Higan creator Byuu, later known as Near, condemned the Cemu's closed-source nature, arguing that Cemu benefitted from the work of previous emulators without contributing back. However, the decision drew criticism from other emulation developers. Exzap explained that it allows for quick progress and for more control of its development. Unlike other emulators, Cemu is notably not open source. In August 2017, a hack to Cemu Emulator developed by Cemu community member Xalphenos allowed The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild to run at 60 frames per second (FPS), higher than the game's native 30 FPS limit. Many mods and enhancements have been developed for The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild. Notable games running at higher resolutions include Mario Kart 8 running in 8K resolution and The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild in 4K resolution. 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.

Wii u mac emulator