How long before a full Switch emulator too? That's even less exotic hardware than wii u, it might even overtake wii u emulator development.

So it is done!

Sorry, I had to

No wonder Cemu is progressing as fast as it is. Through the patreon they make enough money for 2 full time employees.

Too bad Wii U doesn't have that many great games that would profit from timely emulation. XBC and BOTW are the only ones that really come to mind.

It's certainly gonna be interesting the next months. With a bit of luck there are some weaknesses in the DRM and we will see the first start of an emulator within the first year. Switch games should be a lot more emulator friendly despite being a custom chip.

I wonder if those hackers could make Switch games to run on Nvidia's Shield.

I mean, yes, the Shield has 1 less GB of RAM, but it doesn't have Nintendo's OS on it, and the SOC is the same.

That was the wierd thing about the ifixit tear down of a retail Switch is the Nvidia chipset still has Nvidia branding on it even though the Nintendo branding  appears elsewhere unlike the earlier teardown in China.  Normally there is Nintendo branding on such chips.

So I wondered if Nintendo didn't get their customised Nvidia SOC's in time and early Switches have the full X1 fitted with the 'Little' ARM processors disabled. Then it made me think if those chips aren't final maybe early Switches are actually hardware identical to development kit Switch's with different firmware and some point they could be hacked into development kit Switches.

We have seen how Switch seems to be in a very beta state in software maybe the hardware is too.

Maybe proper retail Switch's will come later. Maybe even the 4GB isn't actually the true memory capacity and when the final retail design comes it will only be 2GB and we have all been fooled by the first retail units being dev units with a retail firmware.

Maybe that will be a hack in a few months time, a blob of solder here and there and hey presto a dev kit for early adopters.

Whatever its certainly strange no Nintendo branding or co-branding on the main SOC. It could indicate a different type of agreement they have with Nvidia compared to AMD. I hope Nintendo have been sensible as Nvidia are known for being very cut-throat with both Sony and Microsoft not happy with previous dealings with them. I remember  Nvidia wanting full royalties for the original xbox even at the end of the life of the console which forced Microsoft to launch the 360 too early that cost them 100's of millions due to RROD.

I honestly doubt Nintendo is having problems with the SoC. After all, we've heard of dev. kits. since even before last year's E3.

The Nvidia branding could be simply because there is no customisation of the chip, with the "A2" lavel meaning that it's just an improved design of the original.

I'm also worried about what kind of deal did Nintendo get from Nvidia. Hopefully, Nvidia has learnt to be more flexible, after all they had no one using their products in the Wii U-PS4-X1 time frame, and they can't let developers get used to work around AMD GPUs in consoles and then port those games to PC, but who knows. Being in the hands of Nvidia is not a wise decision, they could decide to finish the production of the X1 in a couple of years and that would force Nintendo to either upgrade to an hypotetical X2 with the Switch 2 (or Pro), or starting from the ground again.

I hope a modding scene crops up around this game. Is it possible for this game to get a modding scene developing around it? Not sure since it runs off of an emulator...

That was my point they were using non customised chips because the customised chips are not ready yet but yes also they will never actually use customised chips is also an option they simply disable features they are not using on the X1. A lower cost option I guess and maybe allows an easy upgrade path for later Switch designs.

It was described as a customised chip though by Nvidia.

What if the early Switch's are using a 20nm process but when Nintendo's customised chips actually arrive they are 16nm? 

Emulation is cool but its rather fucked up that we have something emulating what was until very recently a current console.