Hello guys, this is my first post here! I just got a MIG Switch card out of curiosity and I was tinkering with it. For those who don't know, it's used by placing XCI dumps as well as other game specific bin files in the sd card of the MIG Switch, and are obtained from the original cartridge by using an app like nxdumptool. Two of these bin files are mandatory to get the game to boot: Initial Data.bin and Certificate.bin. They stay the same for every cartridge of a specific game. Now, if you want to use an XCI dump from a shady website it's impossible to get it to work without those files. By using the Certificate.bin from another game it has no problem, but this does not count for the Initial Data.bin. So I looked for a way to obtain this Initial Data from an XCI file and read a bit of the XCI file documentation from switchbrew dot org. Here's what I understood so far: The Switch checks if the cartridge is valid by doing a challenge–response authentication on the Initial Data. The Package ID is contained both on the XCI and the Initial Data, on positions 0x110 and 0x0 respectively. The Initial Data hash is on the XCI at position 0x160. It is calculated by doing a SHA-256 hash on the full Initial Data content. So I was wondering, is there a way to to construct a functional Initial Data file starting from an XCI dump? I also tried a reverse approach by editing the Package ID in the Initial Data from another game, generating the Initial Data hash and putting it in the XCI file but is not enough to get the Switch believe it's a real game. Sorry if this may seem stupid but let me know what you think.

duckstation for Switch

catlover007 · 2024-04-22T04:06:40+00:00

duckstation is an excellent Playstation 1 emulator by Stenzek. It has a very good compabiility and it is quite performant. It also supports all kinds of enhancements such as high resolution rendering and PGXP which can lessen the "wobble" and...

Hacking Question Restoring Nand Question

Thread starter timmystar04
Start date Jul 27, 2018
Views 857
Replies 1

timmystar04

Active Member

Newcomer

Level 3

Jul 27, 2018

Hey just wondering if a restore my nand does it get rid of any games i've downloaded or any saves i have

wurstpistole

GBAtemp MVP

Member

Level 16

Jul 27, 2018

timmystar04 said:
Hey just wondering if a restore my nand does it get rid of any games i've downloaded or any saves i have

It'll reset everything to the point where you made that NAND backup, including savegames.
If games are installed on SD, they won't disappear.
If you only backed up GPT partitions and not the full raw NAND, and then only restore those partitions, I assume it would keep the USER partition and thus everything on it.
Won't work tho if there's a system update in between, I think. Guess best would be to either make regular NAND backups, or what would probably be way faster, regularly backup important savegames with Checkpoint. It backups on your SD card. Just have to do it manually. And then make new NAND backups after big system updates that raise version numbers respectively burn fuses.