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Updated
Switch Weekly Issue 1
- 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.
— Mike Heskin (@hexkyz) August 31, 2018
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.
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.
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.
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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
Last edited by Quantumcat,
