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Switch 2 will be backwards compatible with Switch

(www.videogameschronicle.com)
288 points ashitlerferad | 5 comments | 06 Nov 24 14:32 UTC | HN request time: 0s | source
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bladderlover21 ◴[06 Nov 24 15:28 UTC] No.42063777[source]▶
And this reveals the real reason Nintendo came after Switch emulators - to buy some extra time before Switch 2 gets properly emulated.
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jsheard ◴[06 Nov 24 15:44 UTC] No.42064022[source]▶
The hard part of emulating the Switch 2 probably isn't going to be the actual emulation, but breaking the security so that the games and firmware can be extracted and decrypted. Nintendo pretty much nailed their software security with the Switch 1 but were undone by catastrophic hardware bugs, so we'll have to see how well they learned their lesson on the hardware front next time.

Microsoft and Sony have demonstrated that hardware security can be more or less perfected, neither of their systems have been compromised via hardware attacks for several generations now.

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1. farseer ◴[06 Nov 24 15:55 UTC] No.42064215[source]▶
Microsoft and Sony have successfully prevented their systems from being jtaged or mod-chipped. Not sure you can prevent dumping the actual game binary on the internet. That has lots of software and hardware attack vectors and only needs to be done once by a professional enthusiast.
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2. jsheard ◴[06 Nov 24 16:01 UTC] No.42064306[source]▶
The game binaries are encrypted, sure you can image the Blurays and put them online but they won't do anyone much good without access to the keys buried in the firmware, which are also a moving target since they can be rotated via mandatory firmware updates if they get compromised. In the case of the Switch, you also have to contend with the proprietary carts requiring a crypto handshake before they'll let you even read the encrypted game data.
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3. gcr ◴[06 Nov 24 16:46 UTC] No.42065040[source]▶
What on earth do you mean? How does a physical blu-ray’s encryption keys get rotated?

Do you mean that the protection on the firmware gets refreshed with updates, but the secret it protects always stays the same?

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4. jsheard ◴[06 Nov 24 16:49 UTC] No.42065092{3}[source]▶
I mean the keys can be rotated for future game releases, so extracting the keys from firmware X doesn't allow you to decrypt all new physical games in perpetuity, because past a certain point they'll start using a key that only exists in firmware Y onwards. Key rotation was moot in the case of the Switch 1 since the early models were so thoroughly broken that Nintendo couldn't do anything to stop the new keys from being extracted every time, but it worked for Sony and Microsoft whose systems generally only get one-off software exploits that can be closed forever via firmware updates.
5. downrightmike ◴[06 Nov 24 16:58 UTC] No.42065252[source]▶
MSFT largely did this by building the xbox platform basically on a local hyper-v system that they can control and not have to worry about hardware.