Bring Your Nintendo Switch To The Cloud With Raspberry Pi 4

A Pi In The Sky!

As Hackaday reasonably points out, the mobile nature of the Nintendo Switch makes it a perfect device for cloud gaming services; something which has completely escaped Nintendo’s attention even years after launch.  They figured out how to make the cartridges taste bad instead of giving you the option to drop them completely.  This can change, with a bit of work and a passing familiarity with Raspberry Pi.

The project involves using an HMDI capture device which talks to RasPi’s hardware video encoder to capture and then stream content from a running Nintendo Switch dock, which is then streamed out to web.  Your input is captured with the help of Adafruit’s Trinket MO which they specifically designed to interface with Switch controllers, or in this case to emulate one,  which communicates via the Pi’s UART connection.  This design does have a wee bit of latency, in the neighbourhood of 100ms, so it is best suited for slower paced titles unless you really like to frustrate yourself.

You will also need some cloudy software, currently provided by SurrogateTV who happen to be the employer of the enterprising soul which developed this project.  At the moment you need to apply to that provider to get hold of the SDK you will need to tie all the parts together, but it should be opened up to public access in the near future.  

Drop by for a look at the project, as well as the various hardware involved over at Hackaday.