Impact of MIG Switch ROM cart on legit games / consoles

[orange808]

Is Ninty doing that?

If Nintendo is using cart ID (that consists of a public key and hash) based on a set of internal private software IDs that are assigned in a non sequential order, it would be very difficult to guess the cart IDs.

You should be able to run a check on the hash and public key portions of the cart ID locally at runtime to verify it's (somewhat) "genuine". It not, you refuse to boot the cart, pop an error, and phone home.

Nintendo could obviously use heuristics (based on system logs and online information) to identify carts that were used simultaneously. They could also maintain a catalog of cart IDs and their associated games (including region) without risking their private set of keys. The real cart IDs should be private keys stored on an air gapped server. If your public key doesn't match the expected game (or it matches an unassigned internal key), you ban hammer the user.

That would force pirates completely offline. You could also add a few wrinkles to trip up the offline pirates and make them install a custom OS.

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[fernan1234]

The real impact will be on the people who work on installing mod chips on Switch consoles. There's been a big market for these services outside of North America and Western Europe (and Japan of course). Maybe a lot of the fear mongering is coming from those modders who are going to see their business undercut by these carts.

[ZellSF]

I'm also wondering if topics like this (not necessarily this one) are a way to advertise these devices on places that don't allow for piracy.

A topic saying "this device allows you to play roms on your Switch" wouldn't be allowed a lot of places where "how this device that allows you to play roms on your Switch threatens the used game marked" could be. But both inform you of the device all the same.

[ASDR]

I started this topic because while the existence of the cart was covered pretty much everywhere I haven't seen much discussion of this issue. For instance Modern Vintage Gamer made a video on the cart but I don't think he even mentioned this.

[Rulumi]

You need the Card ID, Certificate and unique ID. The Card ID is the same for all game cards of the same version so that's not a problem.

For the Certificate and unique ID, you can really use the one from any game with any game, so I guess who really just wants to pirate will just use the same ones with every game they pirate. Wether is safe to go online in the future with a different game UID, I'm not sure.