Nowadays, the Nintendo Switch scene has quite a few active developers and as a result, many interesting pieces of homebrew are surfacing. In recent days, we got a Half-Life 1 port and a patched YouTube app with extra features along with an Atmosphère update!

Half-Life 1 ported to the Nintendo Switch

Like the PSVita, the Nintendo Switch is getting its own share of homebrew game ports and this time, it got a port of Half-Life 1. This port, like Vita one, is based on the Xash3D engine which is an open-source implementation of Valve’s GoldSrc engine.

Xash 3D was ported to the Switch by developer “Datamats” and is at the current state:

• Performance is pretty good with the framerate hovering around the 60FPS mark in the opening level
• Sound and voices work fine
• Loading levels and making saves may be slow due to the speed of I/O operations on SD cards. As a result, it’s recommended you turn off auto-saving in Xash3D’s configuration file (by adding “sv_autosave 0”) to avoid long pauses during gameplay.
• The game menu may be a little laggy

To get Half Life on your Nintendo Switch, follow this link and grab the NRO file. As Half Life 1 isn’t a free game, you must provide game files yourself as they aren’t provided in the aforementioned NRO file.

Patched YouTube App and Atmosphère 0.7.5 released

Earlier this week, the Nintendo Switch finally received an official YouTube application which you could download via the eShop. Obviously, those with a banned console couldn’t get this application and so, a patched version of the YouTube app was made.

Apart from working on banned consoles, this patched YouTube app also brings along some goodies including:

• Support for FW 5.1.0 and newer
• Doesn’t require a linked account to work
• HDCP was disabled so you can stream it to TVs/monitors that don’t support this technology
• Restrictions on taking screenshots and recording the screen (video capture) while using the app have been lifted
• Age restrictions and crash reporting have been disabled

Other than a Half-Life port and a patched YouTube app, the Nintendo Switch also received an updated Atmosphère CFW. Atmosphère 0.7.5 brings about a couple of improvements over 0.7.4 which are:

• Faster (200-400%) boot time due to the addition of DRAM training in fusee-secondary
• Creport, the process creating error reports, had its code region detection improved

Conclusion

If you encounter any bugs with the software mentioned in this article, report them to their respective authors in the in-link links above. As always, be clever when using your Nintendo Switch online as Nintendo seems to like banning hacked consoles!

 

N.B: Please note that I could not test the software mentioned in this article as I currently do not own a Switch. The best efforts have been made to report accurate information through online research! – Aurora.