Peanuts Native brings 12 Switch games to Android without an emulator layer

It’s an exciting time to be an Android emulation fan. Not only is the emulation scene moving quickly lately, but native recompilation projects are also speeding up, letting you bypass the emulator layer to run console titles “natively” on Android. Nintendo Switch 2 emulators have recently landed on various platforms, including Android, and projects like BananaNative have inspired other devs to port console titles like The Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of Time Remake to Android within a week of release! Now, the new Peanuts Native open-source project builds on BananaNative to convert several Nintendo Switch games into standalone Android games with live second-screen companion support for Android handhelds.

Announced by Reddit user SuperbShop4757, who also created Eden Duo (a fork of the Eden Switch emulator focused on dual-screen Android handhelds like the AYN Thor), Peanuts Native is a fork of BananaNative. As such, it is a native translation layer and not an emulator.

Users supply their own legally dumped game files (NSP, XCI, or dump folders) alongside their console’s prod.keys file. The Peanuts Native app processes the game files directly on the device by rewriting the game’s ARM64 code to execute directly on the phone’s CPU, replaying graphics over Vulkan, and pre-translating shaders. The build process takes between five and 40 minutes on an AYN Thor, which is impressive given the technical complexity and overhead involved.

The standout feature of Peanuts Native is its dual-screen functionality tailored for handhelds like the AYN Thor. While the main game runs on the top display, the bottom screen renders touch-enabled companion overlays that support interactions and haptic feedback. Peanuts Native also uses the same companion package format as Eden Duo, so existing companions — which display live maps, inventories, quests, and party stats pulled directly from game memory — work out of the box here too.

Single-screen Android devices can still run the converted games without the secondary display features.

At launch, Peanuts Native supports these 12 Switch titles:

• 60fps:
  • The Legend of Zelda: Link’s Awakening
  • The Legend of Zelda: Echoes of Wisdom
  • Super Mario Odyssey
  • Metroid Dread
  • Mario Kart 8 Deluxe
  • Fire Emblem: Three Houses
  • Fire Emblem Engage
  • Castlevania: Belmont’s Curse
  • Octopath Traveler 0
  • Pokémon Brilliant Diamond
• 30fps:
  • Animal Crossing: New Horizons
  • Persona 5 Royal

To run Peanuts Native, users need a device running Android 13 or later with at least 12GB of RAM and a Snapdragon GPU supporting Vulkan 1.3, with custom Turnip drivers recommended.

As an early release, the developer notes that users should expect bugs and missing features like SD card support and mods, adding that Peanuts Native will coexist alongside Eden Duo rather than replace it.