Case study

Tomodachi Native: running Tomodachi Life on Apple Silicon

Tomodachi Native adapts nxnative to run the Switch game Tomodachi Life: Living the Dream on Apple Silicon Macs and iPads. It rewrites selected ARM64 instructions, supplies Switch system services and translates NVN graphics to Metal 4 using a game-specific profile. The author reports that early island and Mii creation scenes work on Mac.

Targets: Game
Category: Independent reconstruction cases
Relationship: Independent reconstruction project
Sources reviewed: 2026-11-06
Evidence class: C2 code & docs, no demo or download

Stars: 13
Last commit: 2026-10-18
Language: C
License (GitHub): MIT

GitHub data as of 2026-11-10

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Evidence

Observed: Code and documentation observed; no download method or demo found.
Checked: 2026-11-09

How evidence classes are assigned

Requirements & limits

Prerequisites: An Apple Silicon Mac with macOS 26+, Xcode, .NET SDK 10, spirv-cross and Python 3 with lz4, capstone and fonttools.
Prerequisites: The user's own game NSP files and prod.keys.
Limits: The author reports that iPad playthrough is incomplete and the iPhone build has not been tried on a device.
License: MIT license.

Cite

BibTeX

@misc{tomodachi-native-case,
  title = {{Tomodachi Native: running Tomodachi Life on Apple Silicon}},
  howpublished = {\url{https://github.com/kuosuko/tomodachi-native}},
  url = {https://github.com/kuosuko/tomodachi-native},
  urldate = {2026-11-06},
  note = {Awesome REA entry: \url{https://awesomerea.org/resources/tomodachi-native-case/}}
}

Plain text

Tomodachi Native: running Tomodachi Life on Apple Silicon. https://github.com/kuosuko/tomodachi-native (accessed 2026-11-06). Awesome REA entry: https://awesomerea.org/resources/tomodachi-native-case/

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About this entry

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Primary sources

README.md GitHub · kuosuko/tomodachi-native · Revision 5587d1b
dm/games/README.md GitHub · kuosuko/tomodachi-native · Revision 5587d1b