This red box is going to change
the Nintendo Switch market forever, and after today, it will never be the same. Hey guys, Taki here. Today, we have a huge video.
As I stated in my MIG Switch video, I think there's a high chance that this video is going to
get taken down. But I hope that Nintendo doesn't because even if you don't want to buy this thing
at all and you have no interest in it or this card, you need to be informed about it because its
existence can impact every Nintendo Switch owner. And if you are not informed about
what it is and what it does, there are some potential negative consequences
that can come out of it. So in this video, I'm going to present the information that
I think both sides need to know about this, people that are interested in getting
this and also the people that want to know how they're going to navigate the
landscape now that both of these exist. Anyway, this is the MIG Switch Dumper. It’s a
small red box with a USB Type-C port on one end, and a Nintendo Switch cartridge slot on the
other. And if I just get a cart for this, it clicks into place just
like it does on a Switch. Without even opening it up, I'm
assuming some of the things that were on the PCB for this are also on this
PCB because the update files are the same. If you want to wrap your head around
this, think of it as if it were an SD card reader. If you connect this to
a computer with a cartridge inserted, the computer would be able to read
all of the files that you would need to essentially create a clone of it with
the hardware solution in the Mig Switch. These are things that were usually used
for emulators, but there's a lot of extra identification that is only required for when
you want to do a 1:1 clone of a card that can then go online. That's the most important
part of this entire thing. But we got to see how it works. So let's get a computer
to see what happens when we plug this in. For our PC, we are going to go with
the Nintendo Switch. Obviously, this can be used in a lot of things, but
I just figured since Nintendo is already going to be super angry that I am doing a
video on the dumper, why not make matters worse for myself by showing an operating system
that they don’t even want you to be able to run. So anyway, we have the dumper here connected
to this USB cable. There’s no cart in it right now, and we are just going to start by connecting
the other end of the cable to the Switch. Once that happens, the activity light
is going to go on inside the dumper, and if I put my hand here, you can see that
the activity light is solid red to show that it's active. At the top of the screen, we
have a notification that we’ve connected a drive called Game Card. And if we press on
that, we can view what is on this dumper. So far, it looks like a flash drive. Now,
the interesting thing about this is that the properties show that this is a 275GB drive. It
also says that it has half a gig of free storage. I don't believe that this thing has that
much space and we'll check on that later when we do a teardown. I just think it’s
very interesting that they’ve done this. As you can see, it says that we are at
99% capacity with the drive almost full. Inside the drive, we have a system folder. In
there, we have a single Update.S2 file. If you recall from my Mig Switch video, that’s the update
package. They only have one update package online, so I would be shocked if these do
not share the same PCB components. If we press on that file, we can see that that is just basically under 300KB. I’ll go over
the update process later in the video. As you can see right now, we don’t have anything.
This just works as a flash drive. If I disconnect it, that goes away. If I plug it back in, it
reconnects as a USB drive. I think everybody watching this has a pretty good understanding
of how a flash drive works, so we can move on. This is where things get spicy -
finding a that I can test this with. Most of the games that I have
are things that I know would cause ninjas to kick in my windows,
so I’m going to go with Minecraft. I have two of them here, and I am going to be upfront about what I'm doing. If
I copy any files off this dumper, they will not exist after the camera shuts
off. This is not a game that I need to dump. So let's take one of our two Minecraft
cartridges, and we are just going to put this into our little box and then we're
going to connect it and see what happens. So the dumper disconnects, the activity light
goes back on, and then our game card shows back up. The difference this time is that we now have
a new folder. I want to go into the properties now to see what it says for our capacity. It still
says that we have the same amount of free space, but now it says we have a bunch of
items that are totaling over 900MB. If I go inside the new folder, you can see
all of the files that you would need to be able to clone this card on the Mig Switch.
If we look at those, we have the ROM file, which is pretty small, all things
considered, at less than a gig. We also have the card ID set, the card UID, the
ROM certificate, and the ROM initial data. As far as I know, this file here is the one
that is unique from every single cartridge. It's unique to this Minecraft cartridge. If I did
a dump of this and I analyzed this cartridge and then I dumped this Minecraft right here, those two
files should be different. But the initial data, the card UID and the card ID set and the ROM,
should be identical between the two of them. Only the ROM certificate should be different. What I want you to kind of internalize
is just how easy it was for me to connect this to my Switch to have full
access to all of these files. Now I can make a 1:1 backup
of this card. If I did that, do I even need the real cartridge anymore? No. I have enough files here to make an exact
clone of this game and use it how I see fit. That's kind of the danger
of these two products. Now, does this work? And the answer to that question
is yes. And it even works in the way that it is connected right now. We do not even need to
copy these files over to be able to use them. If I open he who shall not be named, you can see that it identifies Minecraft
as a valid game. A couple of things here. The files that are currently in use to allow this
to happen come from this Nintendo Switch. I know Nintendo doesn’t care about that distinction, but
I am trying to do this as above board as possible. If we press on the game, you can see
that the game will start to launch, and the activity light will change. Now we have my OLED Switch, using its own files to decrypt this game
running from an external card reader. It is so strange that this is
now possible. It’s weird that someone would never even need to dump
their games to be able to use them, and I believe you can do this across all
platforms that have a USB port and an emulator. Anyway, here’s Minecraft running on the
Switch through emulation. I have played a lot of Minecraft on the Switch, and the most
disappointing thing about seeing this running in the way that I have here is that it even
runs better than it does under the official system. This is just sad. You should not be
able to get an improved gaming experience by running an emulator that emulates the device
that you are using to run the emulator. I’m going to show you in just a second,
but if this was in the stock system, I would see a ton of pop-in as the
game loads in other parts of the world, but it’s running way better
than it should via emulation. Here’s that same game under the stock
OS, and you can see exactly what I am talking about. This isn’t even as bad as
it can get because it’s possible to get a defacto loading screen while you wait for
the next chunk to load in. But I digress. We'll have one thing left to cover when it comes
to this before we start talking about some of the meat of this video, and that is updating it. Let's
go over to the MiG Switch website. We can see that the cartridge and the dumper share a binary.
I’ve gone ahead and grabbed the latest version. It shows up as an 80KB file.
I'm going to copy this file, and then I will go to the system folder to paste
it in place, overwriting the one that is there. Now you can see that our file in this
folder is only 80KB. We're going to disconnect this and then reconnect it. And
now when we go back in there, you can see the file is back to being 272 kilobytes. So
that's how we do the update process on this. I think the next thing people want
to see is the PCB. Before doing that, I’m going to open the Mig Switch card. As
a recap, they etched out the two of these, but I was able to identify that
one of the chips was an ESP32, which is a very cheap microcontroller, and
the other was a small FPGA from Lattice. Both of these should be inside the MIG Switch
Dumper. All right. Let's disconnect the USB cable to start opening this up. With the thing open,
we can see that they did not etch off the labels, so we can get a closer look at them
after we remove the remaining screws. And here we go, this is the Mig Switch Dumper. And as you'll notice, we have some familiar parts
that we already talked about. Here’s the ESP32, which is going to fill the role of
handing IO and updating the FPGA, and if we flip this, here’s our Lattice
FPGA. This should be the chip that is responsible for interfacing with the
card to be able to rip off the data. Essentially, it's decrypting the game files in the
same way that you do on a hacked Switch. And if we just get our Mig Switch, we can see this Chip
is the Lattice chip, and this one is the ESP32. Beyond that, we just have two other
chips, along with some resistors and fuses. There’s not a whole lot going on
here. We do have this cartridge slot, and I guess this is just something
that exists as an aftermarket part on the repair market Switches so they were
just able to get them for this product. Anyway, here’s the back. It’s
a very simple piece of kit, and this is something that shouldn’t be too
complicated given what they have on this. I might leave the case off this because I think
the bare board looks better than the red box. That's the whole that's the whole thing. For this last big section, I want to talk about
the impact of this. Now that both products exist, I feel like I can fully outline all
of the issues that this presents. So let's get one thing clear before we
get started. It was possible to dump games before this thing existed, and it'll
be possible to dump them after. The big difference is in what is being dumped. If
you dump a Switch game on a modded Switch, you’d usually just have the ROM file here,
and that would allow you to play the game on an emulator, or on a modded Switch
by running the game from an SD card. From Nintendo's side, they could ban your
Switch if you were to ever play that game with your Switch connected to the internet. This
is why people that have modded Switches usually only play pirated games on their emulated
system with all of the telemetry disabled. With this tool, we now have a use for other card
contents that can be dumped. And the one that's important here is that certificate file because
that's the unique file for this exact cartridge. Before this existed, there was
never a real use for those files, and even though people could have dumped
those files with a modded Switch in the past, there was nothing they could
really do with them. Now there is. I want to be upfront about this
with you. After I did my last video, I said I was going to go out and buy
a ton of Switch games that I had on my wish list. I bought about 15 games or
so a day after I released my last video. These aren’t all of them, but they were
games that I had been holding off on. Just like with the Switch consoles that I own, I buy a mix of new and used games. If there’s
a game that I really want to play on release, then I will buy that game sealed. That would be
something like Tears of the Kingdom or Super Mario RPG. I bought those games on release because I
wanted to experience them when they were new. For other games that are older that I never
got to experience, I would just buy those games used and before these things existed,
I never needed to worry about whether or not somebody had cloned any unique files that could
potentially get me screwed without me knowing. To be able to describe the situation that
we're now in, I'm going to use Minecraft for this and I'm going to use it for a few
reasons that will hopefully make sense to you. I have two copies of this. One is
inside here, and the other is on this table. Let's say I wanted to buy a third copy of
Minecraft and I didn't want to buy it brand new. If I want to buy this game now, and
this is typically a game that want to use online that you could use online, I now
need to worry about whether or not there is a certificate file from the game that I'm
buying that has been dumped on the Internet, or that somebody has made a copy of
that they're running from a Mig Switch. That's one worry that I have to have. And if
you think that people aren't going to do this, you are sorely mistaken because there's
a lot of discussion already from people that want to go out and buy new
Switch games just to dump them before returning them to a store after
they get the files that they need. If those people go online with their clone, and
you go online with your game, that certificate file will go to Nintendo and they can see there
are two consoles or more using the same unique ID. Nintendo hasn't said how they're going to handle
this situation, but they can’t sit back because this will cause a lot of lost revenue for
them. I wish that they would say something because this is not a good situation for Nintendo
Switch owners to be in. So now in this situation, if I want to buy this thing used, I have to
ask the seller, have you dumped this game? And I have to hope that they have been honest.
Now, if they were the original owner of the game, it’s easier to track the chain of custody because
I just have to ask one person, but if many people have owned the same game, that’s way too risky.
Because now you have to hope that multiple people didn’t clone a cert file while they had
their hands on the game that you now own. Now that is just if someone wants to use the game
on the Mig Switch. If you are a Switch owner, it is not going to come as a surprise
that the used prices on Switch games are kind of high. The official price
for new games is also kind of high. There is now a huge incentive for people to take a game that has a high resale value and
just clone it with a fake cartridge using the hardware solution that now
exists with this Mig Switch design. If people have the ability to turn out
near identical clones of official games, then the entire used market
just becomes super shady. Let's take let's take these two games,
for example. These are the used prices for Breath of the Wild and Tears of the
Kingdom where I live. As you can see, they aren’t that cheap, especially for
a game as old as Breath of the Wild. If we take the hardware on the MIG Switch as an
example, we have an FPGA that is going to set you back $2-3 in volume, as well as an ESP32 that
can go for between $2-4 depending on the model. If we include all of the passive components
that are on this board and take into account the cost to get it fabricated, you are
looking at like a $7 PCB. You could then add some storage on the board, get a good
sticker, and a nice shell to have a full clone. Now, when you want to go buy something from the
second-hand market, it would be very difficult for you to know at a glance if you're buying
an authentic Switch game because they could do such a good job that you won't know unless
you opened it up. That's going to be a huge problem going forward because now you're going
to have to worry about counterfeits and it's something that we didn't need to worry about
for the entire lifespan of the Nintendo Switch. So I presented two situations to you, one
where there's an incentive for people to now clone cartridges of games with high
resale values, but they could even do this for a current release. That's going to have
a huge impact on the entire Switch ecosystem. The cynical side of this is, well, Nintendo is going to be happy about this
because this will just blow up the used game market and cause people to only buy
new games. I don’t know if I believe that. Going forward, I am going to have to get used
to asking sellers if they have ever dumped the files from their games now that these both
exist. I think that fully explains this title. Anyway, that’s it for this review
of the Mig Switch Dumper. It does what it sets out to do, but
it does have some downsides. If you enjoyed this video and you
want to see another, take a look at my big video on the Nintendo Switch in
2024. Happy gaming everyone, Taki out.
