In this AI era, it seems like just about anything is possible. Normally, Apple TV is only used for watching shows, or at most occasionally playing Apple Arcade, and you’d never imagine that Apple TV could be used to play games like Switch titles. Recently, a developer did exactly that: they brought Super Mario Odyssey to Apple TV 4K, and it’s actually running natively, reaching up to 60 FPS. They can even play Animal Crossing: New Horizons normally.
Apple TV can also play Switch games! A netizen used Claude to create TVPort, and Super Mario Odyssey runs at 60 FPS.
Recently, a Reddit user named FloatingFalafel shared on r/decomps an open-source project he created called TVPort, which uses a Mac to recompile Switch games he owns and package them into tvOS apps, then install and run them on Apple TV 4K. His test device is a third-generation Apple TV 4K with an A15 chip. So far, he has successfully run three games: Super Mario Odyssey, Animal Crossing: New Horizons, and The Legend of Zelda: Tears of the Kingdom, with Mario running at 60 FPS.
FloatingFalafel emphasized that this project was made using Anthropic’s Claude Opus 5.5, with the reasoning effort set to the highest level, Extra High.
According to his explanation, TVPort is a project forked from nxnative. nxnative was created by developer seedds and was originally a tool for running Switch games natively on iPhone and iPad, and its approach was further extended from another open-source project, d2r-mobile, that brought Diablo II: Resurrected to mobile.
TVPort added two things on top of this foundation: first, an execution engine for the Apple TV version; second, a Mac App—once you select the game folder and Apple TV and click “Build & Install,” it automatically builds and installs, with no need to use Terminal.
The developer has currently tested three major Nintendo Switch titles on Apple TV:
| Game | Test version | Developer-reported performance | Known issues |
|---|---|---|---|
| 《Super Mario Odyssey》 | 1.3.0 | 60 FPS | Occasionally there is slight stuttering, and audio abnormalities occur near the waterfall. |
| Animal Crossing: New Horizons | 1.0.0 | 30 FPS | The developers haven’t run into any problems so far; all players share the same island. |
| The Legend of Zelda: Tears of the Kingdom | 1.4.2 | 30 FPS (handheld mode, 3D resolution 75%) | Still being adjusted—after the device heats up and throttles, loading screens become noticeably slower. |
Super Mario Odyssey performs the best of the three, reaching the same 60 FPS on Apple TV as the original Switch version. Although Animal Crossing runs at only 30 FPS, he hasn’t encountered any problems playing it so far.
The Legend of Zelda: Tears of the Kingdom is more of a struggle. FloatingFalafel says getting a game of that caliber running requires extensive diagnostics, and he even had to partially rewrite the game engine through code patches. He also admits that heavier games may never run smoothly on the third-generation Apple TV 4K, and currently recommends that interested people try only Mario and Animal Crossing. To make Tears of the Kingdom run more smoothly, he is adding Apple’s MetalFX upscaling technology, similar in concept to NVIDIA’s DLSS, rendering at a lower resolution and then upscaling the output.
[Release] TVPort – Port switch games to run natively on AppleTV (4k 3rd gen)
byu/FloatingFalafel indecomps
Most games work pretty much the same way as on Switch, but some games load textures into memory differently, so each one has to be diagnosed and fixed individually before it will run. In addition, the Apple TV version can only run 64-bit game versions; for example, Mario Kart 8 Deluxe before the 2.0 update was 32-bit, so it couldn’t run.
FloatingFalafel also mentioned that the biggest challenge for Apple TV is memory: tvOS has a memory limit of about 2GB for a single app, which is quite tight for major Switch games. Another hardware limitation is texture format: Switch games make heavy use of BC-compressed textures, but the A15 chip does not support this format, so TVPort will first decompress the textures before storing them.
At this point, some people might be wondering whether it is through TVPort Can you play Switch games in the living room? If you meet all of the following conditions:
- Mac: Must be an Apple silicon Mac running macOS 26.6 or later, with Xcode 27.1 installed.
- Apple TV 4K: tvOS 26 or later, enable Developer Mode and pair with Xcode. Currently only tested on the third generation (A15, tvOS 27.2).
- Apple ID: You need to sign in to Xcode; a free account is fine, but every 7 days you have to click “Build & Install” again to renew the app.
- Game files and keys: game files (in NSP or XCI format) that you extract yourself from the console, along with the console’s key file.
- Build time: The first build of a game takes 30 to 60 minutes; subsequent rebuilds take only a few minutes.
Source: KOCPC Chinese