The Cemu team recently gave the emulation community a bit of a heads-up on when the next update for the emulator will be released. It’s actually a lot sooner than you might be expecting: February 2nd, 2017. That’s next week.

The news came courtesy of a post over on the GBA Temp forum from user NiagA, a Brazilian programmer working in the emulation scene.

According to NiagA, the 1.7.1 update features frame-rate improvements by approximately 94%. This means that games that were running under the Wii U’s par, such as Pikman 3, Mario Kart 8 and Wind Waker HD are now running at higher frames per second on lower end hardware. You can get up to 45fps in Mario Kart 8 on an i7 2.4GHz with a GTX 6xx and 8GB of RAM.

This is all thanks to a PowerPC recompiler to increase CPU emulation read speeds that helps improve caching and cycles over time.

The new update will also feature VRAM usage reduction and higher compatibility for some games, a feature that people have been asking for dearly. NiagA writes…

“Internally, we made some progress by improving support for some rarely used Cafe OS features. Based on early tests, it looks like QUBE is now working, Don’t Starve Giant Edition almost goes ingame and Devil’s Third goes up to the intro screen. Since there is still development time left, we hope to get at least 1-2 more games booting.”

The Cemu team is making vast progress in a very short amount of time. A lot of this is thanks to the strong community support and dedication given to them by gamers who really want to see the Wii U emulator made feature-complete.

Many people don’t just offer support and positive vibes on the forums, though. The Cemu team is receiving actual financial aid for their endeavors thanks to the Cemu Patreon.

Those who donate at least $5 a month will gain early access to the latest Cemu emulator build, one week ahead of the general public. So, for those of you putting $5 into their coffers, you only have to wait until next week on February 2nd to get your hands on the latest build of Cemu 1.7.1.