Buying Switch Games Is About to Get a Lot More Risky
Buying your Switch games second-hand is a great way to minimize the Nintendo tax, but it’s about to get riskier. Thanks to the arrival of some new hardware, buying used Switch games could land you in hot water with Nintendo. Here’s what you need to know.
Introducing the MiG Switch Card and ROM Dumper
The MiG Switch card is a flash cartridge designed for all models of Nintendo Switch that allows you to play Switch games directly from a microSD card. The MiG Switch Dumper is a device for “dumping” software copies of games (known as ROMs) to an SD card for use with the MiG Switch card.
It’s been possible to dump Switch ROMs for years using a modified Switch that’s running custom firmware. Dumped ROMs typically consist of a single file that can be played using modified Nintendo hardware or on an emulator. While emulating a platform isn’t necessarily illegal, creating ROMs may be, and disseminating them certainly is.
Until now, it wasn’t possible to spit out an exact replica of a game cartridge. Notably absent was the ROM certificate, a file that identifies each Nintendo Switch cartridge as a unique entity. This is what makes it possible to claim Nintendo Rewards once per cartridge.
The MiG Switch changes that. Thanks to the presence of a cheap, sub-$10 ESP32 microcontroller and an FPGA—a type of chip that can be reprogrammed on the fly—the MiG Switch dumper can grab all of the data from a Switch game cartridge, including that all-important unique ROM certificate.
With these files, the MiG Switch card can perfectly emulate a unique cartridge. The Switch console cannot tell the difference between the original game card and the MiG Switch with a microSD card in it. In the US, the MiG Switch card and ROM dumper cost around $70 each at retail.
These devices are marketed at those who want to create backups of their physical game cartridges so that they only need to carry a single cartridge with them to access a range of games. This sounds great in theory, but you can
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