If this is true decrypted `fs` r/w, I wouldn't be surprised if we start seeing Switch 2 game dumps appear in a few hours. Given the world of recomps/decomps we now live in, that would mean console exclusives playable on arbitrary hardware (a worst-case scenario for Nintendo). We've already seen things like Tears of the Kingdom running at 60fps natively on an iPhone.
Giving LLMs arms and eyes via KVM (or webcam) is a very strong paradigm for this sort of hardware work, as it allows things to be parallelised and run 24/7. Highly recommend people play with this more (to less nefarious ends!) when working on firmware/hardware for external devices.
I work with Claude to port games to DOS and build new Classic Macintosh apps [1][2][3] using real hardware.
For a while I was doing the SDcard swap thing; but realized with a usb4vc[4] (hands), a vga/hdmi usb capture dongle (eyes/ears), an old Wemo switch (on/off/reboot) and ftp/appleshare (files/logs) I could have Claude do it all for me.
Claude made me vcctrl[5] that ties all of it together, including an mcp, skills and a webkvm.
Yup, I've done similar HW in the loop with a variety of things, NanoKVM, Intel AMT, a Wemo switch (heh), USB uarts, and the Epiphan VGA2USB (which I didn't realize only had an old binary linux driver, well, until Claude took care of it: https://github.com/ChickenParts/EpiphanVGA2USB). Def probably buying a USB4VC, I have so many retro machines and this will save having to bodge more things together using pi picos. TBH, I have a whole pile of projects that I've just been sitting on, in various states of completion, and no idea when and what to make public lol.
There are a number of classic mac emulators that will run everything at far better than original speed. Basilisk II / Sheepsaver meets my needs, but there are a lot of options.
I modded my Original Switch but all I do is play retro games on an emulator (retroarch) on it! I look forward to the switch 2 but not for pirating. It is a bit of work though
I'm working on a IoT device at work and have been the "hands in the lab" for my agent this week. It's been a really weird experience. Making changes to the update/recovery process, so I have to validate several permutations of fault injection (i.e.: abrupt power loss during update step X while on starting version Y).
I would love to give it unattended "hands". 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. X and Y are relatively small, and I expect this validation to be too costly to do at a regular cadence in CI. I can trivially use a MCCI USB-C switch for the power though.
Tips would be appreciated if anyone here has thoughts.
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 had some zigbee outlets laying around but wasn't interested in doing the config work to give Claude access to my mqtt broker. I already had most of the kernel written by hand years ago, so PXE etc were irrelevant, the goal was to see how well driver work would go. I was able to send relocatable elf binaries over serial and use the existing modular machinery in my kernel to have it load and run them.
> 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.
To add on to this for the SD card, you can buy an “SD card extender” that has an SD card on one end and a slot on the other, with a cable in between. Something like that might make it physically easier to get in between the signals by modifying the cable. Nice big wires on this one: https://a.co/d/0cPVVsLE
I bet we'll see more KVM-for-X type products appearing, basically multiplexers for various storage devices and peripherals, as ways of giving agents control over them.
> 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.
If you control the bootloader and firmware, or you can talk to the team that does, then look into network filesystems and network booting. The SD card would only exist to bootstrap the system and then everything else happens over the network.
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.
IDK about cheap options to do this, but fancy ones could be:
Keysight has bench power supplies that can be controlled via USB, i did some scripts with python a few years ago to characterize a pcb using the psu and an oscilloscope. The scope charts saved as images. I imagine that an agent could easily run the script to control the PSU and look at the images to debug the board or run characterization tests.
For the SD card pull/plug, maybe a pcb sd card extender that cuts off data or power lines to the SD card driven by a MCU that your agent could control?
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.
It can also just turn into a waste if you build all the automation to turn around and only use it once, recalling https://xkcd.com/1205/
Now that said, the economics have changed in a world where many trivial automations can be thrown together by agents themselves in a fraction of the time it would have taken a human.
Since they're so hell bent on preventing user control of their own devices, perhaps Nintendo should've better reflected the potential economic impact of such a bug in their bounty program and we wouldn't be here.
I suspect if the payout for the bug bounty wasn’t so ridiculously low then maybe this intelligent hacker would have submitted it, got paid and then released it once it was patched.
$50k max seems ludicrously low for a chain of console Zero days.
But then again they may have just released it for the love of the game, but Nintendo will be quick to patch this…
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.
Even some of us internet nerds are Nintendo fans who wouldn't go anywhere near emulating. Apart from any of the moral concerns, it's just such a worse experience: I want to use a touch screen, a portable device, a proper gamepad, etc. Nintendo has built up quite a considerable amount of goodwill since the 1980s, and the reward for that is a pretty loyal customer base.
I love Nintendo and have since the NES was released. Taking a day or 2 to set up an Ayn Thor w/ every game I've ever played from my childhood, the instruction manuals, and whatever other conveniences modern emulation affords really does beat trying to find the old hardware and games at a ridiculous premium. Also buying most all of the old stuff doesn't help Nintendo in any way so the 'morality' goes out the window. The setup IS a bit tedious but once it's done you rarely have to change anything.
I also own a Switch 1 w/ Breath of The Wild but I prefer to emulate it because you can increase the draw distance, get 60 FPS, add some HD textures [1], and fix some other issues that I had with the game because the Switch 1 was such terrible hardware. Even the Switch 2 version isn't nearly as good as the one you can get from emulating.
Opposite for me. I pirated and emulated some switch games that I wouldn't have played on an actual device because I don't like handhelds and I hate playing games at 30 FPS and in low resolution. Any polish and intended experience goes out of the window when I'm constantly distracted by terrible framerate.
I have a Mac and every time I've tried it, it's been fraught with problems. I think it worked once; maybe I'll go back and see if I have more luck now <shrug>
Personally I won’t bother playing any game or console that can’t be emulated these days.
The whole experience just feels so enshitifies from the days when I could just put in a cartridge and boot into a fame in seconds with no internet, updates to manage, accounts to worry about, etc.
Has everyone forgotten the PSP already? When I was at school a lot of kids in my class(including myself) had one, and I don't recall anyone getting any actual games for it, I do remember the clerk at the store explaining to my parents that oh this console is very easy to hack and you can just download games online for it, which is exactly what everyone I knew did.
Which seems to be what everyone did everywhere, as the console sold very very well and the software for it sold poorly.
This is actually the Japanese experience too. Many Japanese ex-kids of PSP generation have the story of the guy from two classes over with a Pandora battery and the firmware stick usually in his school bag. But sound of UMD drives seeking was common too, and discs themselves aren't rare at all, so I think a lot of games did sell in the end?
Where'd you go to school? Bay Area? Those sound like smart kids.
For what it's worth, I also had a cracked PSP. I did the battery pack hack, it was gory and awesome. I'm guessing some of the later iterations got a little simpler? All software?
I wonder what % of kids today are using a modded Switch or rooted Android.
Once you had a modified battery, it was pretty easy to do more PSPs. I was able to purchase the battery later and just carry around the software on a memory card. Sold that as a service for a bit.
So true. It's dangerous to form world views based on "What HN thinks". This is the best community on the Internet IMHO but we're a very tiny slice of the population. "Real people" tend to not behave like us.
I remember as a child many of my friends getting a PS1 specifically because you could chip it and burn games.
Young people love piracy because they have no money to pay
I was one of them. Now I got a good salary I use it to actually buy games. So in a way piracy led me to keep up my game enjoyment into adulthood. Doesn’t make it legal of course but with a delayed effect the games industry is getting their money from me.
More likely to happen via recompilation, if anything. Game ports via recompilation have been taking off in the last month or so, all the way up to systems as recent as the PS5 and Switch 1. It has far less overhead than emulation.
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.
According to wikipedia, they sold over 23 million units of the switch 2 and over 155 million of the switch. Not that I agree with their aggressive practices but it clearly works. That's a lot more than the Steam Deck btw.
have you ever played first party titles on the switch?
the level of polish and stability on the open world zeldas is astonishing, i never experienced anything like that in third party AA/AAA games form the last 15 years or so, playing on the switch or on the pc.
Out of curiosity, have you played God of War (2018) or God of War: Ragnarok (2022)[1]? I find the level of polish/stability of those games to be utterly incredible (almost to the point of ruining many other games for me), but I avoid Nintendo out of principle so I have no basis of comparison. Would love to hear from someone who has experienced both how they compare.
[1]: Given those were originally Playstation exclusives, it might not be the best example/comparison, but they have been available on Steam for quite some time
>Would love to hear from someone who has experienced both how they compare.
I have. In terms of a bug-free experience, nintendo games and the main cinematic sony games (including also last of us 2 and the like) feel equally good.
The surprising thing about open world zeldas is that they allow a lot of physics tinkering. Keeping a story based, relatively on rails game stable is far easier than an open world sandbox. TotK feels like it should be a skyrim-like bug ridden experience but it isn't.
Also nintendo games tend to feel very satisfying, call it good UX if that makes sense. Animations, sounds, they do really know how to produce a sense of wonder.
That said I hate the hardware, I own a switch and yet I play on a steamdeck. The screen's not that good, controls are awkward, the sticks start drifting as soon as you blink...
I’ve played both - I beat God of War 2018 but quit Ragnarok after a couple hours because you’d hit a puzzle and Atreus wouldn’t shut up with hints.
But yes, Nintendo’s polish is definitely on that level, even their weird little Japanese games like Tomadochi Life have an incredibly coherent theme and polish within themselves despite some being incredibly whimsical and goofy. I think part of it is what you get when you have the same devs working for 40 years on say, Mario games. Truly masters of their craft. Super Smash Brothers is a supreme work of social engineering how they managed to convince so many disparate companies and even competitors to allow their IP in the game and everything just fits together so well.
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
You can pay for them if you appreciate the effort that went into making the game. Nothing to stop you buying the Switch cart and playing an emulated version.
I really wanted a Switch 2, but when it became clear that all games were essentially rentals and could be shut down/off at Nintendo’s whim, I decided I couldn’t have one. Perhaps the need to compete with piracy again will make Nintendo more consumer-friendly. Probably not, but one can dream.
Seriously. The Wii, Wii U, DS, and 3DS eShops are still running to redownload your past purchases. The Wii shop is actually 20 years old now! It feels disingenuous to read people bemoan Nintendo for their "license vs ownership" when Nintendo has an extensive history of supporting its online shop customers.
What are you referring to? The Wii and 3DS shops quite famously shut down years ago. Yes there’s hShop now which simulates it and provides every ROM for free, but you can hardly credit Nintendo for that.
Yeah hilariously you can even still use old Wii U exploits which allow you to download games you don’t own directly from the eShop with proper signing and everything despite the shop being shut down lmao
But locking their cards to the hardware preventing a resale market is pretty crumby. I only purchase Switch2 games that are physical, no download codes. Vote with your dollars.
Only if you ignore the hardware aspect. Nintendo treats the Switch 2 as a fleet of machines they control, and reserve the right to shut them down for any reason as they see fit. It's sort of a non-starter (for me), honestly.
Connecting the Switch 2 to the internet to get those updates exposes you to their kill switch. It effectively can't be used except for a few physical launch titles without placing you under the recourse-free banhammer.
Switch 2 actually still has lots of boxed games. Plus, when you buy games on the eShop you can use the virtual game card feature to gift them or lend them to friends after you finish playing. It's the closest experience to having a physical copy out of all the main digital stores.
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.
Recmpilation seems like an incremental advance relative to the high-quality Switch emulation we already have.
Given the continuing success of the Switch 1 even after such emulators existed, I doubt this will pose a serious problem for Nintendo.
Best case scenario, it will lead Nintendo to reevaluate their exclusivity policies, as I'd be willing to bet an official TotK iPhone port would sell very well in spite of a vibe coded alternative.
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.
TOTK requires too many button gymnastics, it won't be playable on an iPhone without a gamepad shell and the iPhone screen is too small. I've played through both BOTW and TOTK to the end.
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?
Aren't Nintendo's lawyers second to none (maybe other than Disney)? Or do we think we're in a situation where the legality of it is moot? My gut is that we will see a response from Nintendo.
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 is one thing to go after a couple emulator teams where expertise is concentrated, that at least is a plausible bottleneck. But open source did open source things so forks appeared and development has continued in various forms. And now with AI the expertise is available to everyone so we are getting into “suing individual Napster users” territory. That is not to say that Nintendo won’t make some examples of people developing jailbreaks or doing recomps but it won’t fundamentally stop it from happening.
I'm working on a custom app for a camera that has a terrible Android app, and I'm working on a similar harness: AI is building both the 3D model and the parts list (basically, a Raspberry Pi, a webcam, and a few servos).
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.
Sorry to be pedantic but it looks like it would have fetched up to $50k, and I have to imagine they would have tried as hard as they could to keep that number as low as possible.
I might be wrong, but you might need need (at least) a 23x23 LED matrix to have a white border around the outside to give it the contrast needed (the "quiet zone", since QR data is black).
This is why my first prototype had a white border around it. The LEDs were red back then, so I don't know exactly what I was thinking, but I was aware of the problem.
For those unaware, misjudging a dose of rapid-acting insulin by even a few units can prove fatal. Can’t fathom expecting a quarter of a unit and getting 100x the amount.
Perplex City was great, thanks so much for all you did on it! Fondly remember the community that built up around solving these. I lucked in to being the first to solve one of the silvers (Differently Lethal), and remember all the efforts to solve this one back in the day.
If this is true decrypted `fs` r/w, I wouldn't be surprised if we start seeing Switch 2 game dumps appear in a few hours. Given the world of recomps/decomps we now live in, that would mean console exclusives playable on arbitrary hardware (a worst-case scenario for Nintendo). We've already seen things like Tears of the Kingdom running at 60fps natively on an iPhone.
Giving LLMs arms and eyes via KVM (or webcam) is a very strong paradigm for this sort of hardware work, as it allows things to be parallelised and run 24/7. Highly recommend people play with this more (to less nefarious ends!) when working on firmware/hardware for external devices.
Worth noting too that this would have easily fetched >$50k via Nintendo's HackerOne (https://hackerone.com/nintendo).
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