Nintendo is now facing a major piracy problem, with a bunch of illegal Nintendo Switch ROMs starting to appear online.
Nintendo Switch ROMs Problem for Nintendo
ROMs for The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild, Mario Kart 8 Deluxe, ARMs and others have started to appear online, marking the first step towards the console being fully emulated in a similar manner to the Wii, Nintendo 64, SNES and other Nintendo consoles. The ROMs have been uploaded by BigBlueBox, who previously hacked the 3DS, and confirmed on GBATemp.net, with the console hacking outfit continuing to be a thorn in Nintendo’s side.
Though the ROMs aren’t currently usable on the Switch hardware, as the Switch itself has yet to be emulated nor has it been jailbroken, their existence still leads to various possibilities for the homebrewing and hacking crowd. While many will argue the case for these ROMs being uploaded online — gaming historians argue that as physical media degrades over time, games stored in such a manner are important for video game archives — they inevitably open up a barrage of piracy issues.
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But there’s another more intriguing element about these ROM uploads. As described by NeoGAF user Atheerios: “The scariest thing about this is that they are not normal cartridge ROMs, but the hackers have already decrypted the contents and posted those in a way that they hide the unique identifier that cartridges have.” BigBlueBox have already managed to achieve a number of things while poking around with the Switch, including backing up save data and transferring it to another Switch, editing saves, data mining games and enabling cheating in games by modifying RAM values.
The following games have been included in the ROM upload:
- The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild
- Mario Kart 8 Deluxe
- ARMs
- Has Been Heroes
- Puyo Puyo Tetris
- Lego City Undercover
It should be noted here that we at CRAVE don’t condone the use of ROMs or piracy, and while these ROMs are currently not playable on the Switch hardware, downloading them is still very much illegal.
