Wow cool! Do you think it’s possible to port classic Mac games to modern MacOS now (thinking Dark Castle, Ancient Art of War at Sea)?

I built a little harness for an x86 SBC for Claude to do osdev a few months ago.

Janky setup with two ESPs for the serial terminal and to control a servo taped to some microswitches to power cycle the board.

It worked very well, allowing Claude to spend all day and night debugging quirks with the NIC until it was able to get the driver working.

So, I think giving your IoT device some "hands" is probably worth it. For SD card automation, you can find "wireless SD cards" on Amazon/AliExpress that have a microcontroller pretending to be sd card, eg FYSETC SD-Wifi.

> I just thought it was more time efficient to do it manually rather than spend days trying to figure out how to automate SD card pull/plug

Heres the thing. You only have to build the automation once. While it will only take you seconds at most to pull a card, you gotta sit around and be ready for the card to be pulled.

For your problem I see 2 quick things that came to minq very quickly that could do SD card pulling for you.

1) shove a level shifter in between the SD card and device under test and have a micro enable/disable the level shifter when you want to pull/unpull. ( you can even get multiplexer IC that will do the same thing as the level shifter as acting as a switch for the SD card lines, but would allow you to connect the SD card to a 2nd device (the testing pc) to allow you to write/read data from the card when its "pulled" from the DUT.

2) 3D print a jig that will insert/remove the SD card and use a cheap RC servo to handle the movement - again using a mirco to control the servo. gives a more real world test of pulling the SD card. but only gives the the ability to pull/insert. Still required manual effort if you need to read/write to the SD card

Once you have build the jig, you can reuse the jig on the next project, so while it will take some time to do/setup it could save you time later down the road.

Edit: As for the code driving the ICs or Servo, I'm presuming you already know embedded programing, but even so, a simple Arduino sketch will be able to handle it for you, fuck ton of example code already exists for it, and can be easily controlled over USB.

Sounds interesting!

So far most of my automation has been optical (tweaking display output to show correctly under a lens with odd optical characteristics, hard to simulate computationally), so pointing cameras at the device and letting the LLM iterate and tune display output has been useful.

As with any automation, it all depends on scale. Setting up a harness to repeatedly mess with microSD cards seems way more prone to failure (and false positives) than just doing it yourself, but if you're testing thousands of devices, would probably be worthwhile.

There is hardware available for SD card automation; see the USB-SD-Mux by Linux Automation GmbH / Pengutronix. https://linux-automation.com/en/products/usb-sd-mux-fast.htm...

Automation wins, every single time.

The Switch 1 sold about 150m units, the Steam Deck’s sold 6m.

Internet nerds like us aren’t really Nintendo’s target market, I don’t think. Installing emulators or jailbreaking a system isn’t something most of their customer base would have the want or need to do, IMO.

Very unlikely to happen via emulation, there's Switch 1 games that the Steam Deck struggles to run already.

What about putting Steam on your Switch 2?

Totally, convenience always wins. I think this is more of a hardware sales issue for Nintendo though — if what I understand is true, I'd bet that we see Switch 2 games running on other systems before we see a CFW/decrypt-encrypt stack for running pirated games on the Switch 2 itself.

I have no desire to buy Nintendo's hardware as I don't want to play their games badly enough to buy a dedicated console and deal with their practices. I have however enjoyed the last two Zelda titles on my PC where I was able to play them with performance and quality mods. Once it was just another application the barrier of entry was low enough to get my interest. If the games were available as actual PC titles I would have gladly paid for them

Would people still go to such lengths if Nintendo just released their games for the hardware people actually have, like the SteamDeck & PC ?

Still seems rather self-enflicted pain for Intendo due to still pushing locked-down consoles in 2026.

"You can't stop the signal, Mal."

I actually love watching this from a distance. It's very OG cyberpunk.

They have successfully deplatformed emulator projects from the larger project hosting providers like Github. But they have not stopped them. The real emulator projects have just circled the wagons and started self-hosting their build and dist infrastructure, running independent Forgejo instances, etc. There's still more churn in the community because of the risk profile, and now because of LLMs. But it's settling down and there are a couple stable Switch 1 projects. And actually, their recent DMCA carpet bombing removed a lot of the unsafe forks of emulators on places like Github. Likely leading to more people being directed to the real ones.

It's not impossible to navigate, original Switch has a lively "homebrew community".

DroidDeck (https://github.com/The412Banner/DroidDeck, and things like GameNative) have been huge for Android. Compatibility is fantastic, and you can run most games >3 years old at respectable frame rates on Snapdragon 8 Gen 3 handhelds.

I'm sure if this leads to a full CFW environment people will port it over.

Ah, you're right! Depends on their generosity, but I'd imagine piracy and running exclusives on non-Nintendo hardware is more of a risk to their business than a bootROM exploit.

Who gets the bounty money in that case? By the looks of the article, Codex did all of the work actually finding a bug. Shouldn't the money go to OpenAI?