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Switch Weekly Issue 2
Welcome to the second issue of Switch Weekly, your bite-sized catchup of Switch scene news! To catch up on the previous week please see here.
This week we have:
- The Nintendo Direct that had been postponed indefinitely
- SX Gear begins production
- Nintendo gets really anti-SX
- Updates on the CDNSP cert scare
- Official OpenGL support for libnx
- EdiZon 1.5.0 released
- New homebrew roundup
Nintendo Direct
We won't focus on game news here, as that has already been covered extensively on this site. Instead, just a few snippets that should be interesting to both homebrew and "Yarrrr" enthusiasts.
Cloud saves are not forever
On Nintendo's UK site in a FAQ answer about Cloud saves, it is implied that save data stored in the Cloud are not kept forever, and are instead deleted when your Nintendo Online membership lapses. Switch users are understandably pretty unhappy about this, and there are hopes there will be a homebrew save manager that can store to the Cloud soon.
Official launch date for firmware 6.0
On the 13th of September Nintendo sent out emails to most of its customers announcing an 18th of September release date for firmware 6.0. This resulted in a flood of new threads on GBAtemp from members who forgot to check for existing threads. Thanks to multiple users who downloaded the files from the CDN and datamined them, we already know what 6.0 has in store for us. Check out the Weekly issue 1 for more detail.
Nintendo Accounts to become unlinkable
In the aforementioned email to Nintendo customers, it was stated that when firmware 6.0 hits, you will no longer be able to unlink Nintendo Accounts from Users, so best to fix up any discrepancies now. What is the difference between the two?
- User = The profile on your Nintendo Switch, that you select to play a game to make sure the right save data is loaded.
- Nintendo Account = The email and password you use to sign in to the Nintendo website, that holds your purchases, Gold Coins, etc.
SX Gear begins shipping
The SX Gear was announced back in August, a little too early to report in last issue. A nice addition, solving the problem of wanting a convenient way to load payloads on the go but not wanting to shell out for an SX OS license that wasn't going to get used (or for SX OS-only users who had a change of heart and wanted a dongle too).
If the fact that they had begun shipping was the only announcement, we would be scratching our heads at the decision to announce it on the front page. However, TX had one nice new feature worth mentioning: quick payload loading. Instead of needing to start up SX and then choose to boot an external payload from the menu, now you can put a special SX Gear boot.dat on your SD card and it will automatically launch anything called payload.bin without needing to navigate through the SX menu.
So far there have been no reports of anyone receiving their SX Gear yet, so we don't know how well they work.
Nintendo gets serious
In the past, on the Wii, Wii U and 3DS, Nintendo's approach to hacking has just been to quietly mitigate the entrypoints it could with firmware updates, masking them with the release notes "Further improvements to overall system stability and other minor adjustments have been made to enhance the user experience". This seems to be changing now.
Official challenge to SX
On the official anti-piracy subdomain ap.nintendo.com, a news release mentioned SX OS and SX Pro. This seems a strange choice, considering they are telling people how to pirate their games in case they didn't already know. Perhaps they believed it was so widely known that it wouldn't hurt, and might scare some people off buying it. Here is what they had to say:
Until now, Nintendo has only let people guess at what anti-piracy measures may be implemented. This often causes panic and wild speculation, and often people try to go legit because they have no idea what punishment Nintendo might inflict. You would expect that announcing the mitigations officially would cut down on this panic, and be against Nintendo's interests. It seems they realised themselves that telling everyone how to pirate their games might go against them - they removed the link to the article on the main page of ap.nintendo.com but forgot to delete the article itself. Way Back Machine caught it before the link was removed, sometime after the 5th September. Here is what the page looks like now:
YouTube videos mentioning SX get copyright strikes
In another inconsistent move, Nintendo has started issuing complaints against any video that mentions SX, whether that be a review or a how-to video. It would make sense that Nintendo doesn't want information about how to pirate being out there easily accessible to the general public. However, if this is the intention, why mention them officially in the anti-piracy news bulletin?
Nintendo is known already for its random copyright strikes against YouTubers. Unfortunately, even videos protected by Fair Use (with commentary or other additions to gameplay footage) get targeted, and there is little that YouTubers can do in response. The bots are so ruthless that they even blocked Nintendo's own PokemonGo video.
Discussion thread about SX YouTube video strikes here.
All bans to be CDN bans from now on
Late August, a rumour started that all bans would be CDN bans from now on, and existing console bans would be elevated to CDN bans. This is because the content that was previously on the atum server was moved to dauth.
- atum: Content that doesn't require any authentication to download, for example game updates and firmware updates
- dauth: Content that requires authentication of your console certificate to download. This includes purchased games.
For more discussion on this topic please see this thread.
CDNSP console cert distributed then not distributed then distributed again
When the official public console cert was CDN banned only two days after issue, the team behind CDNSP Bob GUI announced that they would not be releasing any more public certs, because it was a waste if they would get banned so quickly. They changed their mind the next day and issued a password-secured file with a challenge. The day after that they went back to sharing the file as they used to.
16 days later and that public cert was banned too, so they announced again they would not be sharing public certs anymore. No prizes for guessing what happened the day after that. Yes, they revoked the announcement again and went back to business as usual.
If Nintendo manage to really step up their game and ban certs within a few days of release, the group might really stop publicly providing them - but this hasn't happened just yet.
Official OpenGL support for libnx
We reported last week that fincs showed off OpenGL working in homebrew with the classic OpenGL demo program glxgears and his homemade spinning lenny animation. Libnx now officially supports it, making it simple for any aspiring OpenGL programmer out there to get their stuff onto the Switch. Example programs are available to use as templates.
NXQuake 1 was updated yesterday to support OpenGL - check it out in the New homebrew roundup below.
New Switch group appears
A new Switch group by the name of 2168-0002 has surfaced with their flagship homebrew XciZeroTwo, an XCI installer. Made up mainly of ex-ReiNX developers, they hint that they may have more XCI-related homebrews to come in future.
Homebrew roundup
Generic Mod Manager by @Genwald: Written in Python, this homebrew allows you to activate and deactivate LayeredFS mods and handle conflicting mod files. It looks pretty useful!
100 Boxes NX by @Cid2mizard: A remake of the popular homebrew game 100 Boxes, originally for DS and GBA. The author of this port also previously ported it to 3DS.
Game example by @Dontwait00: A simple game engine that takes place entirely in console mode: no graphics, no sound. Can be used as a base for other homebrew developers to try as their first project.
Horizon nand dumper by @asdfaaasssdddfff: Does exactly the same thing as the NAND dumping function in ReiNX toolkit, except that it is open source. This may lead to it being better in future than the toolkit since anyone can add a pull request and make it better, instead of just ReiNX developers.
NXQuake by @fgsfds: As pointed out by an astute reader, we mentioned NXQuake2 in issue one but neglected to mention that Quake 1 was also ported! It has even been updated to use OpenGL with the new update to libnx.
XciZeroTwo by @EliseZeroTwo: A handy tool that will unpack and install XCI files onto your Switch, just as easily as NSP files.
Edizon 1.5.0 by @WerWolv: Not technically a new release, but worth mentioning. This existing save manager homebrew has received a major update, allowing batch backup and restores, and adds a scroll function, making it easier to navigate.
Au revoir
This wraps up another week of Switch news. As always if you have any tips, know of new homebrew, or know of anything that should be reported on in the next issue please don't hesitate to contact me.
Thanks @daxtsu for the correction!
And thanks @zoogie for the information about the news release link on the ap.nintendo.com main page!
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