 Linus, imagine if you will, a Nintendo Switch that not only can play Zelda and Smash Bros, but can also run all your retro games with emulation, run all of your Xbox, PC, PlayStation games with game streaming, and even play Netflix. Let me try. Try to imagine. Oh, no, I can't. Too awesome. Well, that's fine because you don't have to imagine it. We installed Android on our Switch and it can do all those things. Look, I'm playing Halo right now. Wow. That's freaking awesome. It is. But hold on a second. I mean, is it worth your valuable time and possibly bricking your Switch to do this? Wait, hold on a second. This is my Switch. Uh, well, I mean, I think it's worth it. Right, but this is my Switch. Yeah, but it's definitely worth it, okay? Just like our sponsor, ORIGWALL-IT is the sleek way to keep WalletBallage down thanks to its compact frame and RFID blocking interplates. Check out their new patterns and use the offer code LINUS to save 10% and get free worldwide shipping. This is my first time actually seeing this and this trips me out so hard. Like, it shouldn't because a big part of the reason this is possible is that the Switch has way more in common with an Android device like your phone than it does with other game consoles. It's running an NVIDIA Tegra X1 processor with four ARM CPU cores and custom NVIDIA graphics. It's got four gigs of RAM, 720p touchscreen, and a 4310 milliamp hour battery. So a group called Switchroot, it's a great name. Yeah, it is. They set out to modify Android to run on the Switch, specifically Lineage OS, an open source fork of Android. Long story short, Switchroot totally worked and they published their results in July 2019 and people have been using Android on the Nintendo Switch since then. Let's get to how this is possible. Now we'll have links in the description with detailed instructions on how to do all this and shout out to XDA developers and the Switchroot subreddit. Very helpful when I was figuring all this out. In order to get into recovery mode, which you need to do in order to boot Android on this thing, you need to hold down power, volume up, and the system's home button, which is not the same as the Switch home button right there. The real home button can only be triggered by shorting two pins in the Joy-Con rail, which is down there. But I can't show you which ones because Nintendo's legal team is out for blood these days and we've got kids to feed. LTTStore.com. Speaking of which, yes, please check it out. The easiest way to do it is actually using something called an RCM jig. So it's this little 3D printed doohickey you can get on Amazon for a few bucks. So if $6 for a little thing like this is too rich for your blood and you're willing to risk accidentally shorting the wrong pins, you can also bend a paper clip. This is fine craftsmanship, right? I really like this. I did my best. So you can achieve the same result with a paper clip. But again, our understanding is that Nintendo might get real butt hurt if we show you exactly the shape of it to how to bend it. So it's blurred. But we do have links in the description. One more thing we're going to need. This SD card that's installed in the back of our Switch has already been flashed with Switch Root's Android fork. And if you're going to try this, it's really important to use the fastest SD card that you can find because otherwise system responsiveness and especially app launching speeds are going to be really slow. So now what? So we've actually already running Android on this right now. Okay, so we should undo some. We'll undo that. Okay, one moment, please. So now I'm triggering the system. The real home button. The real home button. And then we just... It's not a Linus Texas video. I have small hands. It's hard to hold the whole thing. Okay. Okay, so now I just press these two buttons. Yes. Boom. Hey, look at that. RCM okay. All right, so now we know that we're in the recovery mode. So from here, we're going to inject a payload. So now we are in the bootloader. So now we can disconnect because we don't need this anymore. Okay. And you got to do that every time? Yes. However, some people have developed these little USB-C dongles that are preloaded with it and you can just plug it in and then inject it and then you unplug it. So that would be how you do the real portable solution for us. Right. Connected to the laptop, we've booted into recovery mode and now... Can I click launch? No, that's not the right button Linus. You have to click more configs and then switch through to Android. Boom. And now we're booting into Android. Now this is going to take a little time because... SD card. Yes. And also it's all a little glitchy. You know, this is... I'm not a programmer but I understand that, you know, we're not dealing with consumer software here, okay? Can I put the Joy-Con back on now? You can but it won't register it because the only way that this tablet now can connect because it's just an Android tablet now. The only way that this can connect to these controllers is via Bluetooth. So it doesn't take very long. Well, yeah, but Bluetooth sucks. You suck. It's slow. Yeah, it is. You know, I want like, you know, low latency gaming. Okay, so what do we got here? We got some games, we got some streaming apps, we got some... Wow, Stadia. So I installed Stadia but Stadia doesn't actually work on this thing because it only works with pixels right now. But later it will. Yeah, later it will, okay. Look at this, you got an app drawer. Dolphin emulator? It's all there. Oh man, why does... It shouldn't surprise me but like, oh wow, like, you know, Wi-Fi is working and stuff. I mean, yeah, there's only so many like Wi-Fi chipsets out there. Right. Yeah, I guess. Exactly. Okay, my keyboard doesn't... Oh, okay, that... It takes a second. So this is the other thing. That did take a second, didn't it? Now, when you were talking about the SD card speed, I hadn't really thought about that much. Okay, look, just it warms up. It warms up, it needs... It's like a cold car engine, you know, it kind of just needs a second. I'm really like evangelizing this thing. I mean, it's cool. And you could tell that I was on the Netflix support page because the Netflix app doesn't actually work natively. You need to kind of trick the system into thinking your installation's legit. And I haven't done that yet. So Netflix actually... I know I said Netflix works in the intro but it doesn't actually work right now. But it can work. I just haven't done the stuff to make it work. Wow, this is slow. This is shockingly slow. Wait, where are you? What app are you? I'm trying to go to our forum. I'm on Chrome, but it's just like... Chrome is bad. Why do you hate Chrome? What, are you an Opera GX fanboy now? Gaming browser. That video really converted me, yeah. No, no, no, I'm saying Chrome is not so good on the Switch right now. Okay. Wow. Look at that. It's amazing how slow it is. So part of the reason you might be kind of getting glitchiness is because the touch screen is also like really, really finicky. Right. It's sometimes it registers double taps. Got it. So you kind of got to be very... Yeah, I'm not having that much trouble with it. Oh, there's one. Oh, there's one. You just got to believe. You're not believing hard enough. Slide that baby on. Okay. But like the actual Joy-Con connector here is now serving no purpose whatsoever. It's charging. So these can't... Some people were worried about that. So it is charging. Okay. But yeah, it's not a wired... It's not a physical connection. Okay, there it goes. Allow access to your contacts and call history. Well, it's not checked. What the hell? You don't have to do that. Well, you know what? Sure, why not? You don't want to give the Joy-Con? Hi, yeah, Riley. I just want to talk about the privacy concerns I have about your Joy-Con. Don't worry about it. It's fine. We've looked at everything. We double-checked the code. Okay. It is good to go. Perfect, thanks. All right. Okay, bye. See you later. Love you. I'll see you soon. Oh, God. Oh, God. Okay, sell down. Sell down. Load the core. What do you want to play? Let's play some SNES. Say load content. Downloads. So which one is a SNES game? Link to the past is Super Mario World. We're going to take that out of the video because that's a super easy... We don't want to get a copyright strike. Yeah. Okay, so we're going to use these controls. Yes. Which we could rebind. Retro is pretty sweet. Yeah. Look at this. Wait. Oh, it's not bound correctly. Oh, man. What? It's not what? Oh, it's not mapped. Yeah, that should be a... I think this is run X. You know what? It is fine. In terms of responsiveness? Yeah. It looks really good. I mean, I guess that makes sense. It's not like 720p isn't plenty for a game that's this old. Last I checked, the system might be rendering everything at 1080p instead of 720p, which means that we could potentially get even more performance. This is fine. Right? Yeah. That's what I'm saying. Okay, let's run something a little more different, as they say. Downloads. There's tactics. And we should stress that you should only emulate games you physically own. Because this was N64 era, right? PlayStation. PlayStation 1. Yeah. What do you mean N64 era? It's the PlayStation era. What are you, some kind of Nintendo fan voice? That's how I know I only had an N64. I didn't have any PlayStations. All my PlayStations were N64s. That was the station I played at. I had my workstation and my PlayStation. Okay, here we go. All right, we're in the game. This is actually running quite well. Like, look at that. So I can pan the cameras in the camera. I didn't know you could do that. This is impressive. Because even though the Tegra X1 absolutely is more powerful than the original PlayStation, emulating it has a ton of overhead. So the fact that this is running so smoothly is like just super cool to me. That's attesting to the Switch's power, and it's also attesting to RetroArch, which has like a million different emulators you can use. RetroArch is amazing. Oh boy. We off to a good start, boys? Okay, so- You can swim in Wind Waker. But you can't go underwater, just like Breath of the Wild, unfortunately. Huh, okay. So this game is actually a good example of what we're going to run into, which is that the Joy-Cons, I'm pretty sure in this game, they're not analog. Like, try to walk slow. Yeah, I see that. The joystick acts as like an eight-way D-pad. The Switch, when you don't run Android on it, normally has two performance settings for the GPU. One runs at 384 megahertz in portable mode, and then in docked mode, it runs in 768 megahertz. But Switchroot's build of Android gives you three profiles to pick from in the battery settings. Balanced, Quick, and the one we're using, Performance, which runs the GPU at 920 megahertz. So then even then, as you're seeing even the general Android UI, there's some chug there, and games, and in more demanding games, there's a bit of chug as well. But it is emulated, and it's doing a pretty good job. This is playable. Yeah. You know, by like, you know, console gaming standards, you know? We haven't got Wind Waker for Switch yet. Okay, well now we do. Nintendo does a great job of re-releasing all these things, but... Except when they don't. Except when they don't. Hey, there it is. Oof. Okay. Oof. Now... Hold on, wait for it. Just settle down. It's going, it's running fine. It's a little squishy. It's not the best. It's not the best. And it looks really soft, like it seems like we're actually rendering at a non-native resolution, and it's really affecting us on this one. Right. Yeah, so this is where that whole 720p versus 1080p thing comes into account. Let's do some streaming. So, we got Steam Link, Moonlight, you can use those for PC streaming. You got your Xcloud, because we're in the Xcloud preview. You got GeForce Now, so you got a number of options for that. Oof. A is the best. A is the jump. A is jump? Okay. Ooh, look at him go. I think the first time I got PC game streaming running on the Switch, I was kind of like... It's like a eureka moment, because you're like, wait, I have a Switch. I've used it for portable Nintendo gaming up until now. And now it's like, wait, this is opening the door here. I can play all my cool PC games that I want to play on my Switch. Xbox logo on a Switch. I've wanted to see that my whole life. Get them. What, you put me right in the middle of the... I'm gonna die. But you're not inverted. You have no excuse not to kill everybody now. Oh, Linus. Yeah, I mean, I'm not even dead. Okay, but how cool is this? It's Halo on a Switch. That is pretty cool. Okay, so as you're noticing, probably no analog input again with the joysticks. Now, they are working on a fix to enable analog input with the Joy-Cons. Yeah, that would be better. And apparently, in the next release of SwitchRoot, the next release of SwitchRoot is gonna be Android 9 Pie, because this is actually Android Oreo 8.1. What's the other really cool thing about the Nintendo Switch that you can do? You promised Netflix. I already talked about that. What's the other really cool thing you can do with a Switch? You can dock it to a TV. You can dock it. Let's go. Let's try that. All right. Come on. Ha! Look at that. Display cloning. And look at this. Because the controllers are Bluetooth, they still work. Right. And there's a... Wow, we're seeing some lag, dude. Now, we have two Xbox controllers connected to the Switch. We're gonna plug it in. We're gonna cross our fingers. See the light go... Hey! Okay. So now, let's go home. Let's go to... Stop. What are you doing? Stop. Stop it. What? Halo 5. Do it. Okay, so I have no idea whether this is gonna work, and there's probably gonna be some lag. I think it's fair to say there will be some lag. But I wanted to do it just to say that we played Halo 5 multiplayer... On a Switch. On a Switch. So we're gonna have lag from the Bluetooth controllers. Yes. We're gonna have lag from the weirdness of our dock solution here. We're gonna have lag from using game streaming from a remote server. And we're gonna have some lag from Wi-Fi. Yeah. Wait, how do you know when this is done? What kind of a progress bar is this? As meaningful a progress bar as Microsoft ever gives you. So Android is reading both of our controllers as one controller. Oh yeah. So here goes. Teamwork. You move, I aim. Okay. Get him. I'm supposed to shoot. Okay. I'm walking. Yes, indeed. Are you gonna aim at all or like... We're not gonna look where we're walking? We're just gonna... Oh! I think it only accepts input from one at a time. Oh, I see. I see how interesting. All right, we beat the game. Yeah. Yes. That is really cool. I mean, especially because we're not making any permanent changes to the system. It's basically impossible for Nintendo to remotely brick your console because of what you're doing here, which is awesome. But before you guys run out and try it, we were only able to do this because pretty soon after the Switch's launch, the homebrew community found this exploit in the Switch's recovery mode called Fusegla, which can be used to inject a bootloader. But unfortunately, shortly after that, Papa Nintendo found out what the kids were doing and fixed the vulnerability. But because the recovery mode is baked into the hardware level, they weren't able to patch it. So what Nintendo did was release a new patched Switch starting in about mid-2018. So if you bought a Switch before that, you can do this, probably. And if you bought one after that, you probably can't. By the way, if you like the dark science of installing OS's where they don't belong, make sure you're subscribed so you catch our upcoming video about making a Hackintosh laptop or as we call it, a hacktop coming soon. I was always really excited about this concept and I'm glad that we were actually able to do it because the possibility of running Android on a Switch is just so interesting to me. I held off buying a Switch, actually, until just last year. And since then, I love how portable it is, but yeah, you can get a controller and a mount and run emulators and stream games on your phone just fine. Right, for this Android side of the experience. If you want this, but it's just not the same as having a singular gaming device for Nintendo games, game streaming, retro games. And yes, I acknowledge the Switchwood project has a ways to go. And probably won't get where they would need to get to given that it's compatible only with early manufactured units of one console. It's true, it's true. But if they continue to refine the experience, I feel like this might be, this could be the ultimate gaming device, okay? Right, portable, docked, every console. That's cool. It's too bad you waited so long and ended up buying a console. Ended up with a non-modable. I can't do this on my Switch, so. But I did it on yours. And that's what's important. The good news is you can buy a Switch, I used one online, and if you ask for the serial number, you can throw it into a utility to find out if it's hackable. So maybe that's your solution, Riley. Maybe, maybe. Sell my Switch, buy another one, an older model. Good luck with that. Weird. Speaking of things to be lucky about, it's lucky I had this segue in my back pocket. Wow. Manegear's Vector Gaming Laptop is available at 25 Micro Center locations, as well as on Amazon. It's $99.99 at MicroCenter.com and $1199.99 on their Amazon listing. It features a Core i7-9750H processor at 2.6 GHz base, NVIDIA GeForce GTX 1660 Ti graphics, 16 gigs of DDR4 memory, a 512 gig NVMe All-State drive, and a 15.6 inch 144Hz Fully-PG display. Check it and other Micro Center specials out now at the links in the video description. Cannot aim for crap on this thing. Well, there it is, guys. If you're looking for something else to watch now, why don't you go check out part four of our Hack Pro build? What actually happens in that video? It's been such a journey. We show Apple what's up.