this post was submitted on 17 Jan 2024
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Ugh... yeah... guess it's cheaper than chipping it. I do wonder how quickly the big N will ban people all using the same game ID.
Instantly if you try playing online.
Maybe if you use the widely circulated ones.
I can imagine plenty of people will start(have been) dumping rental carts from ie. the library.
If those dumps loaded onto the mig are indistinguishable from the original and Nintendo starts banning those, they risk banning a lot of other legitimate players who also rented and played on those carts.
Correct me if I'm wrong, but it didn't use to be an issue to Nintendo because you had to install the xci and that was detectable. Now you can run the game off the cart directly.
The MIG uses its own IDs from what I understand, and if they're invalid (randomly generated) or used by others (not random and used by other MIG users) Nintendo will know, autodetect, and ban you
Ah okay so I guess the mig can't spoof ids. Then in any case it's probably only a matter of time the console gets banned if it ever reaches the internet, which is worse than modding because now you have no way of updating the firmware for future games.
I do wonder if they'll check if you have played a game via the MIG offline then go online later with a legit game, I don't think they do currently but with the existence of the MIG I am certain Nintendo will make that happen with an update.
To be fair, once your console gets banned you can get the firm upgrades pretty much freely from the Archives and won't have to ever worry about any kind of "desync" that could Alert the Mothership.
How would you install the firmware that you obtained from the Archives tho? Remember that the console for all intents and purposes is unmodded so Daybreak is not an option.
Unlike previous handheld generations, system firmwares are no longer embedded into the game carts either so while a game can require a newer firmware, it does not come with an option to update offline afaik
Fair point. To be also fair I'd consider that anyone who is considering still mainlining a Switch in 202X and would be any interested in a flashcart, it would be because their system is already modded.
I might be remembering wrong but I've found formware upgrades in carts such as FE3H and New Pokémon Snap. It's not like they're that heavy, so they can easily be added as payload to the cart.
Interesting point. Although quite the contrary, I'd think the flashcart mostly interests switch owners who didn't mod their console for whatever reason. Eg. OLED owners, cost of modchip install, lack of access to reputable installers, risk of physical damages, voiding warranty, hassle of juggling cfw updates, etc.
I'm not sure what you mean by mainlining a switch means, but I'm a fairly new switch owner myself(late 2022). I bought the OLED at a discount not knowing the high costs associated with modding specifically the OLED model. (At the time it was upwards of $300CAD for modchip and install, and there were plenty of horror stories of how finicky it was) Had a flashcart been available at the time, I'd buy that in a heartbeat instead.
For people who didn't mod and already own a library of games, a flashcart would've still been a cheap and good opportunity for people to discover new games they otherwise have missed or wouldn't have bought either way.
I haven't been able to find any resources online that suggest firmware is embedded onto the game carts at all. What you may have confused with is GAME UPDATES, which can be present on carts. The issue with your suggestion is two-fold:
By injecting a payload to the cart, you have to modify the game rom(xci) and thus invalidate the NCA signature. It is my educated guess(with no proof admittedly) that this is the reason that the switch failed to launch games when they tried to add updates and DLC onto the MIG. (OP's video mentioned this in an update).
Even if point one wasn't the case, the console does not know what to do with the firmware because there's no mechanism to update from an offline source to the best of my knowledge. Even the Switch's own maintenance mode requires internet connection to download a new firmware.
That mmight be because currently the SEO space for "nintendo switch cart firmware" searches seems to be globbed by mentions to the flashcart project, depending on where / how do you search. Currently it eats up the first page and a half for me, even on DDG.
I have the physical carts that prove it. It's how I got my Switch in Pegascape to upgrade firmware safely in the first place. It was also critical to getting some very early upgrades (3.x) going. Perhaps they're just not doing it anylonger for newer fws?
A few sources on the existence of such carts include various threads at gbatemp, gamefaqs, and the ChoiDujourNX FAQ. What I don't know is if the upgrade is part of the game cart data or if it's partitioned sepaately.
I think you're right about SEO cluttering up searches with flash cart and also probably search engines becoming crappier in general. Everything I encountered so far has been telling me "no" and I had to look really hard to start finding traces of updating through game carts as far back as around 2019.
That said, the general consensus nowadays is still "no" since I guess they stopped doing it for newer firmwares as you suggested.
In any case we'll find out in due time as people start getting their hands on the flash cart and see how the cat and mouse plays out.
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It does? That explains why in the video the person was able to play incomplete dumps after some tweaking. I know that on their website they recommend you create a full backup that includes multiple cartridge-specific identifiers if you want to use "online mode". From my limited outsider perspective I'd always assumed these were required to be present for the Switch to even recognize something was in the slot, as the slot uses a seperate circuit and chip to ensure validity before passing it through to the Switch. I never thought of the possibility of them including a (currently) valid ID for you!
Unless the developers have managed to obtain an official private key from some publisher in order to digitally sign their certificates, this thing really isn't gonna survive long, is it? Nintendo could ban the cert (or, if it's bogus, enforce stricter verification) and/or flag everyone using it (maybe even retroactively?). Why would they even make it have an identifier in the first place, since they already want you to provide your own and all it does is give Nintendo something to ban?
Sorry for my rambling by the way