First and foremost, it financially supports some very sketchy players in the commercial piracy (under)world.
Secondly, it won't let you play homebrew games - only officially signed nintendo software.
Thirdly, you'll have to keep your console offline forever, if you plan to use it - you can bet Nintendo will start revoking cart certificates and banning consoles at the first opportunity (each genuine cartridge is uniquely identifiable).
We have completely free solutions to both """backups""" and homebrew. Your best bet is to find a cheap model with an unpatched bootrom, and your second best bet is to install an rp2040-based glitching modchip (or find someone to install it for you, if you're not comfortable with microsoldering).
What online switch game is worth playing? I'm sure the mig will be decrypted, and they will just fake the signature for the homebrew games. I think that's how some of the older homebrew worked. The scene is pretty dead since smartphones exist though.
I agree he should just get an old one but aside from maybe not liking the mig guys I don't see a problem with the product. The amount of blood from mining in Africa for my minerals probably isn't too moral either.
Each physical cart has a unique certificate, signed by a private key held by Nintendo. That certificate is verified locally by the console, against a public key in the firmware. Without CFW, you have no way to bypass that signature verification.
In short, the flashcart works by making a full clone of the cart, cert and all. The console doesn't know it's not talking to an original game. That is, until Nintendo's servers notice multiple consoles playing the "same" cartridge at the same time.
If you really are only making and playing backups of your own games then you'd probably be fine, but I don't think anyone really buys these products with that use case in mind.
Thank you for your explanation. I thought homebrew would be possible if you have a legit game, have homebrew then just use the cert to play it and make the game console think it's a game. I think if it like a GameShark, you load it with a cert then you switch the game.
The unique certificate is mainly used to verify that a cart is authorized to be played online, the game files themselves are signed in their entirety and a console not running CFW will not accept any modified files.
The console itself is practically a loss leader, it's buying the games that's sketchy :P
To clarify my overall stance, I am:
Broadly anti-nintendo (good games, sketchy company), extremely pro- modding and homebrew, mostly pro-piracy, but firmly against the commercialization of piracy.
Making things available for free is good, taking things just so you can profit from them yourself is bad - and that's how I see MigSwitch et al.
First and foremost, it financially supports some very sketchy players in the commercial piracy (under)world.
Secondly, it won't let you play homebrew games - only officially signed nintendo software.
Thirdly, you'll have to keep your console offline forever, if you plan to use it - you can bet Nintendo will start revoking cart certificates and banning consoles at the first opportunity (each genuine cartridge is uniquely identifiable).
We have completely free solutions to both """backups""" and homebrew. Your best bet is to find a cheap model with an unpatched bootrom, and your second best bet is to install an rp2040-based glitching modchip (or find someone to install it for you, if you're not comfortable with microsoldering).