Wow cool! Do you think it’s possible to port classic Mac games to modern MacOS now (thinking Dark Castle, Ancient Art of War at Sea)?

I just assumed that a jailbreak would be inevitable sooner or later, with full game ROM dumps including DLCs becoming available sooner or later as well, and that's good enough. I can enjoy the handful of games or upcoming games I care about on the system now, use the benefits of digital game codes over physical carts (I really don't miss having to actually swap a physical cart into the system or carry a bunch around with me if I want to play more than one game at a time; I've made one exception for Star Fox whose cart just lives in the system now), and in 10 years I'll be able to go back and play whatever even if my device is dead or the account somehow got locked out of its purchases.

“All games are essentially rentals” applies the least to Switch 2 among consoles.

Among all gaming platforms, it’s only behind DRM free storefronts like itch.io and GOG.

Unlike PS5 or XBOX, not all switch 2 games require downloads or day 1 patches.

I built a little harness for an x86 SBC for Claude to do osdev a few months ago.

Janky setup with two ESPs for the serial terminal and to control a servo taped to some microswitches to power cycle the board.

It worked very well, allowing Claude to spend all day and night debugging quirks with the NIC until it was able to get the driver working.

So, I think giving your IoT device some "hands" is probably worth it. For SD card automation, you can find "wireless SD cards" on Amazon/AliExpress that have a microcontroller pretending to be sd card, eg FYSETC SD-Wifi.

> I just thought it was more time efficient to do it manually rather than spend days trying to figure out how to automate SD card pull/plug

Heres the thing. You only have to build the automation once. While it will only take you seconds at most to pull a card, you gotta sit around and be ready for the card to be pulled.

For your problem I see 2 quick things that came to minq very quickly that could do SD card pulling for you.

1) shove a level shifter in between the SD card and device under test and have a micro enable/disable the level shifter when you want to pull/unpull. ( you can even get multiplexer IC that will do the same thing as the level shifter as acting as a switch for the SD card lines, but would allow you to connect the SD card to a 2nd device (the testing pc) to allow you to write/read data from the card when its "pulled" from the DUT.

2) 3D print a jig that will insert/remove the SD card and use a cheap RC servo to handle the movement - again using a mirco to control the servo. gives a more real world test of pulling the SD card. but only gives the the ability to pull/insert. Still required manual effort if you need to read/write to the SD card

Once you have build the jig, you can reuse the jig on the next project, so while it will take some time to do/setup it could save you time later down the road.

Edit: As for the code driving the ICs or Servo, I'm presuming you already know embedded programing, but even so, a simple Arduino sketch will be able to handle it for you, fuck ton of example code already exists for it, and can be easily controlled over USB.

For an extremely temporary setup for a push-push card slot, you can maybe just put the device on an Ender-3 and poke it with the cold nozzle. Bed flex can become a problem if it's heavy.

There is hardware available for SD card automation; see the USB-SD-Mux by Linux Automation GmbH / Pengutronix. https://linux-automation.com/en/products/usb-sd-mux-fast.htm...

Sounds interesting!

So far most of my automation has been optical (tweaking display output to show correctly under a lens with odd optical characteristics, hard to simulate computationally), so pointing cameras at the device and letting the LLM iterate and tune display output has been useful.

As with any automation, it all depends on scale. Setting up a harness to repeatedly mess with microSD cards seems way more prone to failure (and false positives) than just doing it yourself, but if you're testing thousands of devices, would probably be worthwhile.

Automation wins, every single time.

The Switch 1 sold about 150m units, the Steam Deck’s sold 6m.

Internet nerds like us aren’t really Nintendo’s target market, I don’t think. Installing emulators or jailbreaking a system isn’t something most of their customer base would have the want or need to do, IMO.

Very unlikely to happen via emulation, there's Switch 1 games that the Steam Deck struggles to run already.

What about putting Steam on your Switch 2?

Totally, convenience always wins. I think this is more of a hardware sales issue for Nintendo though — if what I understand is true, I'd bet that we see Switch 2 games running on other systems before we see a CFW/decrypt-encrypt stack for running pirated games on the Switch 2 itself.

Would people still go to such lengths if Nintendo just released their games for the hardware people actually have, like the SteamDeck & PC ?

Still seems rather self-enflicted pain for Intendo due to still pushing locked-down consoles in 2026.

I would buy a Switch if it were an open, hackable platform that I owned. If Nintendo put all of its games in stores on open platforms DRM-free, I buy and would own nearly every Nintendo title ever released.

Alas. Having a pleasant and moral game-playing experience falls on our and the community's shoulders.

I have no desire to buy Nintendo's hardware as I don't want to play their games badly enough to buy a dedicated console and deal with their practices. I have however enjoyed the last two Zelda titles on my PC where I was able to play them with performance and quality mods. Once it was just another application the barrier of entry was low enough to get my interest. If the games were available as actual PC titles I would have gladly paid for them

Emulation was getting to be a pretty big problem by the end of the Switch's life. People would get a hold of a game, dump it, and get it running in emulators prior to the game's release date. IIRC Super Mario Bros Wonder leaked around a week early, and Zelda Tears of the Kingdom leaked around two weeks early. Obviously you can't quantify how much of an impact this had on game sales because time travel doesn't exist, but I imagine that there's some impact on sales when a highly anticipated game is playable for free prior to its launch date.

Besides the issue of games leaking early, piracy groups would also use Switch emulation as a workaround for the PC version of a multiplatform game having Denuvo DRM. They would make an installer that bundled the Switch version of a game with a preconfigured emulator, so people could run the game by double-clicking an icon without having any knowledge of how to set up a Switch emulator. This isn't really relevant anymore because of hypervisor cracks making it far easier to bypass Denuvo, but I think it demonstrates how widespread Switch piracy was.

I agree that this won't have any sort of major impact on Nintendo's bottom line, but I imagine it'll have some impact. I doubt this will lead Nintendo to change their exclusivity policies. They didn't change anything when the GBA was emulated during its commercial life, when DS piracy was rampant during its commercial life, when Wii piracy was rampant during its commercial life, when 3DS piracy was rampant during its commercial life, or when the Switch was emulated during its commercial life.

"You can't stop the signal, Mal."

I actually love watching this from a distance. It's very OG cyberpunk.

They have successfully deplatformed emulator projects from the larger project hosting providers like Github. But they have not stopped them. The real emulator projects have just circled the wagons and started self-hosting their build and dist infrastructure, running independent Forgejo instances, etc. There's still more churn in the community because of the risk profile, and now because of LLMs. But it's settling down and there are a couple stable Switch 1 projects. And actually, their recent DMCA carpet bombing removed a lot of the unsafe forks of emulators on places like Github. Likely leading to more people being directed to the real ones.

It's not impossible to navigate, original Switch has a lively "homebrew community".

DroidDeck (https://github.com/The412Banner/DroidDeck, and things like GameNative) have been huge for Android. Compatibility is fantastic, and you can run most games >3 years old at respectable frame rates on Snapdragon 8 Gen 3 handhelds.

I'm sure if this leads to a full CFW environment people will port it over.

Ah, you're right! Depends on their generosity, but I'd imagine piracy and running exclusives on non-Nintendo hardware is more of a risk to their business than a bootROM exploit.

Who gets the bounty money in that case? By the looks of the article, Codex did all of the work actually finding a bug. Shouldn't the money go to OpenAI?

Having the codebase for newer models is a key for approvals.

I don't know. I feel like the blog reads as very human written and enjoyable overall. Also what's 2 weeks of real work (in tandem with an agent) compared to a few hours for the blog?

this was clearly human written

please point me to an LLM that can write like that without extensive handholding

I wonder if the SD Express will be taken advantage of in the switch 2 homebrew scene which seems inevitable now.

SD Express is PCIe express after all (also a possible attack vector in itself, see DaMAgeCard). With nvidia drivers for Ampere already on board maybe someone will get an RTX 3090 running on a switch 2.

yes at least with GKC I immediately know that game is not playable offline instead of needing to go to https://www.doesitplay.org and hope that someone already documented the game I am looking at, which is the case with PS5

- You can't download the game without internet, including re-downloading because you had to free up space

- You can't download the game after they have retired their servers (or if their servers are down / having issues)

- The game ends up taking a lot more storage space as updates are usually tiny when compared to the base game. For reference, the Switch 1 version of Zelda Tears Of the Kingdom takes 16 GB while the latest update takes only 500 MB.

I think the point is that X years from now, when the servers are turned off, you don’t actually have the game.

I do agree, in the world of day one patches its not a given having the full, actually playable game on the cart itself isn't a given. We're already largely at the point where game discs and carts are really just license keys, this is just saving some money on the storage.

But it sure was nice when you had the whole game sitting there, without having to rely on some download server still being around. I'm able to go grab a used GameBoy game off the shelf at the used game store, stick it in an old GameBoy, and outside of some games with batteries in them (repairable fwiw) it just works. This has been great for my little kids, as I trust them a lot more with a cheap GBA SP than I do the Switch when going out places. Way more pocketable, way less fragile, and the replacement cost (and repairability) is a lot better.

If I grabbed an old Switch off the shelf in 30 years, popped in a game key card, would I actually be able to play anything? Probably not. There's a good chance most of this Switch 2 will be useless in 30 years time.

It's 7K charectors, and on the free demo version of the game, you can't save.

Teeny tiny teledildonics

I wonder if this would be a reason to sue in the EU ? IIRC you can even replace the firmware without voiding the warranty, unless the manufacturer can prove the firmware cause the issue.

Here I guess you could just RMA the device or even sue Nintendo for retaliating after you just used the device you bought ?

IIRC the current approach makes your switch dual boot the unmodified firmware and the custom firmware with online capabilities disabled, so you could still play online and avoid bans.

But I wouldn’t trust that with an expensive account-bound digital library.

my bad, skipped the top and was looking at the bottom.

I'm confused. So you just completely pirate all your games?

I did not know that.

The first 3DS exploit required Cubic Ninja, a terrible game that sold poorly and was instantly $80+ once it was revealed.