With the Switch and PSVita being two of the most well-supported consoles in the homebrew community, we keep on getting more noteworthy stuff to keep an eye on. In this article, we’ll be looking at GameCard Installer for the Switch and Quick Power for the PSVita which are both pretty useful!

Switch Release: GameCard Installer NX, by TotalJustice, letting you install physical games on your console’s storage!

While the digital game era has been with us for quite a while and is becoming more popular as time goes on, numerous people still prefer cartridge games for a variety of reasons including the fear of getting banned from their main account due to using a CFW or to be able to sell them further down the line.

With GameCard Installer NX, you can get the benefits of digital games with physical games albeit with some limitations

However, physical cartridges have the disadvantages of needing to be carried around with you wherever you go but now, TotalJustice has gotten rid of that problem to a significant extent thanks to GameCard Installer NX!

Its name reveals that GameCard Installer NX is a homebrew utility, by TotalJustice, for hacked Nintendo Switch consoles that lets you install physical games from cartridges to your NAND (internal storage) or SD Card (microSD) in a simple way without having to deal with dumping the game and then installing it. Other than installing games to your Switch, the utility has a few more features up its sleeves which include:

• A pretty nice yet simple user interface that nicely mimics the user interface of the rest of the Switch’s UI
  • The interface displays information about the game cartridge, space requirements and available space
• Touchscreen support for easy navigation
  

  Progress bars and time estimates are also a thing so you know exactly how long you’ll be staring at your Switch’s screen

• The ability to properly install game carts that come with multiple games, you simply need to press the L/R triggers to cycle between the games
• Support for playing music while it’s doing its tasks
  • Simply drop MP3 files in ‘/switch/gamecard_installer/’
• The ability to clean placeholders on start-up and an error code system for easier troubleshooting if something doesn’t work correctly

It’s important to state that games installed with GameCard Installer NX can’t be used online as the cert isn’t installed. Furthermore, it is unclear whether installing games using the utility will lead to a ban from Nintendo’s servers although the developer has mentioned that the installed games use FS patches which might increase your chances of getting banned.

To grab GameCard Installer NX, check out its GitHub Release Page which also contains installation instructions.

PSVita Release: Quick Power, a nifty plugin by Cuevavirus

QuickPower is a simple yet useful plugin that adds power options to the Quick Menu

On the PlayStation Vita, the plugin saga continues and this time around, it’s come to the PSVita Quick Menu which is the menu that comes up when you long-press the PS button. The plugin featured today is called Quick Power by Cuevavirus of Team CBPS which, as its name suggests, adds the following abilities to the Quick Menu:

• Power Off
• Standby
• Restart (simply hold the Power Off button)

To grab QuickPower, download it from its GitHub Release Page, copy it to ux0:/tai or ur0:/tai and put it under the *main section as it’s a user-mode plugin.

Conclusion

In other news, there was the release of RetroArch 1.8.4 yesterday and the PSVita got yet another plugin called QAScreenshot which unlocks the QA screenshot implementation and results in non-watermarked BMP screenshots.