Citron

Editorial note: reference implementation. Verify status, licence and requirements against the project’s own repository before publishing.

Citron is a community fork of a previously released open-source Switch emulator. Forks of this kind inherit the original codebase and licence, then diverge as different maintainers prioritise different problems — one may chase shader compilation stutter while another focuses on Android performance or audio accuracy.

Why forks matter for compatibility

Because forks diverge, “does this game run?” stops being a question about Switch emulation in general and becomes a question about a specific build on specific hardware. A title that is flawless on one fork’s desktop build can stutter badly on another’s Android build running the same renderer. That is the reason NSWPEDIA records compatibility per emulator, per platform and per device rather than publishing a single global rating per game.

What this page covers

This profile covers what Citron is, which platforms it targets, its hardware floor and its maintenance status. Per-game results live on the individual game pages, each stamped with the device and the date it was tested, so readers can weigh how current any given result is before relying on it.

Hardware expectations

Switch emulation is demanding in a way that is easy to underestimate. The console’s own hardware is modest, but reproducing its graphics API, audio pipeline and CPU behaviour on a completely different architecture costs far more than the original silicon ever did. On desktop, the practical floor is a modern quad-core processor with AVX2 support and a GPU with working Vulkan drivers. On Android, the picture is governed less by raw chip performance than by driver quality — two phones with comparable benchmark scores can behave very differently depending on whose GPU driver they ship.

Shader compilation is the other factor that shapes the experience. The first run through any given area compiles shaders on demand, which produces stutter that disappears on subsequent visits once the cache is populated. A frame rate figure recorded on a cold cache and one recorded on a warm cache describe two different things, which is why our testing procedure specifies which of the two we measured.

Firmware and keys

Citron ships as an emulator only. Running commercial software on it requires system firmware and encryption keys taken from a console the user owns. NSWPEDIA does not supply either, and our guides stop at the point where those files are needed rather than pointing readers to sources for them. What we do document is the technical requirement itself, so readers understand why an emulator that installs cleanly may still refuse to launch anything.