Ryujinx is gone — the project shut down on 1 October 2024 after its lead developer reached an agreement with Nintendo, and its official repository, website and Discord went with it. Yet BetterJoy’s most defensible job in 2026 lives in Ryujinx’s family tree. The reason is a sentence from Ryujinx’s own README that still governs its successors: “Motion controls are natively supported in most cases; for dual-JoyCon motion support, DS4Windows or BetterJoy are currently required.” This page explains the successor landscape accurately, why that one sentence keeps BetterJoy relevant, and how the DSU setup works in principle.
Two lineages — do not mix them up
Switch emulation after 2024 forks into two separate family lines, and guides that blur them mislead you:
- The Ryujinx line: Ryubing, a fork maintained after the shutdown and hosted on its own infrastructure (git.ryujinx.app). Its original maintainer, GreemDev, confirmed stepping back in February 2026, with others continuing it as a maintenance project — bug fixes and compatibility upkeep rather than new features. Its exact release cadence since then is something we could not verify from a primary source, so be sceptical of any page quoting a “latest Ryubing version” with confidence.
- The Yuzu line: Eden, a Yuzu successor founded by former Citron developers. It belongs to the other family — covered in our BetterJoy and Eden guide — and it does not inherit Ryujinx’s dual-Joy-Con caveat, because Switch emulators handle their own controller model differently.
Both lines were among the projects named in Nintendo’s February 2026 DMCA wave, which is context worth knowing when a “successor” site asks you to download something: verify what you install, and prefer the projects’ own repositories over aggregator pages. Our Platforms & Emulators hub tracks the status of each line as we verify it.
Why dual Joy-Con motion is the exception
A Switch emulator’s native input stack treats a controller as one device with one motion source — fine for a Pro Controller, and fine for a Joy-Con pair merged into a single virtual pad. But some Switch games are built around each Joy-Con as an independent motion controller: a gyro in your left hand and a separate gyro in your right, reporting separately. That is precisely the case Ryujinx’s README carves out. The emulator’s own pipeline does not split one paired connection into two independent motion streams, so the split has to happen before the data arrives — which is what a DSU server like BetterJoy does. BetterJoy talks to each Joy-Con individually, and its Cemuhook/DSU server (127.0.0.1:26760) can present each hand’s motion to the emulator as its own source. DS4Windows is named in the README as the alternative for the same job.
Everything else about the Ryujinx family is native, and we will not pretend otherwise: single-controller motion, Pro Controller play, and ordinary button input do not need BetterJoy. There is also a telling footnote in the Ryubing FAQ — users of DualShock 4/5 pads are advised not to layer BetterJoy or DS4Windows on top, because those pads work natively. That advice is about PlayStation controllers; it does not cancel the Switch dual-Joy-Con requirement, and pages quoting it as “BetterJoy is unnecessary for Ryujinx” are mixing two different statements.
The DSU setup, in principle
Menus differ between Ryujinx successors and builds, so treat this as the shape of the setup rather than a button-by-button script:
- Get BetterJoy from the download page, install ViGEmBus, and reboot.
- Pair both Joy-Cons with Windows individually over Bluetooth — each must appear in BetterJoy’s window. (The pairing walkthrough is in the Joy-Con connection guide; for dual-motion play you keep them as separate controllers rather than joining them into one pad.)
- Leave BetterJoy running so its DSU server stays live on 127.0.0.1:26760.
- In your Ryujinx successor’s input settings, configure each player’s controller and enable motion via the DSU client where the build exposes it, assigning each Joy-Con’s motion source to the corresponding player.
- Test with a title that reads the two hands independently; if one hand’s motion is missing, re-check that both Joy-Cons are listed in BetterJoy before touching emulator settings.
Bluetooth quality matters twice here — two simultaneous Joy-Con connections are exactly the load the project wiki warns needs a decent adapter — so if one hand lags, work through the Bluetooth lag fix before blaming the emulator.
What “maintenance mode” means for your setup
Because the Ryujinx line now advances by maintenance rather than feature development, expect builds to differ in the details this setup touches: where the input settings live, whether a given build exposes a DSU client at all, and how motion sources are labelled. A successor build without a DSU client option cannot use the BetterJoy route for dual motion no matter how correctly BetterJoy itself is configured — that is a property of the build, not a fault in your setup. So the working order is: confirm your build actually offers a DSU/motion-client setting (its own documentation or settings screen is the authority), then do the BetterJoy half. Pages that print one fixed click-path for “Ryujinx” in 2026 are describing a program that no longer exists in a single canonical form.
FAQ
Is Ryujinx itself coming back?
No. The original project ended in October 2024 by agreement with Nintendo. What continues is community maintenance of its code in forks such as Ryubing — a different thing, run by different people, and worth describing as such.
Do I need BetterJoy for a Pro Controller in Ryubing?
No. Per the Ryujinx README’s own framing, motion is natively supported in most cases; the BetterJoy/DS4Windows requirement is specifically about dual-Joy-Con independent motion.
Does this also apply to Eden?
Eden is a Yuzu-lineage emulator, not a Ryujinx successor, and it is not the subject of Ryujinx’s README statement. Its input handling is its own; see the Eden guide linked above rather than applying this page’s caveat to it.