Nintendo @lemmy.world realitista @lemmy.world 8mo ago

The Switch Will NEVER be the Same: Nintendo Switch Dumper Review

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101 comments

Just a heads up, please remember to follow all the rules. You can disagree with each other, but no personal attacks or any hate speech.

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tl;dw?
- Nintendo Switch cartridge based games have a file that's unique to each individual cartridge. The dumper and accompanying flash cart make use of that file. If Nintendo detects two people playing while connected to the internet with the "same" cartridge, there's a high chance of them banning both consoles. So any used game anyone buys after this point runs the risk that someone dumped it, maybe an old owner who resold, maybe someone who bought and returned it, etc, which means even a legitimate user who hasn't even heard of the flash cart could get banned. There's also the potential issue of people using the tech in the flash cart once people figure out how to use those chips to sell bootlegged reproduction cartridges that have the same issue
  
  Nintendo Switch cartridge based games have a file that’s unique to each individual cartridge. The dumper and accompanying flash cart make use of that file. If Nintendo detects two people playing while connected to the internet with the “same” cartridge, there’s a high chance of them banning both consoles. So any used game anyone buys after this point runs the risk that someone dumped it, maybe an old owner who resold, maybe someone who bought and returned it, etc, which means even a legitimate user who hasn’t even heard of the flash cart could get banned. There’s also the potential issue of people using the tech in the flash cart once people figure out how to use those chips to sell bootlegged reproduction cartridges that have the same issue
  
  Oh wow, so they've poisoned the used market for Switch games. That's disappointing.
  
  Mmh… I suspect doing this is not legal in Europe as second hand have enforced laws.
  
  Other laws like this (I suspect second hand Steam game licence) have been voted to protect customers from such behavior (in the mindset that customer don’t have to pay for company for having bad protection system).
  
  We will see how Nintendo will react.
  
  Nintendo knows the PR hit for penalizing innocent customers would be pretty bad.
  
  If a card ID is used by only two people I would expect it to be ignored, or if a device ID is only associated with one dupe card I would expect that to be ignored.
  
  It's the devices that use multiple dupe cards or the card IDs that are used by thousands of people that will get banned.
  
  It will be interesting to see where they draw the line but its unlikely that they want too many false positives.
  
  Man, games are having so many hurdles and barriers to jump just to play that I'm on the edge of giving up completely.
  
  People already figured out how to create a programmable version of those chips small enough to fit into a convincing bootleg:
  
  https://youtu.be/qm7y9jlebrA?si=gR7SDPi06Ye-wJRC
This problem did also exist on the 3DS but with the difference that you need a modded 3DS to copy the game. We can do nothing other than wait for Nintendo to respond to the first ban that happens because of identical certs.
- I have a guess
  
  Good guess
This guy makes great content. This vid made me subscribe.

I didn't even think about the risk of duplicate certificates and Nintendo's adverse reaction to it. Quite concerning.

I buy almost all games used. Moving forward, I think I'll have to buy new or via discounted digital download code. MiG Switch (Russian owned) probably didn't even think or care about that impact to the market.

But the idea of playing my own carts on PC via the adapter is quite appealing. I don't want to give this company any money but would love to play my own cartridges with improved performance.
I crack up at all the people on Lemmy insisting that this isn't pirating or about pirating. Yes it is. I pirate too, don't bullshit me guys. This isn't about Nintendo being an evil company, cause they keep their games exclusive, just like Microsoft does with PC games and nobody bitches. This isn't about Nintendo being selfish, it's about people who want to copy switch games, mod them, share them, and act as if it's a thing the copyright holder should be happy about lol

Again I pirate, so let's be honest, this whole thing is about ways to easily pirate and backup switch games, not the integrity of gaming.
- Ummm.... If you own the game, making backups is perfectly legal. This isn't piracy, this is hacking. I agree that most movie and game downloading IS PIRACY. This is not. It's piracy if someone rips the files and distributes it. If they rip it for themselves, it's not.
  
  So yeah, it actually is a murky area here. You'd be going after everyone under the assumption of illegal activity vs actually targeting those commiting piracy.
  
  The point is that this is not going to stop with someone backing up their games. Come on now let's be honest. The internet is full of game ROMS that are "for backup only" again, come the fuck on. I'm not against pirating, but to say this isn't it is just silly lol
- <shrug> I support things being hackable, dumpable, flashable, whatever. I also support piracy. But those two aren't as interlinked as you want them to be.
  
  Hacking because it's ownership. Do what you want with the things that you own. Piracy because fuck 'em. That's what happens when you make everything digital - it becomes much, much easier to acquire for free.
- come on guys, I do X because of Y, everyone else must do it for the same reason, and if they claim otherwise they're definitely lying.
  
  Yeah you're definitely lying, especially if you claim you've never pirated a game you don't own
- The majority of people pirate, but insofar as there is a single person who wants to do literally anything else with their hacked system, then it isn't exclusively about pirating, and the narrative to condemn the entire practice of hacking as being solely about pirating is nothing more than another corporation trying to make it harder for people to modify their own property as they see fit.
  
  I think buddy is asking for honesty in the discussion. If your goal is piracy, just say so, don't hide behind that one person who "wants to do literally anything else".
  
  You're right, generally speaking, but most of us don't fit into that category.
  
  The majority of people pirate
  
  Really?
- If it was about pirating, you wouldn’t need the dumper, you could just download the already dumped game online
  
  Lol dude why are you being purposely dumb? You think the person who dumps the game will keep it only for themselves and never share the file online? You need the dumper to put the game online for others
- It’s also about how apparently games run better from a rom using an emulator on a switch rather than through the native software of the switch itself. It’s crazy.
  
  That's likely due to the Switch throttling itself a fair bit in handheld mode, to avoid overheating and spending too much battery power.
  
  Running an emulator on Linux likely uncaps the performance.
- All the popular switch games have already been dumped & shared online. The cart that lets you download and play those came out MONTHS ago.
  
  THIS cart is so you can download and backup your OWN Switch games, something I want just so I don't lose my save data. Thanks for loudly assuring everyone that you know fuck-all about any of this though!
  
  Isn’t all your saved data stored in the device and backed up to the cloud? What games store saved data in the carts?
  
  ~~Does this require using a modded switch or can anyone buy this hardware and back up their own save data?~~
  
  edit: Nvm, sounds like you can't back up your own save data with this, you would need homebrew, damn.
- I am mixed on what you're saying.
  
  As everyone is saying, it doesn't matter if the primary purpose of this is piracy, because this enables legal behavior through the same process as the piracy. You cannot say that this is illegal because it is not piracy until you take the output of this and do something else with it.
  
  But also it sucks that we have to discuss these things with false pretense to avoid Youtube content bans and stuff like that.
  
  But that is the reality of the world we live in, and Nintendo DOES suck and IS an evil company when it comes to consumers rights.
  
  For the record, I do not pirate anything presently. At a certain point in my life I decided that I could go without things or buy them. But I don't judge for people making the opposite choice.
  
  I feel like devices like this aren't really under a false pretense though. Most people who would pirate games like this probably wouldn't buy a third party device so they can copy a friend's cartridge so they can emulate it, they'd more likely just download it and skip the middle man.
  
  The only real way I see it being used primarily for piracy is in areas where Internet activity is heavily monitored/restricted, or broadband isn't available/accessible. Otherwise a 1 month subscription to a VPN and a few gigabyte of Internet usage is far cheaper and easier to a pirate.
- Didn't bother reading the whole thing huh, about how this can effect people that legally buy used games?
- Some people just want to mod a game they love and play it again. There's more than one reason to use these tools.
  
  Right, but for every one person who wants to do that, 9 others want to make money off a mod or spread the game for free, which benefits the creator not at all.
- Wow you are biased. Piracy is a service problem. Therefore platforms with more service issues become targets for more advanced and rampant piracy. Nintendo basically deserved it. Not an honest people's problem that it takes going that far to make the platform act as user friendly as they expected it to by default in the first place.
  
  Of course, but in this case the piracy is more complex than just buying. The issue is much more how this can and might affect buying customers.
- I guess it depends on what you call pirating. Is it okay for me to emulate switch games I own on my steamdeck? It prevents me from having to carry around two devices, and in some cases the games run better. I that situation I've paid everyone I'm supposed to.
  
  And Nintendo is just supposed to accept that everyone will use the honor system and not share their game files for games they don't own?
- I agree. it's always hidden under "backup" but reality is piracy. I pirate too.
- ROFL! PC exclusive my ass.
- nobody bitches
  
  excuse me, but i bitch about it all the time, thank you very much.
- This is the wrong crowd for that, mate. I’ve gone through this rodeo on Lemmy too many times and you’re just going to get dishonest people pretending that what they’re doing isn’t stealing. It’ll be everything from “preservation of games” to “it’s just like renting from a library” and all the extremes of dishonesty.
  
  No one here’s going to be honest about it.
  
  You're being just as dishonest as the people you accuse in two different ways: there are people already in the replies to this comment admitting to the same things, as well as making unverified claims that "they're actually pirating, they just won't admit it"
- Yeah, you're downvoted to hell. I do think it's funny when people in pretend to "preserve" games or what have you as well.
- I'll join you in the downvotes and say I one hundred percent agree with you here.
  
  People will go on and on about legitimate issues but downvote tooth and nail when you correctly day this was developed and sold primary for piracy.
  
  And let's face it, this is built and sold for mainly piracy with the very few who are using it for legitimate uses like preservation.
  
  Outside of the small scene groups dumping new releases, why would someone wanting to pirate go to the trouble of buying a legit copy of a game and this device, only to dump the game resulting in effectively the same file that someone else has already put online?
  
  The people who are putting game roms online generally aren't randos. It's scene release groups, who already have plenty of ways to dump carts without this, otherwise we wouldn't be seeing roms released same day or earlier than the shelf date.
  
  You can already dump games with any Switch you can run homebrew (and therefore pirated games) on. I've done it with my carts so I don't have to juggle the little things or bring a case with me. You don't need this dumper to do it, or to get the files to put on the MiG flash card this is for. Normal dumps off the internet work fine in the cart for pirated game playing on newer switches.
  
  So yeah, it's a piracy device. But I just don't see the use case here for it to meaningfully aid piracy at all.
  
  Look, I have pirated games on a ton of consoles and handhelds, including the Switch, and I've also dumped my own carts/discs. One thing I've never done, or never heard of someone doing, is using one of these dumping tools and then selling the used copy of the game.
  
  I'm sure there are people out there that have, and in the days of game rental stores people absolutely would rent a game and dump it, I used to do it with music CDs. It was harder to grab shit from the intenet back then though, so it was easier than downloading.
  
  If I like a game enough to buy it, I'm not going to the trouble of getting an insulting amount for reselling it. If it was crap enough that I no longer wanted it, why would I dump the cart to a file?
  
  Nowadays, you can download ten switch games in maybe an hour and a half, and every single game is downloadable normally on release day.
  
  Why would you spend extra money on the dumper and lose money from reselling the game for less than you spent, when you can just download it for free?
- You'll burn for this here.
  
  I should save this post for the "what opinions aren't welcome on Lemmy" question that comes up every few weeks.
- You're so fucking dumb.
  
  This is not about pirating.
  This is about Nintendo being so greedy they have created an environment where customers buying used games can get screwed by Nintendos own certificates system.
  
  You mean you need a game cartridge and a Nintendo system to play a Nintendo game? Shocked, just like every console ever made, even up till now which require license verification within the game code?? Shocked.
  
  But you want to go around Nintendo so you can "backup" and share the game and hack it and spread it to everyone for free, but that's not pirating?? Dude I'm pro pirating, but to call this anything but pirating is such a lie

101 comments