The emulator has received positive reception on its ability to play Wii U games on PC at higher resolutions than 1080p, the base resolution of the console, via the usage of graphics packs. Cutscenes were made available with a community-made add-on called Cemuhook though Cemu 1.18.0 removed the need for the plugin. Developers of Cemu expected that The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild would be playable with only a few months worth of work, and had a rudimentary version of the game's tutorial playable within weeks of its release. The anticipation for emulation of The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild caused the emulator's Patreon to increase monthly donations to $7,400 per month and later $22,317 per month. The emulator would rapidly progress from this state and increase its compatibility with the Wii U game library and add more features.Ī couple of days after The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild released, Cemu was able to boot the game though running at a sluggish framerate, without audio, and filled with many glitches.

Despite the Wii U sharing a similar name as its predecessor, the Wii, the emulator was built independently from Dolphin, a Wii emulator, as the systems only shared their CPU architecture in common. Cemu could run on 64-bit Windows operating systems and only supported OpenGL 3.3 on release.

Designed as a proof-of-concept, the initial release of Cemu could successfully boot Mario Kart 8 and The Legend of Zelda: The Wind Waker HD yet lacked Wii U GamePad support and audio and suffered from stutters and video glitches.

Botw running on cemu 1.7.5