Nintendo don't want to admit this, but their attempts to stop or even slow down people's ability to hack their consoles' firmware have been completely ineffective. As is the nature of computers, there is no such thing as an unhackable system, thus, no matter how many safeguards or traps Nintendo deploys in their native firmware, industrious hackers unafraid of lawyers or jail will eventually find the permanent solution. This is already the case with the Wii, Wii U, and 3DS, and it will be so for the Switch in due course.
The other thing Nintendo don't want to acknowledge is that jailbreaking is good. They want to maintain a constant pop culture presence, but how is one expected to play Nintendo games when they're officially behind 2 paywalls at the same time? Jailbreaking offers players the ability to play everything, from the original Super Mario Bros. on up to Wonder, the original Legend of Zelda on up to Tears of the Kingdom, and all the relatively smaller-time franchises that were once game industry juggernauts, such as James Bond, Gex, and Bubsy.
In my particular use-case, it rekindled my childhood Super Mario obsession. I would have loved the future, from a standpoint of Mario stuff. A feature film? Toys and figurines? Shirts and hats? Hell yes! To say nothing of being able to play all the Mario games ever released on a single game system. Send a jailbroken Switch with all the Mario games ever released and some Mario merch back in time to 1733 S. 43rd Street, Lincoln Nebraska USA, June 11 1998, please. A full list will be provided upon request.
By jailbreaking my 3DS, I've been able to play all the Mario games released for it, as well as those from Nintendo DS, Game Boy Advance, and Game Boy. Through my computer-side emulators, I've been able to play all the console Mario games, too... except, of course, Wii, Wii U, and Switch. While Dolphin can play Wii games natively, and I have all the Mario ones in my datahoard, I don't have any way of actually using the motion controls on my computer. That's why I want to find a Wii U and jailbreak it, so I can get all those games off my computer and back onto the sitting room TV.
I'm not exaggerating when I say that jailbreaking reopened a door that the economy and my own depression forced shut. Nintendo wanted too much money for games and consoles, and my interest was waning anyway. When I shifted flats in 2007, my depression was able to manifest itself much more readily, and it sapped my enthusiasm for games almost completely; only The Sims and GoldenEye 64 managed to survive it. You know, that's a good point, too: had it not been for the Project64 emulator, I would have totally lost Nintendo, quite likely forever. GoldenEye was the one thread that still connected me to my childhood and, even though an incident with my GameShark bricked my N64, I was able to continue playing the games on my computer. Going to college in 2011, I was able to renew my vows to N64 with a Mayflash USB adapter for my controller, allowing me to play Super Mario 64 again; as well as expand into Super NES. This was a game system I had wanted to get into, but then the N64 was released at a lower price and I had to settle for it. Well, at the time I felt I was settling. Obviously the N64 was new, the SNES was about 3 years away from being discontinued, and I'd be one of the gamer kids at school because I had the current system. But, there was a Super Mario World-shaped void in my heart that Super Mario 64 just couldn't fill. Even now, it makes me happy and gives me some childlike giddiness to hear the opening notes of the SMW overworld theme. It makes me think about how lucky I am to be able to play it whenever I want to.
I guess, what I'm getting at is this. The only reason Nintendo started out so diametrically opposed to the idea of emulation and firmware hacking in the first place was the Atari Shock (the event Wikipedia calls the Video Game Crash of 1983). Atari VCS could be emulated on the Colecovision and you could even build one from off-the-shelf parts from Radio Shack. Nintendo developed their firmware in secret and used special screws to hold the NES together so people couldn't see how it worked. Anyone with a knowledge of Atarisoft BASIC and 6502 assembly language could make a game for Atari VCS. Nintendo required developers to buy special hardware from them and locked them into contracts so they couldn't develop for any other system for five years. Even if you did manage to crack the code and make a theoretically-compatible game for NES, if you didn't have the proprietary CIC chip, you couldn't disengage the lockout and your code would not execute. This "control freak" business model may have helped Nintendo step over Atari and Sega back in the '80s, but what it's turned into over the years is a paranoid distrust of their customer base. It's never a good sign when you treat your customers like potential thieves.
Anyway, despite all their efforts to prevent me doing it, I've gotten back into my childhood obsession with Mario. Sorry for loving Super Mario World to the point of innovation; it will happen again.
--10 February 2024--