this post was submitted on 08 Jun 2025
18 points (84.6% liked)

Nintendo

21148 readers
286 users here now

A community for everything Nintendo. Games, news, discussions, stories etc.

Rules:

  1. Stay on topic.
  2. No NSFW content.
  3. No hate speech or personal attacks.
  4. No ads / spamming / trolling / self-promotion / low effort posts / memes etc.
  5. No linking to, or sharing information about, hacks, ROMs or any illegal content. And no piracy talk. (Linking to emulators, or general mention / discussion of emulation topics is fine.)
  6. No console wars or PC elitism.
  7. Be a decent human (or a bot, we don't discriminate against bots... except in Point 8).
  8. All bots must have mod permission prior to implementation and must follow instance-wide rules. For lemmy.world bot rules click here
  9. Links to Twitter, X, or any alternative version such as Nitter, Xitter, Xcancel, etc. are no longer allowed. This includes any "connected-but-separate" web services such as pbs. twimg. com. The only exception will be screenshots in the event that the news cannot be sourced elsewhere.

Upcoming First Party Games (NA):

Game | Date

|

Donkey Kong Bananza [S2] | Jul 17 Drag x Drive [S2] | Aug 14 Pokémon Z-A | Oct 16 Hyrule Warriors: Age of Imprisonment [S2] | 2025 Kirby Air Riders [S2] | 2025 Metroid Prime 4 | 2025 The Duskbloods [S2] | 2026 Rhythm Heaven: Groove | 2026 Tomodachi Life: Living the Dream | 2026 Spaltoon Raiders [S2] | TBA

[S2] means Switch 2 only.

Other Gaming Communities

founded 2 years ago
MODERATORS
slimerancher@lemmy.world
CosmicSploogeDrizzle@lemmy.world
CosmicSploogeDrizzle@lemdro.id
picandocodigo@lemmy.world
18
Does a game key card cart have to be in the Switch to play the game or is it not needed after the game has been redeemed? (lemmy.world)
submitted 3 weeks ago by JimVanDeventer@lemmy.world to c/nintendo@lemmy.world
22 comments fedilink hide all child comments
 

Like, is it an eshop game at that point or some sort of worst of both worlds situation?

you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
[–] semperverus@lemmy.world 12 points 3 weeks ago (1 children)

So, I have a hacked switch 1 and I can assure you that any game that has had a "complete overhaul post launch" still uses about 80% of the data on the cartridge. Or rather, it loads the entirety of the cartridge, and then every update to the game after that gets strapped on top of it to overwrite whichever sections of the game it needs to or adds new stuff.

So let's take animal crossing for example. If there were 2 major updates for Animal Crossing, youd have something akin to the following list of files:

  • Animal Crossing New Horizons.nsc [8 GiB] (the cartridge itself, if you dumped it - in this case we're referring to the actual cart itself here though)

  • base.nsp [16 B] (some kind of token file for DLC attach points or something)

  • 184810dheincoiepn02.nsp [300 MiB] (patch 1)

  • 01849...ahd4819.nsp [24 MiB] (patch 2)

The switch loads the entirety of the cartridge, then it loads the base patch over the top of it to hook into the right location, then it loads patch 1 over the top of that, then it loads patch 2 over the top of patch 1, base, and the cartridge. Theoretically you could delete the latest update file and still have a working downgraded game. No original data is lost.

[–] the_joeba@lemmy.world 3 points 3 weeks ago

That's not a complete overhaul, I'm talking about something like Fortnite from 8 years ago to now. That's no shared code left. That's not a game that came on cartridge, obviously, but Animal Crossing only got a few tweaks and some additional content. It isn't an example of what a key card represents.