 I'm not kidding when I say that this video could be gone tomorrow. Nintendo's unleashed their army of lawyers for less than all I've done. But I managed to smuggle it out. Here. This is what they don't want you to see. Hey, what are you doing? Hey, get over here! What's up? What's up? BEEP Nintendo games? On the Steam Deck? It's more likely than you think. Nintendo would never do it. In fact, they took down videos from smaller YouTubers for just showing it. But as much as they'd like to do the same to me, everything you're about to see is perfectly above board and has obvious benefits to you, the Nintendo gamer. Like saving you the trouble of packing your Switch and game carts whenever you go out. And I'll save you the trouble of not having to listen to this sponsor segue by giving it to you anyway. KiwiCo. KiwiCo sends out crates that contain hands-on projects for kids and teens to help develop creativity, confidence, and problem-solving skills. Learn more at the end of the video or at the link down below. MUSIC Before we get to the how-to, let's have a look at the experience. My Steam library's got a bunch of Switch games just chilling in it, including all of the artwork. And if I launch one, it just loads up like any other game. Just... MUSIC There we go. I even get playtime stats. It does take a little bit longer than usual because it has to load shaders and stuff. But once it's done, well, you'll see. Or maybe you won't. Because Nintendo is famously litigious. And we may or may not actually show this on YouTube. Ooh, Mario Kart 8. All right, that's not A. Ah, one thing about the Steam Deck. A is not A in terms of the Switch, because if you look at the Switch, A is in fact the right-hand side. All right, let's just do a Grand Prix. Let's just do it at the 50cc because I'm a games journalist. I mean, so far, everything seems very smooth. And that's honestly been my experience with pretty much every game that I've played. Yeah, check that out. A little bit of a stutter there. I mean, it looks like Mario Kart and it plays like Mario Kart. In fact, it plays better than you would typically be able to play with Mario Kart on the standard Switch because you've got way better sticks. I'm not the best person in the world at Mario Kart. This is basically 60 FPS. If it's dropping, it's dropping very seldomly. The input lag seems pretty good too. All right, let's pop out of Mario Kart 8 Deluxe here. Let's try Smash. Let's do it. Now, I will freely admit that if I'm bad at Mario Kart, I am very bad at Smash. OK, so there's some shader compilation lag there. Oh, a lot of shader compilation lag. This is stuff that will happen basically the first time. After the shader is compiled, you basically don't have to worry about it anymore. As you can see, it is now pretty solid in terms of frame rate. And the stage changed again. So that threw a wrench in that. But yeah, as you can see, it picks right up. And now it's actually very good. I actually have no idea what this item is. It's like a weird version of the Fire Flower from Smash 64. Well, I mean, I didn't win that. That was bad. But, you know, the actual performance is pretty good, at least after the shaders are finished compiling. Sorry all these clips are blurred. We believe that fair use protects gameplay footage for the purposes of creating reviews and tutorials. But Nintendo believes otherwise and has proven to be aggressively litigious about third party exhibition of their games and has repeatedly misused the DMCA to punish third parties when they feel that they're being harmed in some other way. Even if there is no law against whatever you're doing. Nothing is blurred over on flowplain.com. Of course, by this point, I'm sure you've got some questions. Like, why bother if I'm still using a handheld anyway? Valve's Steam Deck is way bulkier to carry, and it has less battery life than the Switch. But it's tough to deny that a full PC is a more versatile device. So if I wanted to carry just one handheld, this is my only real option. This isn't to say that the Steam Deck is a superior console. I mean, for one, it lacks Switch Grade Motion Controls and HD Rumble. I just want to avoid packing two handhelds for travel once I finally get my Steam Deck. This one is minuses that you can plainly see. If you're with me so far, your next question has to be, how do I get this into this? One word, jailbreak. Here's a list of everything we'll need to get going. And while most of it is free, the big one that's not and might be hard to find is a jailbroken or jailbreakable Switch. There's a great write-up by Aaron Donald over on Alphar with a listing of serial number ranges that you can use to figure out if your Switch is moddable. But the TLDR is that any Switch purchased within about the first year or so should work just fine. It just so happens that the Switch I borrowed from one of our new hires is a very early serial number. The other big piece of hardware is the RCM jig. You can get one like this on Amazon for about $5, which we will link below. But what these are doing at the end of the day is simply jumping some pins on the right Joy-Con rail to place it in recovery mode. Here are some other methods if you're inclined to hack a spare Joy-Con. An old one that's got stick drift is a good candidate since this will definitely void the Joy-Con's warranty. Fair warning, by the way, if you go any further, I wouldn't recommend connecting your Switch to Wi-Fi. Maybe this is the excuse you've been waiting for to pick up a Switch Lite or OLED for daily driving. I'll be using this excellent guide by the Nintendo Homebrew Discord server, and you can find download links for everything there as well. Once you've got a hackable Switch and the jig, go ahead and power off the console and slide the jig into place at the very bottom of the right Joy-Con rail. Hold the volume up button while pressing power, and you should see a blank screen with no backlight. Congratulations, you're in recovery mode. That's actually a good thing. If not, power off and try again. It might help to take a sip from a water bottle from lttstore.com, soon to be available in Chungus 64 ounces, although this video might be down by the time that's true. Now, launch the app on your PC, Mac, or Android host device, or perhaps you might even use the Steam Deck here, and plug in the USB cable. Before we can proceed with a full jailbreak, we'll first need to partition our SD card using Tegra Explorer. So make sure you've made a backup of anything you have on the SD card. Select the Tegra Explorer payload and send it to launch it on the Switch. Select partition the SD, then FAT32 plus MU MMC. Once it's done, select Reboot to RCM and eject the SD card. Insert the SD card into your host device and copy these files to the SD card. Not all the stuff that's listed in the guide is strictly necessary for what we're doing today, but the bootloader, Hecate, Goldleaf, Atmosphere, DBI, and Lockpick are non-negotiable. Move the SD card back into the Switch and inject the Hecate payload. Using the Switch's touchscreen, select MU MMC and then Create. Once that finishes, choose Change MU MMC and select SD RAW 1. Before we can move on from Hecate, we'll also need the Switch's unique hardware keys. So we'll select Payloads and then choose Lockpick RCM. On this screen, you'll need to use the volume buttons to navigate up and down and the power button to select. We're specifically after the SysNAND, so select that and it should dump out to the SD card under the Switch folder. We'll copy these into the emulator's keys folder later. Now we can launch custom firmware. Go back into recovery mode and inject Hecate again. Go to Launch, then Atmosphere. Damn, you are now in custom firmware, which you can verify in Settings. Now we can launch the Homebrew menu by holding R and launching a game that's currently installed. The first thing we need to do is dump the system files needed by a few games by going to Goldleaf and then Explore Content. Go to Console, Memory, System, and then copy all of the items there into the SD card. Exit Goldleaf. Now it's finally time to dump some games. Launch DBI, choose Run MTP Responder, then plug the Switch into your computer. Bam, look at that. You've got your SD card, your installed game, your saves, and your game card, that's everything. Backing up is as simple as copying the files, though you don't need both the trimmed and not trimmed files from your game card. Trimmed should be fine, unless you want a perfect backup, including the garbage data that fills the unused space on the card. With our keys in the games, all we need now is emulation software. I'll say upfront that Switch emulation isn't perfect yet, but many games do run just fine. Installing one of the two available Switch emulators, Yuzu or Ryujinx, is pretty straightforward, but both require that the deck be in desktop mode to configure. First, open up the Discover Store to grab them from FlatHub. We'll use Yuzu as an example here. You don't need to disable the read-only file system for this, just FYI. Once downloaded, open Yuzu, and it'll complain that there aren't any keys. We have a solution to that. Go to File, then open Yuzu folder. See that Keys folder in there? Copy those keys from earlier into there, and while you're at it, copy the system folder we backed up with Goldleaf into the NAND folder, then restart the emulator. From here, there's a few options we should configure for the emulator, starting with disabling this setting, which would make exiting from the deck UI frustrating. Next, in Controls, we want to emulate a Switch Pro Controller and make sure that the emulator itself is using our Steam Virtual Gamepad, which should automatically map everything correctly for us. Then, in Graphics, we should make sure that we're set to 1x native resolution and running borderless windowed mode for later. Then, under Advanced, make sure Fast GPU Time is enabled. You can disable it per game later, but I've found that you generally get better performance with it on. Finally, set Fullscreen under View, then on the bottom strip, you'll see some options. Click on Docked to change it to Handheld for better battery life and performance, since we only have a 720p-class screen anyway. Go ahead and copy over the games you backed up from your Switch to an easy-to-remember folder like your downloads, and point the emulator to it. Ha ha, yes, Switch games. Try running one here to make sure everything works. And don't worry, it's normal for a minor stuttering to happen during load screens or when shaders are compiling for the first time. They'll either go away soon or happen when they're least likely to be problematic. Now, it's time to integrate all of this into Steam. While still in Desktop mode, open up Discover and look for Steam ROM Manager. Install that and fire it up. Under Community Presets, type yuzu and choose the Flatpak version. It'll automatically set everything up for you except for your ROMs folder, which you'll have to set to where you copied your games earlier. Click Save and then Test to make sure that the games show up. With that done, go to the Settings page and select your Steam directory. This will be here under Home. Finally, go to the Preview page and click on Generate App List. If all looks good, click Save App List. Now log out and go back into your library on the main deck UI. Check it out. In the non-Steam games list, there's all your Steam games. You can even use this for other console emulators too. Now, there are some drawbacks to this approach, like you're not able to use Nintendo's online services, which could be a deal breaker for you. To be clear, you can play multiplayer games, but only via local play or via local wireless through Ryu Jinx's LDN build, which is a bit tougher to set up on the Steam Deck by actually quite a lot. That's a tough pill to swallow for some after all of those hoops you already had to jump through. There are also benefits though, like easy backups of save games without Nintendo Online. I mean, I'll certainly sleep better knowing that a lost Switch doesn't mean hours of lost game progress. And while the first generation Steam Deck with modern emulators doesn't offer any performance advantages over a real Switch, that will change in the future. And you could expect to run games at higher frame rates or resolutions, or even with experimental mods on better hardware. And nothing we're doing here is, in my opinion, immoral or unethical. For those who are concerned about the damage that piracy does to game developers, you can rest easy knowing that we didn't download any roms or firmware from the internet, and we didn't circumvent any protections. We got the games and keys to decrypt them, fair and square from our own device, using its own firmware recovery mode. That matters legally, even if it is a little less clear cut than the AACS decryption keys leaked back in the day. But why is this so contentious? That Nintendo fans will call you a bad person for doing it? Well, I already talked a little bit about how Nintendo is right to fear piracy in our previous legal emulation video, especially now that there's a similarly priced handheld that can also run nearly every PC game ever and the back catalogs of nearly every historical console. With that being said, if you don't turn around and distribute the keys or roms, in our opinion, you haven't done anything wrong. Nintendo, of course, doesn't seem to care. They went so far as issuing a DMCA takedown of the Fox's video showing the Steam Deck running Switch games despite him neither showing nor suggesting where to get the ROM files. I guess now we'll see if they have the appetite to pick a fight with a bigger fish doing a full guide. You can probably guess at this point that we have something of a love-hate relationship with Nintendo. I mean, as a known Sega kid, I obviously have a little bias, but even ignoring the responses to the Fox's video, you'll need only look at how Nintendo treats their own biggest fans to see why, despite the wellspring of creativity and childhood memories they represent, they're kinda dicks about it. Sega, meanwhile, is surprisingly chill overall, so I feel pretty vindicated, but it doesn't stop people like Linus or even me from continuing to give Nintendo their money, even if Linus would feel awkward taking theirs. The thing is, one of Nintendo's longest held beliefs is that emulation itself is piracy, that you're only allowed to play the games that you buy on original media with the original hardware. Every legal precedent that I know of has leaned otherwise, and Nintendo to date has yet to score victories in court against anyone who hasn't been actively distributing ROMs of their IP. If they tried, my gut tells me that the US courts would side with the individual, but I guess there's only one way to find out, and only one way to find out of our sponsor. KiwiCo. KiwiCo is a monthly subscription of fun, engaging STEM projects for kids and teens, designed by experts that believe if you start learning the small things today, you can produce world-changing ideas tomorrow. 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If you wanna find out how to get retro games on here as well, go check out our previous video on how to dump your games and why you really should before it's too late.