Hacking Android OS on Switch Ultimate Discussion Thread

[TR_mahmutpek]

Rethinked that and we need this. I have decent budget phone but some graphical games like Asphalt 9 crushing it :/ And guess what, Nintendo switch has most powerful ARM based SoC! Android on Nintendo Switch will be beast!

 

[MeowMeowMeow]

Rethinked that and we need this. I have decent budget phone but some graphical games like Asphalt 9 crushing it :/ And guess what, Nintendo switch has most powerful ARM based SoC! Android on Nintendo Switch will be beast!

Android games

 

[Radius4]

The switch is not that powerful.
It would have been what one could consider powerful if it had released with that SoC in 2015.

 

[M7L7NK7]

Imagine stuff like San Andreas on the Switch

 

[guily6669]

Rethinked that and we need this. I have decent budget phone but some graphical games like Asphalt 9 crushing it :/ And guess what, Nintendo switch has most powerful ARM based SoC! Android on Nintendo Switch will be beast!

It's still a fairly powerful device but not the most powerful, smartphones are ahead on everything specially CPU performance and energy efficiency from more modern designs lower manufacturing process, more cores and way more clocks.

 

[Thetoto]

Just try to install ANBOX in Linux

 

[lordelan]

Just try to install ANBOX in Linux

I wouldn't even call ANBOX beta. There's not befinit yet in ANBOX.

 

[Brandon Golway]

The switch is not that powerful.
It would have been what one could consider powerful if it had released with that SoC in 2015.

The Tegra 3 is a pretty powerful graphics chip, it may not have the best CPU but it has a beastly GPU, much better than Adreno/Mali.

The switch would be great to play Android games on because I hat the touch controls.

 

[guily6669]

The Tegra 3 is a pretty powerful graphics chip, it may not have the best CPU but it has a beastly GPU, much better than Adreno/Mali.

The switch would be great to play Android games on because I hat the touch controls.

No it's not...

Tegra 3 is totally useless and dead... It's even less than half of the Vita performance... In theory probably 30x times slower than the Switch or even more lol with its mere 10 to 12.5 GFLOPS.

Tegra only actually got a big step up on the K1, however nowadays other devices are more in the range of ~500, 600 GFLOPS which in theory is around like a AMD entry level GPU from laptops like in 2013 or 2014...

(This is all theorically speaking, not real world performance...).

And Switch with its X1 clocks reduced specially portable will probably be close to tegra K1 performance on the Nvidia Shield tablet, some newer games don't run much good already in it, but switch has advantages of having a 64bit CPU, more cores but then again clocks reduced a lot so it will probably not be much better than the old CPU at its highest clocks.

Finally switch has more ram too which helps a lot Vs the Nvidia Shield tablet.

However we would have to OC the Switch Tegra a lot if you want to come closer to modern high end devices but at a big cost of heat and a HUGE power consumption compared to latest ~500 Gflops or higher SOC GPUs inside.

 

[Deleted-351540]

The switch would be great to play Android games on because I hat the touch controls.

I own a Moto Z phone that has Moto Mods. I also own the Moto Gamepad. Not many games support gamepads in Android. Most of the emulators do, but it is depressing how many apps and games don't support this feature.

 

[guily6669]

However Nvidia shield tablet's android already has built in controller mapping to the screen and setup can easily be opened by just pressing like Xbox home button in case it's a 360 controller if I remember well.

If your device doesn't bring it you can always install apps 4 that, but I don't know is if they will ever work as good as Nvidia built in mapping software on their tablet, but I have no idea if Nvidia Shield TV with the tegra X1 also have that software or not as I don't own 1 and neither I care 4 it as it's so lame and underpowered 4 something to be even considered as a home console only when it's far below Xbox One which is already a crap by default .

 

[kirbymaster101]

Isnt the switch basically an Nvidia Shield with nintendo's custom OS in it? I dont see why not someone will port Android to this device someday in the future

 

[guily6669]

Kind of, but this things are never straight forward as we always think.

Xbox original 4 example was very PC like but we didn't even had a Xbox emulator working on PC 4 so many years while we could totally play PS2 emulated...

Also on current gen PS4\Xone I also thought maybe it could help in someone being able to decrypt a game and maybe find a way to run it on windows but probably will never happen .

I really hope at least they can bring android to the Switch.

 

[TheCyberQuake]

Isnt the switch basically an Nvidia Shield with nintendo's custom OS in it? I dont see why not someone will port Android to this device someday in the future

It isn't as simple as "it has the same cpu so android should be easily ported". There is other hardware at play in the system that makes it not just a easy port over. It's like saying the ps4 and Xbox one use x86 cpus so they should be able to play each other's games and play those games on pc too. There's much more to a system than the cpu.

 

[guily6669]

Yep, in case of the PC 4 example its based on BIOS or UEFI to then boot windows which is different than Xone\PS4, I don't know exactly how is switch case vs android with the bootloader and crap as I'm not a dev but it sure will have its big differences and the added custom nintendo hardware will require custom drivers too.

But its always possible and I'm sure someone out there could do it, now from that to actually someone losing all their free time into it is a very different thing

ps: But I always have faith that someone could make a fully custom android rom\kernell with everything working on the Switch at full performance..... some day .

 

[WiikeyHacker]

Two words, Hell no!

Ok the switch os does suck being limited to just only black and white backgrounds and there's no virtual console but adding a mobile phones os sounds a little weird considering it kind of running something like that already. So adding it wouldn't really make much sence seeing as the os it has functions like that already.

 

[anhminh]

But I want play my shitty gacha game on Switch, no sarcasm.

 

[WiikeyHacker]

just be careful then and don't let nintnedo's ban hammer get you.

 

[guily6669]

Switch OS does nothing... Android has its millions of apps, games, browsing, multimedia.

And if you could dual boot between both would be double kill turning switch into a still fairly decent tablet and a true gaming console at the same time.

Tablets are still ridiculously expensive here where you pay around 200eur for a old crap quad core with almost no GPU power and Nvidia never upgraded their Nvidia shield tablet to Tegra X1 or anything at all.

 

[NoNAND]

NO AND NO AND STILL NO!!!

 

[Deleted User]

Some dev already told me today that android is been ported to the switch and that the touch screen is already working