Linus imagine if you will a nintendo switch
that not only can play zelda in smash bros but can also run all your retro
games with emulation run all of your xbox pc playstation
games with game streaming and even
play netflix let me try try to imagine
oh no i can't too awesome well that's fine because you
don't have to imagine it we installed Android on our switch and it can do all
those things look i'm playing halo right now
wow that's freaking awesome it is but hold
on a second huh i mean is it worth your valuable time and possibly bricking your
switch to do this wait hold on a second this is my
switch uh well um i mean i think it's worth it uh right
but this is my switch um yeah but it's definitely worth it okay
just like our sponsor a ridge wallet is the sleek way to keep wallet bulge down
thanks to its compact frame and rfid blocking inner plates check out their
new patterns and use the offer code lioness to save 10 and get free
worldwide shipping
is my first time actually seeing this and this trips me out so hard like
it shouldn't because a big part of the
reason this is possible is that the switch has way more in common with an
Android device like your phone than it does with other game consoles it's
running an NVIDIA tegra x1 processor with four ARM CPU cores and custom
NVIDIA graphics it's got four gigs of RAM 720p touchscreen and a 43 10
milliamp hour battery so a group called switchroot that's a great name yeah it
is they set out to modify Android to run on the switch specifically lineage os an
open source fork of Android long story short switchroot uh totally worked and
they published their results in july 2019 and people have been using Android
on the nintendo switch since then let's get to how this is possible now we'll
have links in the description with detailed instructions on how to do all
this and shout out to xda developers and the switchroot subreddit very helpful
when i was figuring all this out in order to get into recovery mode which
you need to do in order to boot Android on this thing you need to hold down
power volume up and the system's home button which is not
the same as the switch home button right there the real home button can only be
triggered by shorting two pins in the
joy-con rail which is down there but i can't show you which ones because
nintendo's legal team is out for blood these days and we've got kids to feed
lttstory.com speaking of which yes please check it out the easiest way to
do it is actually using something called an rcm jig so it's this little 3d
printed doohickey you can get on amazon for a few bucks so if six dollars for a
little thing like this is too rich for your blood and you're willing to risk
accidentally shorting the wrong pins right you can also
uh bend a paperclip this is fine craftsmanship right i really like this i
did my best so you can achieve the same result with a paperclip but again our
understanding is that nintendo might get real butthurt if we show you exactly the
shape of it to how to bend it so it's blurred but we do have links in the description
one more thing we're going to need this sd card that's installed on the
back of our switch has already been flashed with switch roots Android fork
and if you're going to try this it's really important to use the fastest sd
card that you can find because otherwise system responsiveness and especially app
launching speeds are going to be really slow
so now what so um we're actually already running Android on this right now okay
so we should undo something we'll undo that okay one moment please
so now i'm triggering the system the real home button the real home button
and then we
just not a line of text i have small hands it's hard to hold the whole okay
okay so now i just press these two buttons yes boom hey look at that rcm okay
all right so now we know that we're in the recovery mode so from here we're
going to inject a payload so now we are in the bootloader so now
we can disconnect because we don't need this anymore okay
and you got to do that every time yes however some people have developed these
little usbc dongles that are pre-loaded
with it and you can just plug it in and it injects it and then you unplug it so
that would be how you do the real portable solution first
connected to the laptop we've booted into recovery mode and now click launch
no that's not the right button Linus you have to click more configs
and then switch route Android boom and now
we're booting into Android now this is gonna take a little time because sd
card yes and also it's all a little glitchy you know this
is uh i'm not a programmer but i understand that you know i'm we're not
dealing with consumer software here okay can i put the joy con
back on now you can but it won't
uh register it because the only way that this tablet now can connect because it's
just an Android tablet now right the only way that this can connect to these
controllers is via bluetooth bluetooth so it doesn't take very long well yeah
guys it's fine you suck yeah it is you know i want like you
know low latency gaming okay so what do we got here we got some games we got
some streaming apps we got wow stadia so
i installed stadia but stadia doesn't actually work on this thing because it
only works with pixels right now but but later later it will yeah
well okay look at this you gotta add the dolphin emulator it's all there
oh man it shouldn't surprise me but like oh wow
like you know wi-fi is working and stuff i mean yeah there's only so many like
wi-fi chip sets out there right yeah i guess
exactly okay my keyboard doesn't oh okay it
takes a second so this is the other take a second didn't it now when you were
talking about the sd card speed i hadn't really thought about that much okay look
just it it warms up it warms up it needs it's like a it's like a cold car engine
you know it kind of just needs a needs a second uh-huh i'm really like evangelizing this
thing i mean it's cool
and and you could tell that i was on the netflix support page because the netflix
app doesn't actually work uh natively you need to kind of trick
the system into thinking your your installation's legit
and i haven't done that yet so netflix actually i know i said netflix works in
the intro but it doesn't actually work right now but it can work i just haven't
done this stuff to make it work wow this is slow
this is shockingly what happened i'm trying to go to our forum i'm on chrome
but it's just like chrome is bad why do you hate chrome what are you an opera
opera gx fanboy now gaming browser that video really
converted me out no no i'm saying chrome is not so good on the switch right now
okay wow look at that it's amazing how slow it is
so part of the reason you might be kind of getting glitchiness is because the
touch screen is also like really really finicky right it's it's sometimes it
registers double taps and got it so you kind of got to be very
yeah i'm not having that much trouble with it oh there's one oh there's one there you just got to believe
you're not believing hard enough slide that baby on
okay but like the actual joy-con connector here is now serving no purpose
whatsoever it's charging so these
these these these some people were worried about that so it is charging
okay but yeah it doesn't it's not a wired uh it's not a physical connection
okay there it goes allow access to your contacts and call history
what the hell well you know what sure why not you don't want to give the
joycon hi yeah riley i just wanted to talk about the privacy
concerns i have about your joy con don't worry about it don't worry about it it's fine it's fine we've looked at
everything we double checked the code okay it is good to go perfect thanks all
right thanks okay bye see you later love you i'll see you soon
oh god oh god okay settle down settle down load of
course what do you want to play let's play some snes they load content
downloads okay so which one is a snazz game link to the
past is super mario world we're going to take that out of the video because
that's a super do you want to get a copyright strike okay so we're going to use these
controls yes which we could rebind uh we could pretty sweet yeah look at this
wait oh it's not bound correctly oh man what it's not what
oh it's not mapped yeah that's that should be a i think this is run x you know what it
like is fine in terms of responsiveness yeah yeah it
looks really good i mean i guess that makes sense like
it's not like 720p isn't you know plenty for a game that's this old last i
checked the system might be rendering everything at 1080p instead of 720p
which means that we could potentially get even more performance this is this
is fine right yeah that's what i'm saying
okay let's run something a little more a little more more different as they say
downloads there's tactics and we should stress
that you should only emulate games you physically own because this was n64 era
right playstation playstation one yeah what do
you mean n64 era it's the playstation era what are you some kind of nintendo
fan voice that's how i know i only had an n64 i
didn't have any playstations all my playstations were n64s that was the
station i played at exactly
i had my workstation and my playstation
okay here we go all right we're in the game this is actually running
quite well like look at that so i can pan the cameras in the camera i
didn't know you could do that this is impressive because even though the tegra x1 absolutely is more powerful
than the original playstation right emulating it has a ton of overhead so
the fact that this is running so smoothly is like just super cool to me that's that's a
attesting to the switch's power and it's also attesting to retro arch which has
like a million different emulators you can use
oh boy we off to a good start boys okay you can
swim in wind waker oh but you can't go underwater just like
breath of the wild unfortunately huh okay
so this game is actually a good example of what we're going to run into
which is that the joy cons i'm i'm pretty sure in this game
they're not analog like try to walk slowly yeah i see that the joystick acts
as like an eight-way d-pad the switch when you don't run Android on it
normally has two performance settings for the GPU one runs at 384 megahertz in
portable mode and then in docked mode it runs in 768 megahertz but switch roots
build of Android gives you three profiles to pick from in the battery
settings balanced quick and the one we're using performance which runs the
GPU at 920 megahertz so then even then as you're seeing even
the general Android ui there's some chug there and games in more demanding games
there's a bit of chug as well but it is emulated and it's doing a
pretty good job this is playable yeah you know by like you know console gaming
standards you know we haven't got wind waker for switch yet okay so we do
nintendo does a great job of re-releasing all these things but except when they don't except when they don't
hey there it is oof okay oof now
hold on settle down
it's going it's running fine it's a little squishy it's not the best it's
not the best and it looks really soft like it seems
like we're actually rendering at a non-native resolution and it's really
affecting us on this one right yeah so this is where that whole 720p
versus 1080p thing comes into account let's do some streaming
so we got steamlink moonlight you can use those
for pc streaming you got your cloud because we're in the x cloud preview you
got g force now so you got a number of options for that
oof a is a is the jump a is jump okay
look at him go i think the first time i got pc game streaming running on the
switch i was kind of like it's like a eureka moment because you're like wait
i have a switch i've used it for portable nintendo
gaming up until now and now it's like wait this is opening the door here i can
play all my cool pc games that i want to play on my switch xbox logo on a switch
i've wanted to see that my whole life get him well you put me right in the
middle yeah yeah but you're not not inverted you have no excuse not to kill
everybody now oh Linus yeah i mean
i'm not even dead okay but how cool is this it's halo on a switch
that is pretty cool okay so as you're noticing probably
no analog input again with the joysticks now they are working on a fix
to an enable analog input with the joy cons yeah that would be better and
apparently in the next release of switch route the
next release of switch route is going to be Android 9 pi because this is actually
Android oreo 8.1 what's the other really
cool thing about the nintendo switch that you can do you promised netflix
i already talked about that let's see what's the other really cool thing you can do with a switch you can dock it to
a tv you can dock it let's go let's try that all right come
on look at that display cloning and look at
this because the controllers are bluetooth they still work right
and there's a wow we're seeing some lag dude now we have two xbox controllers
connected to the switch we're going to plug it in
we're going to cross our fingers hey
okay so now let's go home
let's go to stop what are you doing stop stop it what halo 5
do it okay so i have no idea where this is
going to work and there's probably going to be some lag i think it's fair to say there will be
some lag but i wanted to do it just to say that we played halo 5 multiplayer on
a switch on a switch so we're going to have leg from the
bluetooth controllers yes we're going to have leg from the weirdness of our dock
solution here we're going to have leg from using game streaming from a remote
server and we're oh we're going to have some leg from wi-fi yeah
wait how do you know when this is done what kind of a progress bar is this
as meaningful a progress bar as microsoft ever gives you
so Android is reading both of our controllers as one controller oh yeah
so here it goes teamwork you move i aim okay i'm supposed to shoot
okay i'm walking yes indeed
are you going to aim at all or like we're not going to look where we're
walking i think it only accepts input from one
at a time oh i see
how interesting
all right we beat the game uh yeah yes
that is really
cool i mean especially because we're not making any permanent changes to the
system like it's basically impossible for nintendo to remotely brick your
console because of what you're doing here which is awesome but before you
guys run out and try it we were only able to do this because pretty soon
after the switch's launch the homebrew community found this exploit in the
switch's recovery mode called fusehla which can be used to inject a bootloader
but unfortunately shortly after that papa nintendo found out what the kids
were doing and fixed the vulnerability but because the recovery mode is baked
into the hardware level they weren't able to patch it so
what nintendo did was release a new patched switch
starting in about mid-2018 so if you bought a switch before that you can do
this probably and if you want one after that you probably can't by the way if
you like the dark science of installing os's where they don't belong make sure you're subscribed so you catch our
upcoming video about making a hackintosh laptop or as we call it a hack top
coming soon i was always really excited about this
concept and i'm glad that we were actually able to do it because the
possibility of running Android on a switch is just it's so interesting to me
i held off buying a switch actually until just last year and since then i
love how portable it is but yeah you can get a controller and a
mount and run emulators and stream games on your phone just fine right for this
Android side of the experience if you want this but it's just not the same as
having a singular gaming device for nintendo games game
streaming retro games
and yes i acknowledge the switchroot project has a ways to go and probably
won't get where they would need to get to given that it's compatible only with
early manufactured units of one console it's true it's true but if they continue
to refine the experience i feel like this might be this could be the ultimate
gaming device okay right portable yes docked all that good every
console mm-hmm that's cool it's too bad you waited so long and ended up with a
non-moddable one i can't do this on my switch so but i did it on yours yeah and
that's what's important the good news is you can buy a switch i used one online
and if you ask for the serial number you can throw it into a utility to find out
if it's hackable so maybe that's your solution riley maybe
sell my switch buy another one the older model good luck with that weird speaking
of things to be lucky about um it's lucky i had this segway in my back
pocket wow maingear's vector gaming laptop is available at 25 micro center
locations as well as on amazon it's 99.99
at microcenter.com and 1199.99 on their
amazon listing it features a core i7 9750h processor at 2.6 gigahertz base
NVIDIA GeForce gtx 1660 ti graphics 16
gigs of ddr4 memory a 512 gig NVMe solid
state drive and a 15.6 inch 144 hertz full hd display check it and other micro
center specials out now at the links in the video description and not aim for
crap on this thing well there it is guys if you're looking for something else to
watch now why don't you go check out part four of our hack pro build
what actually happens in that video it's it's a journey we show apple what's
up