Nintendo Switch Emulator: Progress Report December 2023 | Hacker News Reader

Nintendo Switch Emulator: Progress Report December 2023

blog.ryujinx.org

194 pointsthepbone109 comments

> Fashion Designer, a game which we’re sure will be topping Game of the Year charts across the globe, was exhibiting a particularly strange glitch.

The tone in which this blog post is written is very entertaining while being informative. Thank you to the Ryujinx team, and all emulation projects for that matter, for their work in game preservation!

I have absolutely no idea how emulator development is but I always wondered how specific bugs like these are fixed; is it just adding an if statement specific to this game or are these just general bugs that get fixed and could just as well also fix something undiscovered in other games as well?

This is (I believe) the PR that fixed this specific issue: https://github.com/Ryujinx/Ryujinx/pull/5933

In short, no - from my understanding, it does actually fix the underlying issue, rather than special-casing the game. I wouldn't be surprised if there are a few edge cases like that which are special-cased, particularly for older games (when "abuse" of CPU/GPU quirks was more common to eke out extra performance).

The answer is both. Devs will first try to fix it by correctly emulating the system behavior because like you said, that can also fix other games and because that is the right thing to do. There are occasions where doing that can result in a huge performance penalty or some other underised behavior so they just resort to hacks in the emulator or straight up patching the game.

Also, at least in the Dolphin emulator for the Gamecube/Wii, they only use game-specific hacks as a last resort. They learned from a lot of older emulator projects that game-specific hacks pile up on each other and eventually make the code an unmaintainable mess.

> They learned from a lot of older emulator projects

They learned from themselves after doing just that for many years. Lately they have been working hard to get rid of game specific overrides.

They still have a gazillion tho, see here: https://github.com/dolphin-emu/dolphin/tree/master/Data/Sys/...

This is one of the differences between the bsnes/higan family of SNES emulators and the previous generation (ZSNES/snes9x/etc). bsnes/higan and emulators derived from them managed to emulate the SNES more accurately (which required more processing power), and this allowed having fewer game-specific hacks.

Emulation benefits hugely from increases to processing power over time.

Both, depending on the specific issue and the emulation technique.

There’s a slew of different approaches to emulation, such as bytecode interpretation (you read the ROM on the fly and try to “do the intended thing” using platform native APIs), bytecode translation (you convert the ROM into platform native code), hardware emulation (you simulate the original chips directly, and the ROMs “just work”), and more. In many cases all those techniques are used together for different parts of the system (such as emulating a CPU vs a GPU). Depending on what the issue is, how well the hardware is documented (you may even hit an undocumented hardware bug!), and how difficult it is to create a general-purpose fix for your particular approach to emulation, or how computational expensive it is to emulate correct behavior, you may choose to add a workaround.

Some emulation projects put more emphasis on 100% correct emulation than others. Console emulators tend to be biased towards performance.

> Depending on what the issue is, how well the hardware is documented (you may even hit an undocumented hardware bug!)

What's fun is, particularly with older games and hardware, it wasn't uncommon for devs to use hardware bugs to their advantage. DK64 is notoriously hard to emulate because of that.

Can you elaborate on DK64? AFAIK it shipped with a memory leak that was known to the deva but could not be fixed in time for Christmas season 199x. This bug lead to a OOM crash in less than two hours or something so it was decided to require and ship it with the Expansion Pack with 8MB (?) RAM instead of the default jumper pack with half as much. I

That turned out to not be true, FYI:

https://www.reddit.com/r/n64/comments/t2owki/psa_dk64s_expan...

Interesting that Ryujinx is written in C# - I'm not sure why, but at first thought I'd have expected something like a console emulator (where one would have to do "unusual" memory / GPU operations to fully match the quirks of the platform) to be written in C or C++, like Dolphin or PCSX2 (Wii / PS2 emulators) are. Though clearly they can make C# work well for it, and the benefits of working in a managed language are probably worth it.

It originally had a very unique approach, it would JIT the emulated instructions into .NET bytecode and then let the .NET runtime JIT that into native code. At some point they switched over to their own bespoke JIT-to-native engine for more control though.

I'm also using the dynamic code-loading to get free JIT in other projects and quite a few features of .NET relies on that, there are limitations (and for something as dynamic as an emulator I'm not at all surprised that they hit a brick wall at some point).

Another benefit of C# is that they continually add features to make the language less susceptible to GC stalls. Compared to Java you have Value types, real generics, ref and out arguments, Span<T> types, stackalloc allocations, unsafe blocks and so on. You can get quite far without allocating anything on the heap and the ergonomics won't be that much worse than even C++ when doing so.

C# has an unsafe mode if you need it. I've written some low level hardware twiddling code in C# before. It can also be very fast.

https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/dotnet/csharp/language-ref...

It's probably not super important with the switch like it would be with the nintendo 64 or something because it's an ARM cpu.

The YoY performance improvements after going .NET Core 1.1/2.1 up until current .NET 8 have been very significant which allows C# to be the language of choice for writing systems-like performance-sensitive code.

It also had quite a rich unsafe API since .NET Framework days which has since then been complimented by safer alternatives which offer similar or better performance namely Span<T>s and then lately struct optimizations which are helped by the fact that C# generics with struct arguments == Rust generics with struct arguments (aka the ones which are not Box<dyn Trait>).

As a long term emulator aficionado, I'm really proud of Ryujinx. Initially, Yuzu was much further ahead but Ryujinx really stuck with it and I'd say they're both solid now. I switched to Ryujinx full time last year on my Steam Deck and love it!

Thanks Ryujinx team!

> I switched to Ryujinx full time last year on my Steam Deck and love it!

To play retail games you purchased, right? ;)

Honestly, I don't know how Nintendo survives as an independent console maker in the years to come. They ceded the traditional home console, and now everyone is making portables. Valve's portable can play the entire retail Nintendo line for "free".

Valve gets the benefit of piracy to help lift sales of their system, too.

> Honestly, I don't know how Nintendo survives as an independent console maker in the years to come. They ceded the traditional home console, and now everyone is making portables. Valve's portable can play the entire retail Nintendo line for "free".

I think you overestimate the willing of most people to play on emulators.

Or to pirate games in general. 99% of the Steam library is trivial to pirate but that's doing just fine.

The Switch is on its last legs anyway, and the successor will reset jailbreaking/emulation progress back to zero.

the hits that were released for the previous one however will still be pirated.

> The Switch is on its last legs anyway, and the successor will reset jailbreaking/emulation progress back to zero.

Jailbreaking yes, but emulation? I wouldn't be so certain, it's still the fundamentally same, mainstream CPU/GPU family just with more beef.

The most pressing challenge is getting game cartridges to a point where they can be decrypted.

I suppose, but as you say jailbreaking is a prerequisite to emulation since we need to extract the games, and possibly the firmware. In the absence of a "god mode" hardware exploit like the Tegra X1 bootrom bug that's also a moving target because newer games will need newer firmware to decrypt, requiring a steady supply of new exploits to keep breaking open those new firmwares.

> the successor will reset jailbreaking/emulation progress back to zero.

It is possible, but in the past Nintendo didn't reset.

Wii-U, 3DS and Switch share some parts in common still.

You can't emulate 3DS on the Steam Deck, apparently it's either not powerful enough or 3DS emulators don't work well with AMD drivers. The games are too slow, I tried it with Link Between Worlds.

I expect the next Switch to be powerful enough to make emulation difficult, but we'll see.

> You can't emulate 3DS on the Steam Deck

Its's just less work has been put into 3DS emulation atm, nothing else.

Some of the 3DS citra emu devs went off to focus on Yuzu iirc, but lately citra is more active again.

> 99% of the Steam library is trivial to pirate but that's doing just fine.

I think part of it is that Steam offers more than just games; it's a platform for mods, you have friends, there's the Steam community, early access Steam games, Steam cloud, etc.

I think you're right that most people just don't even bother with the effort to pirate stuff in general, though. When I've been asked to, I've shown family members multiple times how to pirate media using a torrent client, but they end up forgetting and don't bother to do it by themselves.

especially at normal speed, if that's what we're doing I'll just play it on the switch.

When I'm able to significantly speed the game up, then I'll consider emulating it.

The problem is that I often play games like RPG's that like to make you sit and wait on load screens and animations, speeding it up allows me to experience the game in far less time.

> I don't know how Nintendo survives as an independent console maker in the years to come

Given that emulators usually take years after a console’s release to be generally reliable, the obvious answer is doing what console makers have always done: releasing a new console every few years.

Usually more than a few years, the Switch was a perfect storm in that it was fully jailbroken very early thanks to the Tegra bootrom exploit, used commodity hardware which was already reasonably well documented, and was slow enough relative to modern hardware for the emulation overhead to be manageable. By contrast Playstation 4 emulation is barely at the proof-of-concept stage a decade after launch, and years into the lifecycle of its successor.

Let's also remember something else: Console DRM is actually, finally, becoming strong enough to be unbreakable.

The PS5 has never had a public exploit. The PS4 was broken, but only on certain firmwares.

The Xbox One has not been cracked in 12 years. And no, the lack of exclusives or the addition of Dev Mode is only a small part of the reason.

The Switch OS (Horizon) is a microkernel, and according to people who have observed it, extremely secure. It's more intrinsically secure than the Xbox and PlayStation OSs. NVIDIA screwed up - not Nintendo. SciresM (an Atmosphere developer) has publicly stated that he believes the Switch 2 will have no useful software exploits, ever. Even on the current Switch, we've not had any kernel or useful software exploits in the last five years.

PS5 has a public exploit althought it is on older firmware (<4.51 IIRC). Check one of the videos on "Modded Warfare" YT Channel. He backed up the disc version of Ghost of Tsushima. The exploit itself is well documented, but method of backing up and running games is still primitive.

> The PS5 has never had a public exploit. The PS4 was broken, but only on certain firmwares.

It's also notable that these firmware exploits never drop out of the blue anymore either, since the console manufacturers started doing bug bounty programs (up to $50k in Sony's case) they always get advance warning when someone does find an exploit and it's fixed before anyone knows about it, by which point most people have already updated to a fixed firmware and it's too late for them to jailbreak.

This also helps for when an exploit is found, like say the issue with Firmware 4.51 and lower.

It's super easy to fix then - cook up a new DRM and encryption scheme (or modify the current one) that, without access to the internals, is impossible to figure out. Doesn't take much - probably just a generic encryption key that gets swapped out. Then, roll that out in an OS update. Finally, make new games use that encryption scheme and thus that firmware level.

Sure, games that run on 4.51 or lower are cracked. New ones? Uncrackable, until a new jailbreak is found.

> Sure, games that run on 4.51 or lower are cracked. New ones? Uncrackable, until a new jailbreak is found.

The PS4 scene is full of downgrade patches. Many games targeting 10.x for example didnt make use of newer syscalls and it was discovered how to patch the game for 9.0 (the 9.0 firmware has a jailbreak).

FWIW, there's a path to downgrade PS4 to the previous firmware, see https://wololo.net/2022/12/06/it-is-apparently-possible-to-r...

> [...] The PS4 was broken, but only on certain firmwares.

For the curious: the PS4 does have a few emulators available[0], but they appear to be at a very experimental stage.

[0]: emulation.gametechwiki.com/index.php/PlayStation_4_emulators

You can play backup games on a hacked PS5 now. If your PS5 is running an firmware released before March 23, 2022 then you can play backed up games. That means it took roughly 3 years from release to fully hack the PS5. It took a little over a year to be able to run hacked games on the Switch but that was a special circumstance due to the NVIDIA bootrom vulnerability.

> By contrast Playstation 4 emulation is barely at the proof-of-concept stage a decade after launch, and years into the lifecycle of its successor.

This is unrelated to being jailbroken. PS4 was jailbroken in october 2015.

https://old.reddit.com/r/ps4homebrew/wiki/scene_history

Nintendo will continue to do well in the years to come, regardless of the progress of emulation. Normal people don't care about emulation or the Steam Deck. The Switch and the next iteration will continue to offer a just works experience which is what most people want. Nobody wants to be dealing with graphical/performance issues, pirating games etc. They just want to buy a game and play it.

As someone with a partner who just likes to buy games and play the Steam Deck is definitely competition for the switch. She does realize that it is a full computer now because I exist but she has never actually entered "desktop mode" herself. She would have been perfectly happy just living in the Steam interface. Already it has a bunch of benefits:

1. Lots of games were sitting available and she just picked up and played them. She already owned them but didn't play much because she plays "on the go" more than at home.

2. Lots of games release earlier for PC than Switch (and she ended up buying many games multiple times to start playing when friends were but then again to play on the go).

3. Lots of Switch games lack cross-play so she would switch to PC for playing with friends.

4. For some games she does prefer to play on her desktop so save game syncing is really nice.

5. More games are available for PC than Switch.

6. Having a web browser handy is convenient, even if rarely used.

Then I messed around with desktop mode to make some non-Steam apps and games available which is another nice plus. But even without this she prefers the Steam Deck over the Switch.

I think there are still lots of people who would prefer the Switch, especially for the first-party exclusive titles. But I don't think you should just dismiss the Steam Deck. It may still be a bit niche but people are definitely caring about it. Even those who just want to play games.

I own a Steam Deck. It's a fairly glitchy experience, especially on a TV. With constant micro problems like "the steam deck won't restart when plugged into my Sony TV, physically unplugging the USB C cord is necessary".

There's lots of fun issues like "Yes the Steam Deck supports Switch Pro Controller, but enable gyro controls and it will make a grinding sound when gyro is used" and "gyro controls work fine in handheld mode, but try them in Half Life 2 with a PS5 or Switch Pro Controller and the movement will be choppy and janky even though that game was supposedly updated for Steam Deck."

There's also fun, more serious issues like a documented "Steam Deck crashes and reports low battery, refusing to even boot up for more than a few minutes if you have poor wifi signal" which necessitated getting a wifi booster.

I also just got soft locked in Portal 2 due to a bug, requiring me to restart the chapter, my save was unbeatable as the elevator to go to the next level wouldn't operate, and I googled this error and it's also present in the Switch port of Portal 2. I guess Valve is too poorly staffed to patch a 13 year old game breaking bug.

Valve seems to only finish their products to about 90% to 95%.

> The Switch and the next iteration will continue to offer a just works experience which is what most people want.

you say that like there weren't a ton of problems with the switch when it released. Reports of overheating, joycon random disconnects, joycon drift, and dock scratches were enough to make me skip over the system at launch and hold off for the next (hopefully XL) version. Now that it's been so long without an XL version, and the drift and overheating are still an issue (it's unclear how big a problem the scratches are now) I'm really considering just getting the steam deck instead. In terms of performance it looks like the steam deck has the switch beat.

> But it really is stark to play these two devices and see the Steam Deck handily run all but the most taxing modern games at 60 frames per second (or better), while the Switch can't reliably play Batman: Arkham Knight, a game designed for last-gen consoles that released in 2015. (https://mashable.com/article/nintendo-switch-oled-vs-steam-d...)

I agree that most people don't want to bother with downloading roms and playing with settings, but I don't think you can call the switch a "just works experience" either.

Getting roms that you don't extract from your own console is actually relatively dangerous. Nintendo is second only to Disney in trademark and copyright enforcement. They monitor torrents through a few different services. Trying to pirate Nintendo stuff through the most obvious sites/protocols will get you a scary DMCA letter from your ISP. That's enough to dissuade most people. There are, of course, ways around that tracking, and sites which can't/aren't monitored. But, it does raise the bar of effort required which keeps most casual pirates safely on Nintendo's shores.

EDIT: To add, piracy is a service problem, not a price problem. Free doesn't mean ubiquitous.

> Honestly, I don't know how Nintendo survives as an independent console maker in the years to come

By doing the same thing they've been doing for the last 40 years. Keep innovating on cheaper, older tech rather than relying on pushing out the most FLOPS to sell the next generation of hardware, and keep producing a consistent supply of solid first party games.

Something else they've excelled at with the Switch are the indy games. Xbox really should have dominated the indy scene, especially with their subscription service IMO, but their licensing must be garbage compared to the Switch. Or maybe it's just that a lot of indy titles are targeting ARM already? Indy games sell really well on the switch compared to Steam (at least that used to be the case, I'm not really up to date).

One other thing that I think really helps the Switch is mobile gaming. Gaming on your phone / iPad is basically horrible due to predatory monetization schemes. As a parent, I would much prefer my kids play games on a Switch than a phone or tablet. Apple sort of addressed this with "Arcade", but the library doesn't even compare to the Switch.

Indy games, like all third-party games, go to the console that has the users. That's why it's important for a system to hit critical mass of good games to attract users and get a flywheel started. IMO that's why it's great for Nintendo to only have a single system. Much easier to hit critical mass of exclusive games if they don't have to make games for a handheld and a home console. The Wii also had decent support of indie games despite it being so different from other systems because it sold like hot cakes

The Nintendo 64 was very advanced for its time.

UltraHLE was a very advanced emulator for its time (played Mario64 and more in January 1999).

TBH, its only been 20 years that Nintendo has focused on cheap hardware.

SNES was more powerful than Genesis, N64 arguably more powerful than PS1/Saturn but lacking CDs (and thus unable to rely on prerendered FMVs that defined that generation), and Gamecube more powerful than Dreamcast/PS2 (Xbox wins, but was unexpected new entrant)

Nintendo definelty pushed graphics advancements as key selling points back then.

The Wii is when they stopped competing on graphics, and switched to innovating in other areas (motion controls, 3D, connected tablet, hybrid gaming, etc).

I won't be defending Nintendo because their issue with joy-stick drifting, their unwillingness to fix their design flaw, and their constant efforts to stop video game preservation really pisses me off.

But emulators are hit or miss, specially if you aren't tech-savvy enough to fix specific problems, and depends on the people's preferences:

- they need to install and configure an emulator, which isn't fool proof

- go through the hoops of downloading ROMs from sometimes sketchy sources

- configuring each game to work well

- self troubleshooting any issues they might have with some games

- not wanting to play their games online (which in Nintendo's case the online experience is truly lacking)

- not have any moral issues with piracy for games that are currently selling in both physical and digital format and are widely available

Nintendo's Switch is due for a very necessary upgrade, but the console is still widely available, very convenient with minimal setup and troubleshooting, and very plug and play. With the added benefit that you get to support developers to continue making the games.

Yeah, I definitely like emulators because I don't have to have a library of consoles beneath the TV and some features such as rendering at higher resolutions and savestates + save management in general are great. But they aren't a seamless experience (especially for newer hardware) and I wouldn't expect the majority of people to prefer it compared to the original hardware.

> I won't be defending Nintendo because their issue with joy-stick drifting, their unwillingness to fix their design flaw, and their constant efforts to stop video game preservation really pisses me off.

I think this criticism is a little misguided.

1. Joy-con drifting doesn't happen much with newer Joy-cons. Nintendo also repairs all Joy-cons for free now - even ones that aren't drifting. Break a button? Damage the rubber top of the Joy-con? They fix those free too, and even pay all shipping costs. We might as well bring up the Xbox Red Ring incident, or the PS5 having melting USB ports.

2. "Their unwillingness to fix their design flaw" - as already stated, it already has been mostly fixed through subtle changes. Sure, there's no big announcement of a specific revision that has no issues, but that would be begging for a class-action lawsuit (the reason why companies can never admit guilt publicly - or they've already lost). Also, if they were to announce that "revision X has no issues," and then it developed issues eventually like all non-Hall sticks do, another lawsuit.

3. "constant efforts to stop video game preservation" - You've surely never seen Sony or Microsoft's efforts then. They are more subtle and skilled, but don't think for a second they don't have the same goals. I actually think Microsoft is the most insidious character; for making consoles that cannot be set up without internet, combined with "backwards compatibility" for "preservation" that also does not work without internet.

> I actually think Microsoft is the most insidious character;

Towards game preservation? Microsoft is basically a patron saint. For starters, the concept of an "Xbox exclusive" barely exists. Most console titles Microsoft publishes release day-and-date on PC, where DirectX is entirely reverse-engineered and doesn't rely on Windows. The Xbox itself is the only console among the companies you mentioned where you can install an emulator without hacking the OS or red-teaming the OEM.

> combined with "backwards compatibility" for "preservation" that also does not work without internet.

That's because the Xbox does not contain redundant backwards-compatible hardware. It provides high-level emulation for older titles, which doesn't work unless you can download the mods. It's a bit like complaining that FPS Boost doesn't work without internet to download the update from.

> Honestly, I don't know how Nintendo survives

Cause they never lower the price on their first part games lol

Nintendo caters to a casual crowd, just the right type of people to not want to faff about with setting up emulators and pulling games on hip new systems. Non-techie people like to e.g. not have to troubleshoot crashes at the boss cutscene 2/3 the way into the game (as an example of the issues BOTW Wii U emulation had for a long time after release) or understand shader stutters and options to work around them.

I think the other part of it is we're ~7 years into the console's life and it uses a ~9 year old chip that was weak at release. Their next console seems imminent and how many years of "emulation doesn't even work anyways and if it did you'd need to do it on a beefy computer" will that give again?

I mean the switch has outsold the PS5. Your entire conjecture is wrong that they ceded the home console market.

https://www.vgchartz.com/article/456387/ps5-vs-switch-sales-...

Switch games have also outsold PS5 and XBox games 4 out of the last 5 years.

https://www.statista.com/statistics/276768/global-unit-sales...

Nintendo is also profitable in a way the other 2 console manufacturers can only dream of.

What a weird comparison. The Switch released 3 or 4 years before the PS5. It's not surprising at all that it has outsold it.

It's outsold every home console currently available and also all the consoles from the previous generation, which is pretty surprising for something which "ceded the traditional home console" and which, when not in a handheld configuration, looks and plays very much like a traditional console.

On the handheld question, Valve hasn't released numbers, but a Nov 2023 quote put Steam Deck sales at "multiple millions", so probably at the lower end of between 1 and 10. By contrast the Switch has sold 132 million units. That's somewhere between 1 and 2 orders of magnitude difference. It doesn't make much sense to make comparisons between them. I'm sure piracy of Nintendo games is far more common on PCs and laptops.

Nintendo has been "dying" for decades -- just like Apple.

The Steam Deck is powerful, but it can't currently emulate a large number of Switch games at full speed (including killer apps like Tears of the Kingdom)

As much as I don't like their style of only releasing their games for first-party hardware (and reselling them on every new generation) I have to admit that Nintendo makes some great games. Most of the Super Mario games, Smash, Mario Kart and others are fantastic. On top of that the Switch has seen a plethora of content including many smaller or indie studio games being available. From a purely pick-up-and-play perspective I can see why the Switch is popular.

Not good enough to make me buy their hardware (I very much like PC gaming and hardware that isn't locked down) but I definitely consider it.

Although now that the Steam Deck and it's competitors are out I wouldn't be surprised if that changes. There are still some benefits of the Switch but having fairly direct competitors will surely hurt. Even though I am not a mobile gamer I am really happy to see more competition in this market. (My partner is in the market. She liked her Switch a lot but when it was time to upgrade she decided to go for the Steam Deck and really loves it. Especially since she ended up buying many games on PC and Switch and was frustrated by lack of ability to sync saves and often lack of cross-play.)

I can’t plug the Steam Deck into my TV, pop in a cartridge, and start playing with four players on excellent controllers, all with almost zero screwing-about. And have that all keep working for years with no intervention on my part.

And my kids can operate a switch, easily.

(I do own both a steam deck and a switch—I can’t let my kids use the deck at all because of some of the games I have on it, with no ability to hide them, even if their account can’t play them; overall the Deck is more a toy for the at-least-slightly tech-“literate”, I’d say. I do like it, in fact, but it’s not a switch replacement, at all)

That is a loto f hand waving there.

The controllers on the switch are outright terrible, they all get the damn drift. The design of the controllers, while, small, are improperly shaped for small hands. The impossibility to tell which controller button to press due to having no letters on the left stick (the only one that fits small hands). Then, the fact that changing controller order can put the switch in a state where only putting it to sleep allows to go back to the home and fix the order.

The thing the Switch has are extremely easy games, which is indeed good for young children. And some couch coop, which is great for brothers.

But the whole "change cartridge" is not helpful, children lose them (as they did with one of mine) and I had to withdraw access to those, since it's 50$ each. They now have to ask.

For the steam deck, set family view, parental controls and you CAN hide any games you want now. If you connect the wireless controllers once to the steam deck (which can be connected to a tv), you are good to go, but you won't have games for them to play until they can properly read (6 or 7).

We are in a limbo where the gaming universe (not the tablet crap) is not properly developed for children yet. lucky the accessibility options are moving things forward, but the reading requirement is really a big blocker.

I don't know why some games are tagged 3+ when the reading age for school is 6 (yes you can read earlier, but 6 is when you should be able to read)

> That is a loto f hand waving there.

Or just a description of my experience with both. Incidentally, the switch pro controllers are excellent, among the best I’ve used, period.

> For the steam deck, set family view, parental controls and you CAN hide any games you want now. If you connect the wireless controllers once to the steam deck (which can be connected to a tv), you are good to go, but you won't have games for them to play until they can properly read (6 or 7).

Oh, that’s great. Last I checked was like November and it was still crickets. All I want to do is hide all the games for one account on it that’s not even any part of our family sharing. Which I’d have thought would be default? It’s a weird choice they made, there. [edit] like, setting aside the hiding-games use case, having games show up in your library, as if they were yours, but that you can’t play without buying them be the default thing that happens is a strange choice.

Can I share with local-only accounts (does the steam deck have such a thing?) or will I need to go through an email address confirmation flow to sign up Stream accounts for each kid? I haven’t done much with this since there was no way to hide games, before, so there was no reason to.

You CAN hide games on account independently of the family sharing now, It's in properties of each game. Of course these games are still accessible in the hidden section, but i don't know where that is.

You do need one account per child, or you let them play on your account. You will need to hide the games on your own account in that case.

I like the Switch Pro too, those are a bit better than xbox one for the small hands. Still enormous, my 3 years old started being able to use it only recently, while the basic switch controller was usable earlier (2 years old).

And yeah, sorry for the tone, I'm frustrated with the switch controller configuration handling. If it wasn't for that I would get less meltdown when mario party messes up the whole configuration

> Honestly, I don't know how Nintendo survives as an independent console maker

Steam Deck: 419 euros, directly needs storage expansion and bad availability

Nintendo Switch: about 280 euros, readily available, plug and play Mario ;)

Also, messing with emulators is something I and lots of people don't want to do when making use of sparse game time. There's always something not quite working right, so experiencing a game on the intended console and not being a freeloader has value to me.

I don't understand why some of you feel like you need to write such obvious lies to defend a product. Deck does not need any expansion and your Switch price won't get you Mario.

> directly needs storage expansion

Huh? The 419€ Deck model comes with 4x more internal storage than the highest end (~330€) Switch model.

I know and have unlocked consoles. I emulated.

I just don't care for it anymore. I have enough money and don't play that many games anymore that i care.

Steam just works, syncs my saves, has mod support.

Switch you buy at the beginning because the price doesn't change. Than i have the console for years. The games i buy physically and either sell it on ebay (when i sell stuff in bulk) or give it to family.

And my extended family knows more or less that i could 'provide' them with every game they want, no one asks me about it. No one cares apparently as a normal consumer either.

> Honestly, I don't know how Nintendo survives as an independent console maker in the years to come

I know past performance doesn't guarantee future results, but I've been reading comments like this since the GameCube was announced, and Nintendo has not gone anywhere. They seem pretty good at understanding that there's a segment of the gaming market which cares about more than speeds and feeds.

Nintendo legal’s treatment of fan projects e.g. AM2R does not afford them the courtesy of my respecting their IP by avoiding pirating their products. They’ve had their chances to play nice.

> Honestly, I don't know how Nintendo survives as an independent console maker in the years to come.

I've been reading variations of this line for 25 years.

First Sega was gonna kill them.

Then Sony was gonna eat them alive.

Then Microsoft was gonna make them look like cavemen.

Then Apple was gonna eat their whole blue ocean lunch.

Survival bias doesn't mean Nintendo won't inevitably collapse -- I fear them getting hostily taken over by a foreign company (Microsoft admitted they considered it as recently as 2017 but decided not to pursue it, mostly for PR reasons[1]).

From every outside indication (interviews, Iwata Asks, etc.) it seems Nintendo's corporate culture is rock solid and they're handling the generational changeovers extremely gracefully compared to most companies (especially gaming companies).

As long as Nintendo's insides don't change too much, they'll likely keep creating first-party entertainment that is compelling enough to support millions of hardware sales.

And they have Pokemon, man.

1. https://www.theverge.com/2023/9/19/23880146/phil-spencer-mic...

I doubt Microsoft would have managed to pull anything off because Japanese nationalism would have very quickly gotten in the way in many forms.

Steam Deck is so niche device compared to whole Switch market. Nintendo survived NDS piracy era with cheap flashcart.

I have never digged into it. Is there a way to export game saves of the switch and import them on Yuzu or Ryujinx?

If you have a hacked/hackable Switch then there are a few utilities for exporting saves. If your Switch isn't hacked then you're out of luck.

Bummer. I have no plan to get rid of the switch as it is a nice portable console but I would totally dig playing Zelda at higher resolution and framerate when the computer is available.

Coming soon! https://migswitch.store/products/mig-switch-dumper-pre-order

I would be... extremely cautious about ordering one. Mainly because Nintendo, without doubt, is ready and waiting to file lawsuits. For devices like this, there is a real possibility of having all customers revealed to Nintendo during the litigation.

Edit: For those who say it isn’t illegal, sure. Dumping ROMs by itself is not illegal (like from an NES or Genesis). Circumventing copy protection, however, is quite possibly illegal. The DMCA in particular has many sections on “circumvention devices.”

Why? They're not illegal to own. It's not clear to me what Nintendo would sue them for

Why would you care? dumping roms is not illegal.

This will not allow you to dump saves from an unhacked switch, it only dumps physical games. All saves are stored on the console's internal memory.

Hi, I'm curious what are the pros/cons of Yuzu and Ryujinx and what motivated you to switch emulators?

As someone who doesn't own a switch, why does the emulator require switch keys to work?

Edit: after searching google I've found there are many sources for such keys.

It’s truly amazing what the team has done with ryujinx. It’s such a masterpiece of software and I‘m excited to see what’s coming

Checking their repo, it's almost fully written in c#. .Net can be this performant now?

If it can be performant depends on the tasks it need to full fill.

The Switch uses the X1. A chip from 2015. The CPU has a clock rate of 1GZ, the GPU 307-768 MHz. [1]

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nintendo_Switch#Technical_spec...

It really always was, the runtime system within .NET always had the capability to run C/C++ code but to get C++ code to talk to C#/VB code with GC-heap objects you had to use language extensions and I think that limited the appeal by a fair bit (Especially as iirc they actually made 2 different extensions), on top of this the C# language has also always had and continually gets new extensions to do non-heap tasks (Compared to Java that has focused on the a clean Java world where everything was on the heap).

Their C# JIT [1] generates x86_64 or ARM native code. This is why it's fast.

1: https://github.com/Ryujinx/Ryujinx/tree/master/src/ARMeilleu...

Check the end of the article for frame rates for different titles.

Preserving gaming history where Nintendon't. All kudos to you!

I love Switch Emulator on SteamDeck! Thank you Ryujinx and Yuzu.

didn't Yuzu copy Ryujinx open source code, and now Ryujinx close sourced some of its code?

My feelings are mixed. Hacking and emulating has been part of the gaming community for decades but isn’t this illegal?

It is 100% legal if you obtain your ROMs legally (i.e. own the game and somehow dump it).

100% legal everywhere in the world, under all circumstances? That’s a very, very bold claim.

And not true - for example, format shifting in the UK is illegal. You can't legally rip a CD, DVD or Bluray here, let alone a console game.

Would be interesting to see a reference for that. I’ve never heard of anyone being pursued for ripping or format-shifting.

https://www.theguardian.com/uk-news/2015/jul/17/high-court-q...

Prosecutions are basically unheard of, but it’s not legal nonetheless.

I have a friend that just purchases the game and then pirates the dump (as it's much easier that way to obtain the dump). That's maybe technically illegal (IANAL), but I don't think anyone should be worrying about violating the letter of a law so long as the spirit of the law isn't being violated.

i've done that, because i just hate playing on the switch compared to the steam deck.

(the switch is lighter, but the deck is much more comfortable for my hands)

Have you looked at Hori Split Pad Pro controllers?

https://www.amazon.com/Nintendo-Switch-Split-Ergonomic-Contr...

not yet! i will take a look at reviews to see if they fit my usage, thanks :)

One has a moral responsibility to disobey unjust laws.

Sounds like prison.

No.

I own a switch and I am excited to be able to continue playing games I bought even if my Switch die. These are pretty fragile machines.

Legal in Switzerland, even with copyrighted games, even if you've never paid for them. Same for music, movies, etc.

But Switzerland is a bit weird in that regard.

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