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Welcome to the first issue of Switch Weekly! In this column we plan to bring you all the Scene news that you may have missed over the week in a quick, easy-to-digest format. In this issue we have:

• Nintendo Direct - Delays and Leaks
  
• The 6.0 Update Story
  
• 6.0 CFW Support
  
• SX Update Diarrhea
• 6.0 Semi-Bricks Right Joycon
• OpenGL Comes To Switch
• New Homebrew Roundup

Nintendo Direct

The Nintendo Direct scheduled for 6pm ET on the 6th September was delayed indefinitely due to a tragic earthquake. However, does that stop us getting any news? Nope! Several announcements, presumably intended to be announced in the Direct, have slipped through very quietly.

• 'Switch' listed as a console at the end of the official Final Fantasy 15 Pocket Edition trailer on YouTube. Reported here.
• Mega Man 11 trailer and demo are both available now.
• Civilisation 6's November 16 arrival on Switch was announced on the 7th September, but the page disappeared shortly after. The WayBack Machine is having difficulties finding the snapshot, but luckily multiple news sites picked up on the page that only existed for four hours and the slip didn't go unnoticed.
• The title of the new Yoshi game for Switch was accidentally revealed.

The 6.0 Update Story

A new 6.0 update was downloaded from Nintendo's CDN servers by an independent dev called roothorick, and datamined by a number of developers. It hasn't been officially launched yet.

On the 27th August Hexkys reported on Twitter that a developer friend of his confirmed that the 6.0 update was being uploaded to the servers. Then, on the 31st, he made the first public announcement of the results of the datamining.

A friend of mine who's a registered developer warned me that it got uploaded to the developer CDN. It has been in beta for quite a while now.

— Mike Heskin (@hexkyz) August 28, 2018

As you've probably seen already, the CDN "leaked" 6.0.0 a couple days ago and we were able to start tearing it apart.
It seems people are confused over some of the publicly shared details on the update, so I'll try to give a more technical view about it in this thread.

— Mike Heskin (@hexkyz) August 31, 2018

For the more concise version you can read the initial report that appeared on Reddit or our coverage here.

CFW Support For 6.0

Along with this update announcement came a flurry of activity amongst the scene's various CFW developers, who wanted to get their packs ready for the impending firmware update (which is still not live at time of writing).

• First came Atmosphere - half an hour before the Reddit post.
• Then, three days later came the beginning of the embarrassing suite of SX releases.
• Lastly, we have the release of ReiNX 1.6 two days after the SX dribble is over.
• No sign of support for RajNX yet.

6.0.0 isnt even out yet so whats the rush

SX OS Update Diarrhea

TX was incredibly eager to be on the early-6.0-support bandwagon. Too eager, as it turns out. Despite having several days between Atmosphere's 6.0 update and their own update for testing, they failed to notice two critical bugs present in Atmosphere's code. These were even kindly fixed for them before their 1.7 update went live, but the fix was not included. One of these bugs caused webapplets to crash (e.g. eShop, News) and the other caused corruption of exFAT SD cards, which meant systems with the exFAT update would not boot.

The next day the team released the 1.8 update to address the exFAT issue, but the webapplet crashing problem remained. It then took two days for 1.9 to hit in order to mop up the remaining problems ("now with more 6.0 support!"). To hopefully signal the end of this saga, one actual feature was included, live updating of their software from homebrew.

No one really knows what to make of their version numbering system (or lack thereof) - perhaps none of them have a professional developer background, or they just like to march to the beat of their own drum.

6.0 Semi-Bricks Right Joycon

According to balika011 on Twitter, running RCM and connecting your right joycon causes it to temporarily brick. He goes on to suggest how to fix it if it happens to you.

If you are running 6.0.0 on your switch and it detects rcm it semi-bricks your right joycon.

— balika011 (@_balika011_) September 5, 2018

Discussion thread here.

OpenGL Available To Homebrew Developers

While OpenGL has been supported for game devs since before the console's launch, it has eluded homebrew developers. On the 2nd of September, fincs made a tweet showing off glxgears running on Switch, a classic OpenGL demo program, as well as a home-made spinning lenny.

( ͡° ͜ʖ ͡°)( ͡° ͜ʖ ͡°)( ͡° ͜ʖ ͡°)( ͡° ͜ʖ ͡°)( ͡° ͜ʖ ͡°)( ͡° ͜ʖ ͡°)( ͡° ͜ʖ ͡°)( ͡° ͜ʖ ͡°)( ͡° ͜ʖ ͡°)( ͡° ͜ʖ ͡°)( ͡° ͜ʖ ͡°)( ͡° ͜ʖ ͡°)( ͡° ͜ʖ ͡°)( ͡° ͜ʖ ͡°)( ͡° ͜ʖ ͡°)( ͡° ͜ʖ ͡°)( ͡° ͜ʖ ͡°)( ͡° ͜ʖ ͡°)( ͡° ͜ʖ ͡°)( ͡° ͜ʖ ͡°)( ͡° ͜ʖ ͡°)( ͡° ͜ʖ ͡°)( ͡° ͜ʖ ͡°)( ͡° ͜ʖ ͡°)( ͡° ͜ʖ ͡°) pic.twitter.com/CY8x0uicur

— fincs🐈 (@fincsdev) September 2, 2018

{{ ( ͡° ͜ʖ ͡°) }} pic.twitter.com/N2y6xnnqEO

— fincs🐈 (@fincsdev) September 3, 2018

OpenGL allows for hardware rendering, which could mean better and faster emulators in future. The CPU would no longer need to emulate the console instructions while also running the game, as the GPU can take some of the load. More beautiful homebrew with 3D graphics could also result from this.

Discussion thread here.

New Homebrew Roundup

This will be a regular segment where I showcase some interesting new homebrew to appear during the week. This issue will cover a period of a little more than a week, since it is our first issue. Tip-offs for future issues gratefully accepted!

ReiNX Toolkit: First homebrew to allow NAND dumps from within homebrew (as opposed to from RCM), comes with a couple of other interesting features.


2Planes: This is a multiplayer game that can be played over the local network. You are a plane and you have to try to kill your opponent with four weapons to choose from over two maps. Has a sweet 90s feel.


Minesweeper NX: The game everyone knows and loves (until they get a 50/50 choice and choose poorly on the last 5 squares in hard mode...).


Flappy NX: A port of the browser-based Floppy Bird, itself a port of the hit mobile phone app, it brings back that perfect blend of addiction and utter frustration to your Nintendo Switch console.


PlayerNX: The first video player for the Switch! Still a WIP, but impressive nonetheless.


NXQuake2: A port of a port, helping this classic game slowly conquer every system one at a time.


NESalizer: This NES emulator promises to improve on LaiNES with easier-to-understand code, and better compatibility.

SphiNX emulator: A wild emulator appears! SphiNX is a surprise new emulator for Windows being developed by one person. No source code available yet, so it will be interesting to see where this project goes.

TTFN

This wraps up our issue for this week. Please tune in next week to see what's new! If you know of anything interesting that didn't get mentioned here, or know of any new homebrew recently released, please feel free to message me (Quantumcat) or post a reply to this thread. Thank you to everyone who helped me answering questions, particularly @AveSatanas and @Draxzelex

 

[Der_Blockbuster]

Cool summary

 

[slaphappygamer]

This will be a great read each week that I can enjoy my coffee with. This is much needed with how fire the scene has been. Thank you!

 

[Draxzelex]

Nice, I made the end credits.

 

[leon315]

• First came Atmosphere - half an hour before the Reddit post.

• Then, three days later came the beginning of the embarrassing suite of SX releases.

SciresM should really do close source to prevent those shameless thieves to steal his job

 

[matpower]

A great summary but I don't think this deserves its own series, it fits better in the already ongoing "This Week in Gaming", after all, there isn't any major news on the scene (arguably the only major thing was some CFW updates) and anything worthwhile gets front paged anyway.

 

[Vieela]

Massive thumbs up for this idea. It's really genius, specially for the people that really don't know where to search when it comes to overall homebrew-related stuff. Thanks for this!

 

[Reploid]

Something tells me author has prejudice against SX.As unprofessional as journalist, like SX are in making CFWs.

 

[SecureBoot]

Ah sweet! I've been wishing for something similar to this. The scene is moving so fast, it's hard to keep up

 

[Sonic Angel Knight]

Next person to bait me with a firmware update is getting a well written angry letter.

 

[Frexxos]

I love this format! Please keep going on. Sometimes I miss a lot of news even when I look everyday on gbatemp. I really love this. Thanks

 

[The Real Jdbye]

I've been saying all along that it's a bad idea to permanently mod the joycon/rail because they can detect it so easily and that's exactly what they did. But I didn't expect the semibricked JoyCons, that's a nice touch.
It does nothing for all the people that are using AutoRCM though.

 

[Deleted member 399513]

This will be really useful in the future, and especially now that the scene is starting to take off.

 

[SirNapkin1334]

Amazing! Cats do write good articles! <3

Might I ask, who did the newspaper art?

 

[Hells Malice]

Seems somewhat redundant when all of the key important points were (or still are) already covered on the front page, games aside.

Where's my Lemmings? That's all I want from this (homebrew) world.

 

[Slimmmmmm]

I think this is a great idea for many people who don't have time to scroll through the site.
It might not suit everyone, but for those it does suit then it is fantastic and I hope it continues for many more weeks to come

 

[KingAsix]

I've just gotten into Switch homebrew as I just realized it was possible on my Switch so this was extremely informative. Thank you!

 

[Xandrid]

Pretty nice

 

[Costello]

loved the article especially the homebrew round up. It’s incredible to see how fast the scene is going!

 

[fatherjack]

Seems to just be an SX OS rant wrapped in stuff we already know about within the switch forum section