GoKawiil
Tech News
Nintendo has reminded owners of the Switch 2 that the screen protector film installed on the console at the factory is not meant to be peeled off. The console, which launched in mid-2025 at $450 and later rose to a standard $500 price point, includes this film as part of its design rather than as an optional add-on.
Developers have released Eden-NX2, a fork of the Eden emulator, adding experimental support for running Nintendo Switch 2 games on PC. The emulator can already launch titles such as Mario Kart World and Donkey Kong Bananza, though compatibility and performance remain works in progress. Developers say the task was eased because the Switch 2 largely reuses the original Switch's hardware architecture and operating system.
Zest, the restaurant discovery app that launched this year, has released an AI-powered concierge accessible via text message. The feature recommends restaurants based on a user's past dining transactions and their friends' history, and can check availability and book reservations on the user's behalf.
Woot, Amazon's discount site, is selling the Nintendo Switch 2 bundle for $459 for new customers using code SAVETOBER, or $479 for existing customers, down from $519. The bundle includes the console, dock, Joy-Cons and a digital code for a free game choice among Mario Kart World, Donkey Kong Bananza or Pokémon Pokopia. The coupon is set to expire November 1 at 11:59 pm ET, though the sale price itself runs for four days.
The games industry continues to revisit classic titles such as Ocarina of Time, Mario Kart, Final Fantasy and Pac-Man, updating them with modern graphics and expanded worlds for new generations of players. Researchers and gamers interviewed say the appeal lies largely in nostalgia, the emotional pull of revisiting familiar virtual environments tied to memories and relationships from earlier in players' lives.
A new tool called Reverse Engineer Anything (REA) is behind a recent surge of console games being natively ported to PC, including titles like Super Mario Galaxy and Modern Warfare 2. REA isn't an AI model itself but a toolkit and agent harness that links binary analyzers, decompilers, firmware readers and other reverse-engineering tools so AI agents can use them together with instructional 'skill files'. This builds on decades of emulation progress and cheaper hardware-analysis tools like the Raspberry Pi.
Developer Mohammed Huzaifa has discontinued Galaxy-Android, his unofficial Android port of Super Mario Galaxy, along with a separate unofficial Android port of Modern Warfare 2 (2009). Huzaifa said both projects' GitHub repositories would remain downloadable for 24 hours after his announcement, giving users until roughly midnight ET to grab them.
A project called Galaxy Android, part of the OpenPort Labs initiative, has brought a native Android build of Super Mario Galaxy, built on code from the seven-and-a-half-year Petari decompilation effort and using AI tools to adapt it. An Android Authority writer tested it on an OPPO Find X9 Ultra and found it installable via a GitHub repository, though with notable performance quirks compared to the smoother desktop version.
Eric Bauza, the voice actor behind numerous Looney Tunes characters as well as roles in projects like 'Coyote vs. Acme,' Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles, Mario properties and DC titles, has died at age 46. His career spanned animation and video games across multiple major franchises.
A new emulation project called VBoy Color builds on last year's Red Viper emulator by assigning distinct four-color palettes to each 8x8 tile in a Virtual Boy frame, rather than just swapping out the console's four shades of red. Using game-specific Color Packs, it can render objects like pipes, platforms, and walls in separate colors even though they share identical red tones in the original hardware output.
A modder known as pepsipu (Sammy Hajhamid) created a software-only, tethered jailbreak for the Nintendo Switch 2, dubbed 'ns2jb,' with help from OpenAI's Codex tool. The exploit relies on the game SmileBASIC 4 and must be re-run each time the console restarts; a demo shows a modified Mario Kart World with added characters like Cinnamoroll, Peter Griffin and Steve from Minecraft.
A developer has published ns2jb, a tethered, software-only jailbreak for the Nintendo Switch 2 running the latest 23.0.1 firmware, via a public repository. The exploit reportedly allows arbitrary native code execution as a system module, enabling homebrew apps, save file backups, reverse engineering of games, and hardware access via MMIO. The developer used AI coding assistant Codex to help build the exploit and to mod Mario Kart World as a demonstration.