While the makers of the Mig Switch would probably argue the purpose of the device is for making backups of games you own, we all know that historically this is not what these devices are for. Of course, there will be people with large game libraries that want to run all their games from a single cartridge, or people that simply want to preserve their games for all eternity, but let’s be realistic; Most people that buy the Mig Switch will use it for piracy.
Every Nintendo console from the GameBoy and newer has some version of flash cart that would let you play pirated games downloaded from the internet. However all of those had one feature that seems to be missing from the Mig Switch.
Ever since the first Switch version was discovered to have an unpatchable exploit the homebrew scene on the Switch has exploded. There are emulators for almost every console from the Dreamcast and earlier, Moonlight for game streaming from a desktop PC, Half-Life 2, you can even install Android on it if you really wanted to. Newer versions of the Switch, including the Switch Lite (available on Amazon*) can be modded to run all this software, but the process requires some fairly technical soldering skills and a willingness to potentially turn your Switch into a brick, making this inaccessible to the large proportion of people. Unlike the flash carts of old, there doesn’t seem to be much in the way of reports of any sort of homebrew working with a Mig Switch.
Maybe this will change as these cartridges make it into the hands of the public, but ejecting and re-inserting the cartridge to cycle through whatever emulator you want to run next is annoying at best and will lead to a bunch of broken cartridge slots at worst. The Nintendo Switch for me has always been a device with more appeal for what it shouldn’t do versus what it should. A Mig Switch that can run the back catalogue of homebrew Switch software would be a deal clincher and probably stimulate the new and second hand market for Nintendo’s ageing console.
However, as it stands at the moment, while backing up your games is a legitimate use case, the legalities around doing so fall into a somewhat grey area and regardless of its intended purpose, the Mig Switch is a device that enables piracy. Without the argument of homebrew, it’s hard to imagine it staying out of the crosshairs of the big N’s legal team for long with a feature list this short.
Hopefully some enterprising individual can figure out a way to get homebrew to work on an unmodified console and we can all bask in the glory of being able to use an unmodified Switch for more than just playing Animal Crossing (available on Amazon*). But given Nintendo’s propensity for suing everyone, the outlook doesn’t look good.
Ever since being introduced to Manic Miner on the ZX spectrum I have been an avid gamer and technology fan. Sucked in by UMPC’s and the promise of big power in small packages, I have wasted too much time and energy jailbreaking, flashing and overclocking anything that has an electrical pulse. A staunch advocate for the right to repair, I resent any company that dictates how I can use something I paid for.
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