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Comment by lastgeniusua | Hacker News Reader

I'm not sure the Mig Switch will allow you to play homebrew, it is designed to replicate the (apparently reverse-engineered) security protocol of game cards signed by Nintendo. The Github repos you've seen previously are probably your best bet, they're designed for homebrew development, but to launch these you'd need to mod your Switch: with an unpatched original model (could easily be verified on https://ismyswitchpatched.com/) it's as easy as connecting two pins with a paperclip and injecting a USB payload with your PC, with patched later models this requires a modchip soldered onto the board.

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Even with that though, home-brew games are almost nonexistent on the Switch, or extremely minimal. Having the ability to launch a game with a modded Switch, doesn't mean you have access to the SDK, or the documentation. Without those things, you really can't write any useful programs. It's like gaining access to the cockpit of a plane, and having no manual or labels on what all the buttons do.

If you truly want to develop a Switch game, you need the SDK, and dev hardware is basically necessary as well. That's only coming from a deal with Nintendo.

You can run full ubuntu on it, so I guess people don't see much need for "homebrew". You can just run any game that compiles for arm linux on it.

> Having the ability to launch a game with a modded Switch, doesn't mean you have access to the SDK, or the documentation.

The very same websites and forums and Discord servers where the people who come up with jailbreaks for the Switch hang out, can also point you to leaked copies of SDKs, and ways to use these with a jailbroken switch and/or an emulator like Yuzu. (After all, while most published console homebrew — including jailbreaks — use ground-up rewrites of support libraries, it's a lot easier to tinker on Proof-of-Concepts for exploit chains using the official SDK.)

> and dev hardware is basically necessary as well. That's only coming from a deal with Nintendo.

Funny enough, you can find all sorts of dev hardware for old consoles on eBay... and yes, that's despite all such kits being closed-lifecycle systems that are supposed to be returned to the OEM when no longer used. (I think the main way these make it out into the market, is through the company that owns them going bankrupt and getting its assets liquidated.)

Modern console devkits don't boot unless they have an Internet connection through the manufacturer's VPN, so buying devkits on eBay is useless now. They started doing this with the Xbox One.

The reason why they did this is because of leakers. The Xbox 360's devkits connected to a separate Xbox Live network called PartnerNet, and anyone who wanted to test Xbox Live functionality - e.g. buying games or DLC - needed to actually upload their game to PartnerNet. This meant that everyone with a devkit got full access to a lot of prerelease games.

There were rings of people with devkits leaking games for gamer clout. The way they got access to the hardware was interesting. Microsoft actually didn't let liquidators touch the consoles[0], but they still needed to dispose of them. The electronics recyclers Microsoft hired didn't do a good job of this, so there was a cottage industry of people taking debug fused CPUs off destroyed motherboards and swapping them onto retail boards. This would give you something identical to a low-spec devkit that lets you run unsigned code and connect to PartnerNet, but doesn't have any of the crazier debug capabilities useful for development.

[0] Notably, the state of Rhode Island tried liquidating the devkits of the Kingdoms of Amalur developers and got stopped by Microsoft

Interesting! Has anyone gone to the effort to jailbreak the devkits + reimplement open versions of any network services the devkit depends on?

No, you're better off jailbreaking retail units.

That being said, most retail jailbreaks also let you jailbreak development consoles anyway. Development and retail hardware is very close to one another, they differ purely in what debug interfaces are available and what DRM gets enforced.

> Even with that though, home-brew games are almost nonexistent on the Switch, or extremely minimal.

One major reason for that is that Nintendo aggressively permabans Switch devices that appear to be modded, preventing them from ever being used online.

This usually won’t happen if you don’t pirate anything, cheat or do anything that looks like either of those, but there’s always a risk

It's just a worse Steam Deck at that point.

Homebrew exists on other consoles with this like the PS4 or PS3. There are zero online games worth playing on switch.

devkitPro (libnx) has a complete OpenGL implementation with solid SDL2 port. I have ported my game engine to it with ease. There are even homebrew Godot ports for Switch that have been going on for years now. There's absolutely no trouble with writing proper homebrew for the Switch, no deals with Nintendo necessary.

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