i'm not kidding when i say that this video could be gone tomorrow nintendo's
unleashed their army of lawyers for less than all i've done
but i managed to smuggle it out here
this is what they don't want you to see hey what are you doing
nintendo games on the steam deck it's more likely than you think nintendo
would never do it in fact they took down videos from smaller youtubers for just
showing it but as much as they'd like to do the same to
me everything you're about to see is perfectly above board and has obvious
benefits to you the nintendo gamer like
saving you the trouble of packing your switch and game cards whenever you go
out and i'll save you the trouble of not having to listen to this sponsor segue
by giving it to you anyway kiwiko kiwiko sends out crepes that contain hands-on
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before we get to the how-to let's have a look at the experience
my steam library's got a bunch of switch games just chilling in it including all
of the artwork and if i launch one it just loads up like any other game just
there we go i even get playtime stats it does take a little bit longer than usual
because it has to load shaders and stuff but once it's done
well you'll see or maybe you won't because nintendo is famously litigious
and we may or may not actually show this on youtube
mario kart 8. all right that's not a ah one thing about the steam deck a is not
a in terms of the switch because if you look at the switch a is in fact the
right hand side all right let's just do a grand prix let's just do it at the 50
cc because i'm a games journalist i mean so far everything seems very smooth and
that's honestly been my experience with pretty much every game that i've played
yeah check that out a little bit of a stutter there
i mean it looks like mario kart and it plays like mario kart in fact it plays
better than you would typically be able to play with mario kart on the
standard switch because you've got way better sticks
i'm not the best person in the world at mario kart this is basically 60 FPS if
it's dropping it's dropping very seldomly the input lag seems pretty good
too all right let's uh let's pop out of
mario kart 8 deluxe here let's try
uh smash let's do it now i will freely
admit that if i'm bad at mario kart i am
very bad at smash okay so there's some
uh shader compilation lag there
oh a lot of shader compilation like this is stuff that'll happen basically the
first time after the shader is compiled you basically don't have to worry about
it anymore as you can see it is now pretty solid in terms of frame rate up
and the chain the stage changed again so
that uh that threw a wrench in that but yeah as you can see it
picks right up and now it's actually very good i actually have no idea what
this item is it's like a
weird version of the fire flower from smash 64.
well i mean i didn't win that that was bad but you know the actual
performance is pretty good at least after the shaders are finished compiling
sorry all these clips are blurred we believe that fair use protects gameplay
footage for the purposes of creating reviews and tutorials
but nintendo believes otherwise and has proven to be aggressively litigious
about third-party exhibition of their games and has repeatedly misused the
dmca to punish third parties when they feel that they're being harmed in some
other way even if there is no law against whatever you're doing nothing is
blurred over on Floatplane.com of course by this point i'm sure you've got some
questions like really bother if i'm still using a handheld anyway valve's
steam deck is way bulkier
to carry and it has less battery life than the switch but
it's tough to deny that a full pc is a more versatile device so if i wanted to
carry just one handheld this is my only real option this isn't
to say that the steam deck is a superior console i mean for one it lacks switch
grade motion controls and hd rumble i just want to avoid packing two handhelds
for travel once i finally get my steam deck this one is
minuses that you can plainly see now if you're with me so far your next question
has to be how do i get this
into this one word jailbreak here's a list of
everything we'll need to get going and while most of it is free the big one
that's not and might be hard to find is a jail broken or jail breakable switch
there's a great write-up by aaron donald over on alpher with a listing of serial
number ranges that you can use to figure out if your switch is modable but the tl
dr is that any switch purchased within about the first year or so should work
just fine it just so happens that the switch i borrowed from one of our new
hires is a very early serial number the
other big piece of hardware is
the rcm jig you can get one like this on amazon for about five dollars which we
will link below but what these are doing at the end of the day is simply jumping
some pins on the right joy-con rail to place it in recovery mode here are some
other methods if you're inclined to hack a spare joy-con an old one that's got
stick drift is a good candidate since this will definitely void the joy-con's
warranty a fair warning by the way if you go any further i wouldn't recommend
connecting your switch to wi-fi maybe this is the excuse you've been waiting
for to pick up a switch lighter OLED for daily driving i'll be using this
excellent guide by the nintendo homebrew discord server and you can find download
links for everything there as well once you've got a hackable switch and the jig
go ahead and power off the console and slide the jig into place at the very
bottom of the right joy-con rail hold the volume up button while pressing
power and you should see a blank screen with no backlight congratulations you're
in recovery mode that's actually a good thing if not power off and try again it
might help to take a sip from a water bottle from ltdstore.com soon to be
available in chung is 64 ounces although this video might be down by the time
that's true now launch the app on your pc mac or Android host device or perhaps
you might even use the steam deck here and plug in the usb cable before we can
proceed with a full jailbreak we'll first need to partition our sd card
using tegra explorer so make sure you've made a backup of anything you have on
the sd card select the tegra explorer payload and
send it to launch it on the switch select partition the sd then fat32 plus
mu mmc once it's done select reboot to rcm and
eject the sd card insert the sd card into your host device and copy these
files to the sd card not all the stuff that's listed in the guide is strictly
necessary for what we're doing today but the bootloader hekate gold leaf
atmosphere dbi and lockpick are non-negotiable move the sd card back
into the switch and inject the hekate payload using the switch's touch screen
select mumc and then create once that finishes
and down and the power button to select we're specifically after the sysnand so
select that and it should dump out to the sd card under the switch folder
we'll copy these into the emulator's keys folder later now we can launch
custom firmware go back into recovery mode and inject tecate again go to
launch then atmosphere damn you are now
in custom firmware
which you can verify in settings now we can launch the homebrew menu by holding
r and launching a game that's currently installed the first thing we need to do
is dump the system files needed by a few games by going to gold leaf and then
explore content go to console memory system and then copy all of the items
there into the sd card exit gold leaf now it's finally time to dump some games
launch dbi choose run mtp responder then
plug the switch into your computer bam look at that
you've got your sd card your installed games your saves and your game card
that's everything backing up is as simple as copying the files though you
don't need both the trimmed and not trimmed files from your game card
trimmed should be fine unless you want a perfect backup including the garbage
data that fills the unused space on the card with our keys in the games all we
need now is emulation software i'll say upfront that switch emulation isn't
perfect yet but many games do run just fine installing one of the two available
switch emulators yuzu or ryujinx is pretty straightforward but both require
that the deck be in desktop mode to configure first open up the discover
store to grab them from flathub we'll use yuzu as an example here you don't
need to disable the read-only file system for this just fyi
once downloaded open yuzu and it will complain that there aren't any keys
we have a solution to that go to file then open user folder see that keys
folder in there copy those keys from earlier into there and while you're at
it copy the system folder we backed up with gold leaf into the nand folder then
restart the emulator from here there's a few options we
should configure for the emulator starting with disabling this setting
which would make exiting from the deck ui frustrating next in controls we want
to emulate a switch pro controller and make sure that the emulator itself is
using our steam virtual gamepad which should automatically map everything
correctly for us then in graphics we should make sure
that we're set to 1x native resolution and running borderless windowed mode for
later then under advanced make sure fast GPU time is enabled you can disable it
per game later but i found that you generally get better performance with it
on finally set full screen under view then on the bottom strip you'll see some
options click on docked to change it to handheld for better battery life and
performance since we only have a 720p class screen anyway go ahead and copy
over the games you backed up from your switch to an easy to remember folder like your downloads and point the
emulator to it yes switch games try running one here to
make sure everything works and don't worry it's normal for a minor stuttering
to happen during load screens or when shaders are compiling for the first time
they'll either go away soon or happen when they're least likely to be problematic now it's time to integrate
all of this into steam while still in desktop mode open up discover and look
for steam rom manager install that and fire it up under community presets type
yuzu and choose the flat pack version it'll automatically set everything up
for you except for your roms folder which you'll have to set to where you copied your games earlier click save and
then test to make sure that the games show up with that done go to the settings page
and select your steam directory this will be here under home
finally go to the preview page and click on generate app list if all looks good
click save app list now log out and go back into your library on the main deck
ui check it out in the non-steam games
list there's all your steam games you can even use this for other console
emulators too now there are some drawbacks to this approach like you're
not able to use nintendo's online services which could be a deal breaker
for you to be clear you can play multiplayer games but only via local
play or via local wireless through ryujinx's ldn build which is a bit
tougher to set up on the steam deck by actually quite a lot that's a tough pill
to swallow for some after all of those hoops you already have to jump through
there are also benefits though like easy backups of saved games without nintendo
online i mean i'll certainly sleep better knowing that a lost switch
doesn't mean hours of lost game progress and while the first generation steam
deck with modern emulators doesn't offer any performance advantages over a real
switch that will change in the future and you could expect to run games at
higher frame rates or resolutions or even with experimental mods on better
hardware and nothing we're doing here is in my opinion immoral or unethical for
those who are concerned about the damage that piracy does to game developers you
can rest easy knowing that we didn't download any roms or firmware from the
internet and we didn't circumvent any protections we got the games and keys to
decrypt them fair and square from our own device using its own firmware
recovery mode that matters legally even if it is a
little less clear-cut than the aacs decryption keys leaked back in the day
but why is this so contentious that nintendo fans will call you a bad person
for doing it well i already talked a little bit about how
nintendo is right to fair piracy in our previous legal emulation video
especially now that there's a similarly priced handheld that can also run nearly
every pc game ever and the back catalogs of nearly every historical console with
that being said if you don't turn around and distribute the keys or roms in our
opinion you haven't done anything wrong nintendo of course doesn't seem to care
they went so far as issuing a dmca takedown of the fox's video showing the
steam deck running switch games despite him neither showing nor suggesting where
to get the rom files i guess now we'll see if they have the appetite to pick a
fight with a bigger fish doing a full guide you can probably guess at this
point that we have something of a love-hate relationship with nintendo i
mean as a known sega kid i obviously have a little bias but even ignoring the
responses to the foxes video you'll need only look at how nintendo treats their
own biggest fans to see why despite the
wellspring of creativity and childhood memories they represent
they're kinda dicks about it sega meanwhile is surprisingly chill
overall so i feel pretty vindicated but it doesn't stop people like Linus or
even me from continuing to give nintendo their money even if Linus would feel
awkward taking theirs the thing is one of nintendo's longest hell beliefs is
that emulation itself is piracy that you're only allowed to play
the games that you buy on original media with the original hardware every legal
precedent that i know of has leaned otherwise and nintendo to date has yet
to score victories in court against anyone who hasn't been actively
distributing roms of their ip if they tried my gut tells me that the u.s
courts would side with the individual but
i guess there's only one way to find out and only one way to find out our sponsor
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you want to find out how to get retro games on here as well go check out our
previous video on how to dump your games and why you really should before it's
too late