Cemu—the Nintendo Wii U emulator—is now a mature program with good performance on most systems. If you’d like to play Wii U games on your PC with all the benefits of an emulator, Cemu is the way to go.
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Why Bother with Emulators?
There are plenty of reasons for emulating a game rather than playing it on official hardware.
- Better Graphics: Emulated games can push the limits of your gaming PC, offering much higher graphics quality and in some cases even increased performance. While The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild runs at 720p at around 30fps on a Nintendo Wii U, Cemu can very easily manage 4K@60fps on high-end systems, with texture and graphics mods to boot.
- Ease of use: A normal Wii U requires you to have an additional device plugged into your TV, which you would have to switch to and then slot in the game disc. With Cemu, you can have all of your games digitally on your PC, which will also load much faster than stock hardware.
- Controller flexibility: You can play with official Wii Remotes, but you don’t have to. If you prefer to use a PS4 controller, you can connect that to Cemu as well.
Cemu can’t easily take the place of a home console in your living room, but it does a very good (and arguably better) job of playing Wii U games on PC.
How to Get Wii U Games Legally
Even though emulators are commonly used to run pirated games, it’s entirely legal to run games you’ve ripped from a real disc. To rip games, you’ll need an actual Nintendo Wii U console you can homebrew. The homebrew process is a little complicated, but it’s worth doing anyway as a homebrewed Wii U is handy in its own right as a retro gaming console.
Once you’ve got your Wii U homebrewed, you can rip games using a program called ddd Title Dumper. Transfer them to your computer, and store them all in one place on your hard drive for Cemu to access easily. Most Wii U games are fairly small, around 2-10 GB, so they won’t take up too much space.
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Setting Up Cemu
Cemu isn’t the most user-friendly of emulators. The setup process is a little involved, and you’ll have to download some files that are usually bundled with programs like this. This may change in the future, but for now, most of this will be manual.
Download the latest release of Cemu from its website and unzip the folder. The folder will be named something like “cemu_1.15.3,” but you can rename this to whatever you’d like, and store it anywhere easy to access (like your Desktop or Documents folders). The contents will look something like this:
