Making a €40 USB-C hub work as a Nintendo Switch 2 dock
blog.nozomi.spaceI’ve done similar hacks and I love how LLMs turned them from month-long projects to a couple of weeks.
Claude used to work best IMHO but their “safety” change has made it near useless. Luckily local models are getting better.
It would be nice if this would be somehow an open source script, so not everyone needs to burn its own tokens to do it.
I'll try to publish the sources on github! Needs a small cleanup
Is it the same quirk as with the Switch 1?
It also had USB-C and didn't work with regular docks/hubs. There was one obscure hub though that works perfectly fine with the Switch 1.
I believe Switch 1 also does the Nintendo Alt mode thing before it engages DP Alt mode, but the exact handshake is different (since Switch 2 docks dont work with Switch 1 and vice versa)
Curious to hear why they did this to begin with.
I can understand the warranty aspect: they don’t necessarily want to be in the hook when users stuffs up the port using a janky 20-in-1 USB-C hub.
Why play around with the VRR and HDR side of things too?
Edit: I know someone will say ‘because they want to sell more docks’, but it already comes with the console… the market for people buying multiple docks I doesn’t justify the development and manufacturing costs.
Apple used to e-mark every single charging cable, and even ban unauthorized ones - despite every iPhone having one included in the box.
Don't underestimate the corporate greed when it comes to selling accessories. The razor-and-blades model is very, very attractive to many.
It's likely for licensing revenue, I mean Sony and Microsoft does it for their game controllers, and if you want to sell a third party controller that works with their console "legitimately" you need to pay them a license, or else the game controller may not pass the authentication handshake.
The HDR / VRR thing feels like they just took shortcuts instead of doing it properly according to standard DP mechanisms (DPCD registers and infoframes). Why check a DPCD capability register for VRR if you can just check if the dock version is new enough? Although it doesn't feel like much of a shortcut, but who knows...
IMHO, their USB-C-ish is frustrating. Same shape but not all chargers work. But on the flip side, understand what they're doing.
Nintendo is not making a USB-C computer, they're making a _product_ or a cohesive system.
They do not want you plugging in an arbitrary charger (which may not have the right wattage), don't want you laying the switch face up (nubs on the controllers getting in the way), face down (scratching the screen), plugging in a usb-c controller and dragging the spiderweb of wires off the entertainment center, or trying to use the touch screen while attached to a TV.
They wanted a vertical dock that managed airflow, charged at the appropriate rate, and guided you away from asking why you couldn't have some janky setup where you're trying to treat it like a gameboy advance (local screen simultaneous to big TV) being held by kindergarteners who pull the TV off the stand).
...so the dock is effectively a sacrificial buffer/safety system to prevent your switch from causing damage to your TV.
> They do not want you plugging in an arbitrary charger (which may not have the right wattage)
Why not? The standard deals with such a situation fine… There is zero danger, the PD contract wouldn’t be able to negotiate, so the system could just indicate with an LED or a message on the screen or something to show it’s not going to be able to start charging without a bigger charger. This is literally a solved problem.
Aren't these issues that Nintendo has to solve to maintain compliance with modern compatibility laws, rather than roadblocks for them to use to inhibit consumer ease-of-use? If the wattage is wrong then the Switch 2 can say that and either slow charge or not charge at all. The other issues are all purely user preference.
ackhsually it charges using any USB charger i throw at it, even fast charge with lenovo / dell / monitors'
(it would have been a dream if it could just send video to the monitor via USB C + DP)
Per el goog it seems like it needs USB-C/PD, so any "modern" USB-C-to-USB-C will probably work, this was likely a remembered experience of mine in the more USB-A to USB-C era with random USB-A wall-bricks that weren't matching the switch's expectations.
And agree how awesome it would be if it were "just a USB-C device", but if you put yourself in Nintendo's shoes there are some fairly rational desired outcomes that making it dock-centric rather than encouraging "loose on a tabletop with an unknown number of cords plugged in and going different directions".
i definetly charged mine last week with an old brick from way before USB PD, it takes an ungodly amount of time (same as with my phone)
i really have to buy a couple of new ones
Because they are Nintendo, that's why.
DS Lite famously had a silly proprietary connector for charging, which required their special wall charger... which was literally a 5V charger. It could have been mini/micro USB from the beginning, but no.
The 3DS was similar but actually used yet another type of connector. It's very common to find aftermarket chargers that have a USB-A on one end and a split dual DS+3DS connector on the other.
Both generations of console technically take 4.6v and not 5v, but in practice it doesn't matter. That may be why Nintendo didn't just make it micro USB directly (or why they never sold an official USB-A charger for the DS/3DS, only ever wall-wart) though.
Funnily enough, with some wiggling you could literally jam a normal mini usb cable in there and it would charge perfectly fine. They changed the connector size ever so slightly just to prevent that.
> doesn’t justify the development and manufacturing costs
At Nintendo scale, I bet it does though
Every single laptop vendor deals with this. Ipads, desktops, you name it. Nintendo are simply not anywhere near industry baseline here.
That is, Nintendo intentionally used a widely-used, well-specified standardised connector and protocol, and chose to make their implementation subtly non-compliant in several ways. And there is no discernible good reason to do so (as far as I know it’s not like they actually needed to do anything special, stock-standard, compliant USB-C would work perfectly fine).
Exactly. It would be understandable if they took the connector and implemented something custom entirely. But they spent engineering effort on altering the official, already working spec, to subtly break it. This was completely intentional.
just like apple does!
It's for licensing, and having to request approval for the secret sauce.
I use a third party thunderbolt dock, third party storage, third party keyboard adapter for a vintage Apple keyboard, third party monitor, speakers, camera, NAS, chargers.
What subtle, proprietary changes does Apple make to standardized connections that require Apple branded devices?
i'm talking about two things specifically: MFi, whatever they did to deviate from BLE for airpods advanced modes.
There was also something specific for Apps to make them behave as you want with accessories, you had to go through something simillar to MFi or work around with hacks.. but i really don't remember what that was called. we made do with workarounds years ago and never thought about it anymore