A developer has successfully ported multiple Nintendo Switch titles to run natively on Apple TV using an open-source code project dubbed TVport. The project recompiles game data from the Switch and Switch 2 to run on tvOS, making games like Super Mario Odyssey and Animal Crossing: New Horizons playable without emulation.
What TVport Achieves
The work comes courtesy of a Reddit user who forked existing open-source tooling—specifically, a version of nxnative—and adapted it for Apple TV. Early tests show Super Mario Odyssey hitting 60 frames per second, with minor glitches such as slight stutters or audio issues around waterfalls. Animal Crossing: New Horizons runs smoothly at 30 FPS and reportedly has no major issues so far. Legend of Zelda: Tears of the Kingdom is still under development: it runs at 30 FPS but is showing signs of thermal throttling. The developer is working on fixes like render scaling (currently at 75%) and implementing MetalFX upscaling to improve performance.
Hardware Requirements & Other Ports
To play certain ports reliably, the project requires the fourth-generation Apple TV with 8 GB of RAM, though some of the lighter or earlier releases work on the older third-gen models. Meanwhile, another community project named Nativecade is focused on porting Nintendo 64 games to Apple TV.
As with many reverse-engineering and porting efforts, legality is murky. These projects involve decompiling and recompiling copyrighted games, which may violate Nintendo’s terms of service. To date there’s no indication of any enforcement action, but the risk remains.
This follows a growing wave of projects using Claude Code—an open-source toolkit—to do things like emulate or reproduce proprietary software and platforms. TVport is the latest demonstration of how modding communities are pushing the envelope of what’s possible on Apple hardware.
Why this matters: Porting games like this demystifies the gap between consoles and Apple’s hardware. It also raises questions around intellectual property, hardware limitations, and whether such ports could pave the way for more official ports—or more legal scrutiny.
What to watch for: whether TVport gains support beyond a game-by-game basis, how performance improves with fixes like upscaling and render tweaks, and how rights-holders like Nintendo may respond as ports become more polished.
