Super Smash Bros. Melee on Nintendo Switch, built as a native homebrew NRO from melee-pc. The game compiles directly to AArch64; rendering uses Aurora GX, Dawn, and Mesa NVK.
You supply your own NTSC-U 1.02 (GALE01) disc image. This repository contains the Switch integration and patches, with no game assets or vendored game source.
Build and install · Contribute · Documentation
Playable, with performance work ongoing. Menus, gameplay, audio, controller remapping, and sideways single Joy-Cons work. Geometry can appear late while shader pipelines compile, and busy scenes and load transitions still hitch. Audio latency and sustained 60 FPS remain open work.
A September 21, 2026 capture of a four-fighter game at 720p and stock clocks averaged 55.4 FPS over a representative seven-minute window. A later scene averaged 42.4 FPS. These describe one recorded session; subsequent feature builds have not been measured under the same conditions.
Copy the NRO and your disc image to an Atmosphère SD card:
sdmc:/switch/melee-nx/melee.nro
sdmc:/switch/melee-nx/GALE01.iso
Launch from the Homebrew Menu. The first run offers to extract the game into
files/, or play directly from the image. After extraction and a successful
disc boot have created disc.meta and disc-boot.bin, the game can boot without
the image. Keep those metadata files alongside the NRO.
Startup and runtime logs are written to melee-nx-boot.log and
melee-nx-runtime.log in the same directory. See the
installation guide for details.
Builds run in Docker. You can use a toolchain image with an external Mesa/NVK build, or package both into a reusable SDK image that needs no neighboring checkout. Start with BUILDING.md; image creation and transfer are documented in the Docker guide.
| Path | Contents |
|---|---|
builder/ |
Dependency fetcher, container wrapper, build stages, checks |
switch/src/ |
Startup, platform adapters, disc reader, cache and logging support |
switch/cmake/ |
Toolchain, graphics imports, linker configuration |
switch/patches/ |
Changes applied to upstream sources |
switch/docker/ |
Reusable toolchain and SDK image recipes |
docs/ |
Maintained contributor documentation and local working notes |
ref/, build/ |
Local dependencies and build outputs; ignored by Git |
- melee-pc, by 999sian, and its vendored Aurora fork
- Aurora and Dawn, including encounter's Switch work
- Mesa/NVK, the Vulkan driver
- Dusklight-NX, for the SDL backend and CPU techniques
- KartPad-NX, for Switch toolchain and platform integration work
- devkitPro, for devkitA64 and libnx
Port code in switch/ and builder/ is GPL-3.0-or-later, matching melee-pc.
Game source under ref/melee-pc/src/melee and ref/melee-pc/src/sysdolphin
remains Nintendo's property and is not licensed by this project. Do not commit
game source, disc images, or extracted assets.
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