December Days 2021 #28: A Switch
Dec. 28th, 2021 11:42 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
silveradept[Welcome to December Days, where I natter on about things organized around a theme (sometimes very loosely), one a day, for 31 days. This year, we're taking a look back at some touchpoints along the way of my journey with computing and computing devices.]
I skipped the Wii U as a console, since I didn't get it when it came out, and it was pretty difficult to find a used one shortly after it came out, and it was quickly replaced by the system that I do have, the Nintendo Switch. (I suspect that if I want to emulate a Wii U, Dolphin probably has that capability by now.) Since the Wii and its motion controls, Nintendo had been trying to do a significant amount of innovation from console to console. The Wii U's innovation was a controller with a touch screen on it, which could be used as a second screen for certain games to display information or a secondary interface to manipulate the game on the television screen with, or it could have the video output of the console beamed to it for gaming within range of the Wii U. The GamePad was even equipped with the same kind of sensor bar that worked with the Wiimote and Wiimote Plus games and controllers, so you could still play motion control games while beaming to the GamePad. The Wii U was also really good with backward compatibility, including a complete Wii environment to play all the nice games with and a utility that would help transfer old Wii saves to the new console …not that all of them necessarily wanted to go that way. In seeing what the Switch is, a lot of its innovations are things that are carried over from the Wii U system and its decisions. Things that aren't explained by the Wii U almost certainly come from Nintendo's line of handheld devices, heartening all the way back to the Game Boy of my childhood times. Game Boys and Nintendo DSes have been extremely portable and good at providing reasonable run times for their battery consumption (except the original Game Boy, but it was a first offering that wasn't a Game and Watch type game, playing one game with limited available positions for the game to represent) and working mostly with small screens (excepting for the XL versions of the 2DS and the 3DS).
What were get in the Switch, then, is a device that primarily functions as a high-powered handheld console with a touch screen. It's a much bigger handheld device than all of the previous handheld offerings from Nintendo by far, but it also means not having to swap between a handheld and a fixed console when desired. The lower resolution for the small monitor also helps with battery longevity, and I suspect in handheld mode that the processor doesn't run as quick and with as many cores when it can get away with not using them. One of those things that I've learned about processors, especially those on mobile SoC, is that they have ways of adjusting their own clock speeds in anticipation of what kind of needs are forthcoming, so that many of them have a lowest, battery-saving idle processor speed and can step up their intensity to the maximum rated clock speed on the processor when things that require intense processing come down the pipe. This was something that was advertised as far back as the Atom processors on Pyrrha and Nora, and changing the governing profile on smartphones and tablets was, I believe, one of the developer options available in style of the custom Android OSes that I installed over the years. I haven't really paid attention to it until now, because I wasn't really doing much that would require intense processor cycles (barring Pokémon Go, and that I basically assume set the processor to provide as much performance as possible, at the cost of the battery crying out as more is demanded of it to catch virtual creatures.) The rails on the side are meant for the Joy-Con controllers to connect to and receive power from, for those of us who are old-school and expect our handheld controllers to be attached to our consoles (and to charge the controllers when the Switch is docked), but presumably, any sort of accessory that had the right kind of rail and communication protocol could be attached to the side of the console, at least for this model. The Lite model doesn't have the rails, but hardwires the controls to the screen, making the Lite more of a handheld than a hybrid.
With the power of a dock and some cabling, the Switch can join up to a TV and A/V system to play games on bigger screens and use all of the power the console had without having to worry about draining the battery. In TV mode, the docked console doesn't accept any inputs from anything on the rails (it will provide charging to those things) and it sends the video and audio signals out over HDMI to however large or small a screen and speakers you desire. The graphics get to shine both in the handheld and in the TV mode, which says good things about the Tegra chip inside. The console is also very good at switching quickly from the TV mode to the handheld mode and back again, with very little lag as it swaps between modes, although if the control schemes change between the two swaps, there may be a paused moment where a controller has to be associated again. And, while it's not something that a person is necessarily going to use unless they have to have motion control in a game and that motion control can't adequately be achieved by the Switch itself as a unit, there is a kickstand built into the housing for the Switch's screen, so that the screen can be propped up on a table and the gaming can continue, even if it's not using the big TV (or someone is in a place where there's no dock available to hook into a TV.)
I paid for a year of Switch Online when I bought the console, and apart from the achievements in Smash Ultimate, and looking at the novelty of playing emulated classic games online, I'm not feeling like there's a lot of must-have features to the service. Maybe if I had more Pokémon to trade with others as part of one of the newer generations. Or if there were a specific sort of situation where having online functionality was really important to a game I really wanted to play. Truth is, though, I'm generally a single player, maybe local co-op kind of person, rather than wanting to do a whole lot of things online with others. (And I hate achievements that say you have to play matches online, and even more I hate achievements that say you have to win matches online or win matches in a row online.)
I think this is also the first time where it's become really apparent to me that this console was designed for people with much smaller hands than mine. The Joy-Cons are tiny. I can cover all of the face buttons with my thumb, and it's actually hard for me to use the controller with two hands because the buttons at the top uncovered by the rails require someone to push inside the rail space. That, and the grip I need to take for the analog stick means I'm going to be pushing the buttons that are on one side of another when the controller is sideways. For a small child, or perhaps someone with smaller hands, a sideways Joy-Con is just about the right size to hold, but for me and my giant hands, it gets swallowed up immediately. (Insert picture of big dragon trying to use tiny controller here. If you find one, let me see it?) For some games, this isn't a problem, because they only need a few buttons or they use the motion controls more than they do all of the buttons, but trying to play Smash Brothers Ultimate with a single Joy-Con is not a good thing for me. Trying to play Smash Brothers on the regular screen is also not great, because some of the stages get particularly large, and if the competitors are very far away from each other, things get very tiny very quickly, and if the stage is one with hazards on it, as many of the larger stages have, then you get the situation where you might get blown away or destroyed without seeing what hit you, or that you dropped off the edge instead of grabbing onto it by miscalculation. I have a feeling that while many of the games for Switch are designed to be playable on either the small screen or a larger one, Smash was probably designed for the bigger screen first and then they try to make it playable on the small screen.
Having had great success with the Wii and the Wii U before it, when the Switch came out and there's was Smash Brothers available for it, I was able to successfully persuade my Friends of the Library group to purchase this one as well, and my librarian counterparts have gotten further funding for some digital social games, like Jackbox Party Packs, that we planned on deploying during our early school release days and our late night after-closing programs. Since there still hasn't been a replacement television provided to the teens, we can't have the controllers out the way we did before, but we try to make sure that when there's early release, there's programming that puts the investment of the Friends to work. Or at least, that's what was successfully going in before everything shut down due to the pandemic and hasn't come back yet because it's still not safe to be breathing the same air as everyone else in enclosed spaces for long periods of time. And programs like the early release ones would involve a lot of louder noise and conversation and we just can't do it because the risks are too great, and with each new variation coming into existence that's wise than the last, I feel like we're going to keep extending how long we do programming only online and not being back the public's use of our enclosed spaces. At least until the public demands that we give them what they want or they're going to not fund us, or they believe (wrongly) that we've done everything we can and now we just have to live with the possibility of being infected. I'm hoping we get the opportunity to restart those programs again, but I'm not willing to risk having our teens infect each other and a program become a superspreader kind of event. It's disappointing that things aren't getting used more. Maybe I can propose something to do with our teen librarian to get a little more life and use out of the Switch and its gaming potential, even at a distance.
Like many other consoles and handhelds, there are people who are looking for ways to install useful utilities to the console that allows for additional functionality or for the Switch to become a multiple system emulator without using the Nintendo Switch Online subscription service. While these were easier to achieve on previous consoles, on the Switch Nintendo had been actively stomping all over any attempts to run exploits against the chip and its operating system. Early versions of the Switch could be induced to boot to a recovery mode due to a bug, but later systems are likely going to need a hardware modification to them to make it possible to run unofficial software on the Switch, and even those who have successfully achieved the feat find themselves being permanently excluded from any online services Nintendo offers Switch owners. Much like the PS3, for people who got in early and found something, there's lots of possibility, but for people who came in at a later time, all of those things have been patched out and there's an extremely active campaign trying to keep other things from being found or exploited. (The problem is, as always, that the people who want to do piracy or, possibly, active malice and the people who want to run neat things in their console because they can use the same processes to find holes in the system to do their work with.)
Ultimately, I like the Switch's design decisions to put together a handheld and a console, and they created a good product, even if I don't have many games for it (and not much time for playing games any more, or so I believe.)
- CPU: 4 Cortex-A57 ARM cores @ 1.02 GHz on an Nvidia Tegra X1 System On A Chip
- Memory: 4 GB RAM
- Graphics: nVidia Maxwell family chip, max resolution 1920x1080 in TV mode, max resolution 1280x720 undocked
- Sound: Up to 5.1 surround sound through HDMI in TV mode, stereo through speakers or 3.5mm jack
- Inputs/Peripherals: Multi-touch capacitive touch screen, Joy-Con controllers (single or in pairs), Pro controller, GameCube controller (with adapter), Joy-Con Wheel, Ring-Con, Special NES or SNES controller, Toy-Con, USB keyboard or other USB Peripheral (USB-A in TV mode, USB-C undocked, so most compatible USB accessories with the right kind of adapters.), IEEE 802.11 a/b/g/n/ac, Bluetooth 4.1
- Storage: 32 GB internal storage, up to 2 TB expanded storage through micro SDXC cards
- OS: Nintendo Switch OS
I skipped the Wii U as a console, since I didn't get it when it came out, and it was pretty difficult to find a used one shortly after it came out, and it was quickly replaced by the system that I do have, the Nintendo Switch. (I suspect that if I want to emulate a Wii U, Dolphin probably has that capability by now.) Since the Wii and its motion controls, Nintendo had been trying to do a significant amount of innovation from console to console. The Wii U's innovation was a controller with a touch screen on it, which could be used as a second screen for certain games to display information or a secondary interface to manipulate the game on the television screen with, or it could have the video output of the console beamed to it for gaming within range of the Wii U. The GamePad was even equipped with the same kind of sensor bar that worked with the Wiimote and Wiimote Plus games and controllers, so you could still play motion control games while beaming to the GamePad. The Wii U was also really good with backward compatibility, including a complete Wii environment to play all the nice games with and a utility that would help transfer old Wii saves to the new console …not that all of them necessarily wanted to go that way. In seeing what the Switch is, a lot of its innovations are things that are carried over from the Wii U system and its decisions. Things that aren't explained by the Wii U almost certainly come from Nintendo's line of handheld devices, heartening all the way back to the Game Boy of my childhood times. Game Boys and Nintendo DSes have been extremely portable and good at providing reasonable run times for their battery consumption (except the original Game Boy, but it was a first offering that wasn't a Game and Watch type game, playing one game with limited available positions for the game to represent) and working mostly with small screens (excepting for the XL versions of the 2DS and the 3DS).
What were get in the Switch, then, is a device that primarily functions as a high-powered handheld console with a touch screen. It's a much bigger handheld device than all of the previous handheld offerings from Nintendo by far, but it also means not having to swap between a handheld and a fixed console when desired. The lower resolution for the small monitor also helps with battery longevity, and I suspect in handheld mode that the processor doesn't run as quick and with as many cores when it can get away with not using them. One of those things that I've learned about processors, especially those on mobile SoC, is that they have ways of adjusting their own clock speeds in anticipation of what kind of needs are forthcoming, so that many of them have a lowest, battery-saving idle processor speed and can step up their intensity to the maximum rated clock speed on the processor when things that require intense processing come down the pipe. This was something that was advertised as far back as the Atom processors on Pyrrha and Nora, and changing the governing profile on smartphones and tablets was, I believe, one of the developer options available in style of the custom Android OSes that I installed over the years. I haven't really paid attention to it until now, because I wasn't really doing much that would require intense processor cycles (barring Pokémon Go, and that I basically assume set the processor to provide as much performance as possible, at the cost of the battery crying out as more is demanded of it to catch virtual creatures.) The rails on the side are meant for the Joy-Con controllers to connect to and receive power from, for those of us who are old-school and expect our handheld controllers to be attached to our consoles (and to charge the controllers when the Switch is docked), but presumably, any sort of accessory that had the right kind of rail and communication protocol could be attached to the side of the console, at least for this model. The Lite model doesn't have the rails, but hardwires the controls to the screen, making the Lite more of a handheld than a hybrid.
With the power of a dock and some cabling, the Switch can join up to a TV and A/V system to play games on bigger screens and use all of the power the console had without having to worry about draining the battery. In TV mode, the docked console doesn't accept any inputs from anything on the rails (it will provide charging to those things) and it sends the video and audio signals out over HDMI to however large or small a screen and speakers you desire. The graphics get to shine both in the handheld and in the TV mode, which says good things about the Tegra chip inside. The console is also very good at switching quickly from the TV mode to the handheld mode and back again, with very little lag as it swaps between modes, although if the control schemes change between the two swaps, there may be a paused moment where a controller has to be associated again. And, while it's not something that a person is necessarily going to use unless they have to have motion control in a game and that motion control can't adequately be achieved by the Switch itself as a unit, there is a kickstand built into the housing for the Switch's screen, so that the screen can be propped up on a table and the gaming can continue, even if it's not using the big TV (or someone is in a place where there's no dock available to hook into a TV.)
I paid for a year of Switch Online when I bought the console, and apart from the achievements in Smash Ultimate, and looking at the novelty of playing emulated classic games online, I'm not feeling like there's a lot of must-have features to the service. Maybe if I had more Pokémon to trade with others as part of one of the newer generations. Or if there were a specific sort of situation where having online functionality was really important to a game I really wanted to play. Truth is, though, I'm generally a single player, maybe local co-op kind of person, rather than wanting to do a whole lot of things online with others. (And I hate achievements that say you have to play matches online, and even more I hate achievements that say you have to win matches online or win matches in a row online.)
I think this is also the first time where it's become really apparent to me that this console was designed for people with much smaller hands than mine. The Joy-Cons are tiny. I can cover all of the face buttons with my thumb, and it's actually hard for me to use the controller with two hands because the buttons at the top uncovered by the rails require someone to push inside the rail space. That, and the grip I need to take for the analog stick means I'm going to be pushing the buttons that are on one side of another when the controller is sideways. For a small child, or perhaps someone with smaller hands, a sideways Joy-Con is just about the right size to hold, but for me and my giant hands, it gets swallowed up immediately. (Insert picture of big dragon trying to use tiny controller here. If you find one, let me see it?) For some games, this isn't a problem, because they only need a few buttons or they use the motion controls more than they do all of the buttons, but trying to play Smash Brothers Ultimate with a single Joy-Con is not a good thing for me. Trying to play Smash Brothers on the regular screen is also not great, because some of the stages get particularly large, and if the competitors are very far away from each other, things get very tiny very quickly, and if the stage is one with hazards on it, as many of the larger stages have, then you get the situation where you might get blown away or destroyed without seeing what hit you, or that you dropped off the edge instead of grabbing onto it by miscalculation. I have a feeling that while many of the games for Switch are designed to be playable on either the small screen or a larger one, Smash was probably designed for the bigger screen first and then they try to make it playable on the small screen.
Having had great success with the Wii and the Wii U before it, when the Switch came out and there's was Smash Brothers available for it, I was able to successfully persuade my Friends of the Library group to purchase this one as well, and my librarian counterparts have gotten further funding for some digital social games, like Jackbox Party Packs, that we planned on deploying during our early school release days and our late night after-closing programs. Since there still hasn't been a replacement television provided to the teens, we can't have the controllers out the way we did before, but we try to make sure that when there's early release, there's programming that puts the investment of the Friends to work. Or at least, that's what was successfully going in before everything shut down due to the pandemic and hasn't come back yet because it's still not safe to be breathing the same air as everyone else in enclosed spaces for long periods of time. And programs like the early release ones would involve a lot of louder noise and conversation and we just can't do it because the risks are too great, and with each new variation coming into existence that's wise than the last, I feel like we're going to keep extending how long we do programming only online and not being back the public's use of our enclosed spaces. At least until the public demands that we give them what they want or they're going to not fund us, or they believe (wrongly) that we've done everything we can and now we just have to live with the possibility of being infected. I'm hoping we get the opportunity to restart those programs again, but I'm not willing to risk having our teens infect each other and a program become a superspreader kind of event. It's disappointing that things aren't getting used more. Maybe I can propose something to do with our teen librarian to get a little more life and use out of the Switch and its gaming potential, even at a distance.
Like many other consoles and handhelds, there are people who are looking for ways to install useful utilities to the console that allows for additional functionality or for the Switch to become a multiple system emulator without using the Nintendo Switch Online subscription service. While these were easier to achieve on previous consoles, on the Switch Nintendo had been actively stomping all over any attempts to run exploits against the chip and its operating system. Early versions of the Switch could be induced to boot to a recovery mode due to a bug, but later systems are likely going to need a hardware modification to them to make it possible to run unofficial software on the Switch, and even those who have successfully achieved the feat find themselves being permanently excluded from any online services Nintendo offers Switch owners. Much like the PS3, for people who got in early and found something, there's lots of possibility, but for people who came in at a later time, all of those things have been patched out and there's an extremely active campaign trying to keep other things from being found or exploited. (The problem is, as always, that the people who want to do piracy or, possibly, active malice and the people who want to run neat things in their console because they can use the same processes to find holes in the system to do their work with.)
Ultimately, I like the Switch's design decisions to put together a handheld and a console, and they created a good product, even if I don't have many games for it (and not much time for playing games any more, or so I believe.)
