Building Yuzu For macOS - Yuzu Emulator Pro

Disclaimer: This guide is intended solely for development, archival, and preservation purposes. Yuzu was never officially released for macOS and remains unsupported for general use.

macOS Development Notice

This article is aimed at developers only. Yuzu’s macOS support is incomplete and has never been in a state suitable for casual or end-user use.

Installing Required Dependencies (via Homebrew)

Use Homebrew to install all necessary libraries and tools:

brew install autoconf automake boost@1.76 ccache ffmpeg fmt glslang hidapi libtool libusb lz4 ninja nlohmann-json openssl pkg-config qt@5 sdl2 speexdsp zlib zstd

Building Yuzu on macOS

Since vcpkg currently has a broken boost-context package, we’ll proceed without it.

mkdir build && cd build
export Qt5_DIR="/opt/homebrew/opt/qt@5/lib/cmake"
cmake .. -GNinja \
  -DCMAKE_BUILD_TYPE=RelWithDebInfo \
  -DYUZU_USE_BUNDLED_VCPKG=OFF \
  -DYUZU_TESTS=OFF \
  -DENABLE_WEB_SERVICE=OFF \
  -DENABLE_LIBUSB=OFF
ninja

Pending Tasks

vcpkg Update Needed – Newer versions of vcpkg resolve the boost-context issue and could re-enable web services.
Investigate libusb – Determine the cause of current issues and whether it can be safely enabled.

Running Yuzu on macOS

To launch the emulator:

Optional: Running with MoltenVK (Vulkan Support)

Install additional Vulkan dependencies:

brew install molten-vk vulkan-loader

Set the Vulkan loader path and launch:

export LIBVULKAN_PATH=/opt/homebrew/lib/libvulkan.dylib
bin/yuzu.app/Contents/MacOS/yuzu