instead of GitHub. Two practical warnings to close on. First, this landscape changes monthly — a project maintained today can go dormant tomorrow, which is exactly why a current status tracker is worth keeping. Second, there is no real Switch 2 emulator in 2026; anything advertising itself as one is vaporware at best and malware at worst. Stick to the maintained, above-board projects, own your games, and keep your keys to yourself.