Game carts boot on sysnand but not emunand

Orangelampshade · Nov 8, 2024

I just set this switch up following a detailed guide using the latest HATS pack and everything seems to work fine except for the fact that it won’t read original game cards. It reads them on sysnand just not emunand. Is there a way around this?

petspeed · Nov 8, 2024

Are you using different firmware versions on emmmc and symmc? That could be the reason
If not check if you enabled nogc either in Atmosphere or Hekate

Orangelampshade · Nov 8, 2024

petspeed said:
Are you using different firmware versions on emmmc and symmc? That could be the reason
If not check if you enabled nogc either in Atmosphere or Hekate

At first I wasn’t but then I updated my emunand to see if it fixed it but the only thing that changed was the error message to “the game card could not be read”. I’ll check what you suggested

thesjaakspoiler · Nov 8, 2024

It depends on how you boot your Switch but there can be 2 places with this setting :
https://rentry.org/DisableNOGC

Orangelampshade · Nov 8, 2024

thesjaakspoiler said:
It depends on how you boot your Switch but there can be 2 places with this setting :
https://rentry.org/DisableNOGC

I think I found it in hekete options. Is it safe to turn off? I’m not sure what it actually does

Edit: ok so I just read that it’s to prevent burning of fuses. Something I’m not familiar with in this context. Are these ‘digital’ fuses? Seems like maybe I should leave it the way it is.

Y3R4X · Nov 8, 2024

Orangelampshade said:
I think I found it in hekete options. Is it safe to turn off? I’m not sure what it actually does

Edit: ok so I just read that it’s to prevent burning of fuses. Something I’m not familiar with in this context. Are these ‘digital’ fuses? Seems like maybe I should leave it the way it is.

They are efuses, and some of them get burned every time you update your console oficially, those prevent your console getting downgraded

Orangelampshade · Nov 9, 2024

Y3R4X said:
They are efuses, and some of them get burned every time you update your console oficially, those prevent your console getting downgraded

Is there a risk of burning them all? what is the harm in playing official cartridges on emunand for it the be prevented by default?

Y3R4X · Nov 10, 2024

Orangelampshade said:
Is there a risk of burning them all? what is the harm in playing official cartridges on emunand for it the be prevented by default?

There's no risk of burning all of them as long as I know, they only get burned when the console updates officially as I said, about the cartridge, I don't know, I only know about the update thing
PS: if you want you can also dump your cartridges, and install them on the offline partition

4d1xlaan · Nov 10, 2024

your fuses are already burned, because game cards have been run on ofw, and fuses are the same between ofw and cfw

so just disable nogc and enjoy

Orangelampshade · Nov 12, 2024

4d1xlaan said:
your fuses are already burned, because game cards have been run on ofw, and fuses are the same between ofw and cfw

so just disable nogc and enjoy

Do you know why nogc it is set to on by default?

4d1xlaan · Nov 12, 2024

Orangelampshade said:
Do you know why nogc it is set to on by default?

because less firmware version fuses are burned compared to your installed firmware version. if you check fuses in hekate, then you probably have fuses below 12.0.2

gamecard fuses are a separate thing from firmware version fuses, though, and those are burned as soon as you use game cards on a high enough firmware version. so because you used game cards in ofw, your game card fuses are already burned, so you can turn off the auto nogc in hekate and not worry about that

the only advantage for nogc is to be able to still run game cards in lower version ofw while having a higher version emunand, this stopped being relevant ages ago though. there is zero reason to keep ofw on a lower version (unless you have a patched erista, but then you're not using ofw for anything anyway)

Orangelampshade · Nov 14, 2024

4d1xlaan said:
because less firmware version fuses are burned compared to your installed firmware version. if you check fuses in hekate, then you probably have fuses below 12.0.2

gamecard fuses are a separate thing from firmware version fuses, though, and those are burned as soon as you use game cards on a high enough firmware version. so because you used game cards in ofw, your game card fuses are already burned, so you can turn off the auto nogc in hekate and not worry about that

the only advantage for nogc is to be able to still run game cards in lower version ofw while having a higher version emunand, this stopped being relevant ages ago though. there is zero reason to keep ofw on a lower version (unless you have a patched erista, but then you're not using ofw for anything anyway)

Ok well that's where it gets tricky for me. I never updated ofw because I hadn't played the switch for years but recently i installed a modchip and set up an emunand which i later updated to 18.0.1. I guess I can update the ofw in theory but it's not really going to serve much purpose apart from what youre describing. I think i need to do a little more research because im struggling to understand the whole fuse thing which means more reading is needed.

4d1xlaan · Nov 14, 2024

there are two types of fuses. gamecard fuses, and regular fuses

game card fuses burn whenever you read a physical cartridge on a newer firmware version that includes a new gamecard reader firmware, this is 4.0.0, 9.0.0, 11.0.0 and 12.0.0; 14.0.0 had a new gamecard reader firmware but did not burn fuses for it, so you can still use gamecards on as low as 12.0.0 fw even if you already read some on a firmware 14.0.0 or higher

regular fuses burn when the official nintendo bootloader loads a firmware version with a higher fuse count than what you currently have, this is bypassed entirely if you only ever use fusée or hekate (yes, even for ofw boot in hekate.) when fuses are burnt, the official bootloader will refuse to run a lower firmware version than what the fuses allow. fusée and hekate ignore this

the nogc check is flawed because it checks for regular fuses instead of gamecard fuses, and because your regular fuses are probably lower than 12.0.0, it trips and blocks game cards from working... even though your game card fuses are already burned anyway and there is nothing to protect. it might not be possible to read game card fuses though which is probably why they rely on regular fuses, I guess it's better to accidentally block game cards for no reason than to accidentally not block them when you might want to

because of this flaw, you might need to disable auto nogc in hekate config, or if using fusée to boot, then you have to specifically set nogc to 0 in the config. otherwise you can fix it by booting higher ofw once using official bootloader, but I don't know if modchip switch can even run official bootloader

the only time fuses ever matter is for ipatched erista on 3.0.0 or lower firmware, because you want to be able to boot 3.0.0 fw for pegaswitch. for every other situation, you could burn every fuse in advance and it doesnt matter, unofficial bootloaders ignore fuses and they are never checked anywhere else

Orangelampshade · Sunday at 8:03 AM

4d1xlaan said:
there are two types of fuses. gamecard fuses, and regular fuses

game card fuses burn whenever you read a physical cartridge on a newer firmware version that includes a new gamecard reader firmware, this is 4.0.0, 9.0.0, 11.0.0 and 12.0.0; 14.0.0 had a new gamecard reader firmware but did not burn fuses for it, so you can still use gamecards on as low as 12.0.0 fw even if you already read some on a firmware 14.0.0 or higher

regular fuses burn when the official nintendo bootloader loads a firmware version with a higher fuse count than what you currently have, this is bypassed entirely if you only ever use fusée or hekate (yes, even for ofw boot in hekate.) when fuses are burnt, the official bootloader will refuse to run a lower firmware version than what the fuses allow. fusée and hekate ignore this

the nogc check is flawed because it checks for regular fuses instead of gamecard fuses, and because your regular fuses are probably lower than 12.0.0, it trips and blocks game cards from working... even though your game card fuses are already burned anyway and there is nothing to protect. it might not be possible to read game card fuses though which is probably why they rely on regular fuses, I guess it's better to accidentally block game cards for no reason than to accidentally not block them when you might want to

because of this flaw, you might need to disable auto nogc in hekate config, or if using fusée to boot, then you have to specifically set nogc to 0 in the config. otherwise you can fix it by booting higher ofw once using official bootloader, but I don't know if modchip switch can even run official bootloader

the only time fuses ever matter is for ipatched erista on 3.0.0 or lower firmware, because you want to be able to boot 3.0.0 fw for pegaswitch. for every other situation, you could burn every fuse in advance and it doesnt matter, unofficial bootloaders ignore fuses and they are never checked anywhere else

Sorry for the late reply, I appreciate you taking the time to explain.

So basically nogc is for people on unpatched 3.0.0 v1s so they don't lose access to a particular exploit? This is something that could be explained in set-up guides lol. I ended up downloading the games i already own physically but at least I know i can turn off nogc in hekate if i need to. My sysnand is on 11.0.1 while emunand is on 18.0.1.

Sorry if you explained this but what is the original purpose of the fuses? Is it anti-piracy? Surely it pre-dates any piracy.

4d1xlaan · Sunday at 8:09 PM

Orangelampshade said:
Sorry for the late reply, I appreciate you taking the time to explain.

So basically nogc is for people on unpatched 3.0.0 v1s so they don't lose access to a particular exploit? This is something that could be explained in set-up guides lol. I ended up downloading the games i already own physically but at least I know i can turn off nogc in hekate if i need to. My sysnand is on 11.0.1 while emunand is on 18.0.1.

Sorry if you explained this but what is the original purpose of the fuses? Is it anti-piracy? Surely it pre-dates any piracy.

no, it doesnt matter even for unpatched erista. gamecard fuses never matter unless you for some reason really want to play game cards on a lower firmware version. but there is never an advantage to running an older firmware version. the only time where running an older firmware version matters is for patched erista using pegascape, but then it's the firmware version fuses that matter. you can burn the gamecard fuses to run physical cartridges on emummc even on patched erista, it doesn't matter because the exploit doesnt use game cards

if anything, burned gamecard fuses is a good thing for patched erista, because it means you can leave a game card in, and you dont risk accidentally running it on ofw and updating from 3.0.0 the next time you (or someone) powers it back on

the purpose of the fuses is to prevent downgrading, because nintendo knows there can be exploits in older firmware versions. so they burn fuses on updates, to prevent being able to downgrade and exploit older vulnerabilities.

on the 3ds and other nintendo consoles there was no downgrade protection, so for instance we were able to downgrade to 2.1.0 to exploit a really old vulnerability at one point, to extract the otp, which allowed installing a9lh to load cfw at almost boot time. this wouldnt be possible with fuses that prevent lower firmware versions from being able to boot in the first place

Orangelampshade · 2024-11-25T03:41:51+0000

4d1xlaan said:
no, it doesnt matter even for unpatched erista. gamecard fuses never matter unless you for some reason really want to play game cards on a lower firmware version. but there is never an advantage to running an older firmware version. the only time where running an older firmware version matters is for patched erista using pegascape, but then it's the firmware version fuses that matter. you can burn the gamecard fuses to run physical cartridges on emummc even on patched erista, it doesn't matter because the exploit doesnt use game cards

if anything, burned gamecard fuses is a good thing for patched erista, because it means you can leave a game card in, and you dont risk accidentally running it on ofw and updating from 3.0.0 the next time you (or someone) powers it back on

the purpose of the fuses is to prevent downgrading, because nintendo knows there can be exploits in older firmware versions. so they burn fuses on updates, to prevent being able to downgrade and exploit older vulnerabilities.

on the 3ds and other nintendo consoles there was no downgrade protection, so for instance we were able to downgrade to 2.1.0 to exploit a really old vulnerability at one point, to extract the otp, which allowed installing a9lh to load cfw at almost boot time. this wouldnt be possible with fuses that prevent lower firmware versions from being able to boot in the first place

Sorry, I meant to say patched. But yeah I get what you're saying thanks for explaining it in detail.

4d1xlaan · 2024-11-25T22:36:29+0000

Orangelampshade said:
Sorry, I meant to say patched. But yeah I get what you're saying thanks for explaining it in detail.

yeah I meant patched too lol

Game carts boot on sysnand but not emunand

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