I’ve done similar hacks and I love how LLMs turned them from month-long projects to a couple of weeks.Claude used to work best IMHO but their “safety” change has made it near useless. Luckily local models are getting better.

That is, Nintendo intentionally used a widely-used, well-specified standardised connector and protocol, and chose to make their implementation subtly non-compliant in several ways. And there is no discernible good reason to do so (as far as I know it’s not like they actually needed to do anything special, stock-standard, compliant USB-C would work perfectly fine).

Every single laptop vendor deals with this. Ipads, desktops, you name it. Nintendo are simply not anywhere near industry baseline here.

&gt; They do not want you plugging in an arbitrary charger (which may not have the right wattage)Why not? The standard deals with such a situation fine… There is zero danger, the PD contract wouldn’t be able to negotiate, so the system could just indicate with an LED or a message on the screen or something to show it’s not going to be able to start charging without a bigger charger. This is literally a solved problem.

Aren&#x27;t these issues that Nintendo has to solve to maintain compliance with modern compatibility laws, rather than roadblocks for them to use to inhibit consumer ease-of-use? If the wattage is wrong then the Switch 2 can say that and either slow charge or not charge at all. The other issues are all purely user preference.

IMHO, their USB-C-ish is frustrating. Same shape but not all chargers work. But on the flip side, understand what they&#x27;re doing.Nintendo is not making a USB-C computer, they&#x27;re making a _product_ or a cohesive system.They do not want you plugging in an arbitrary charger (which may not have the right wattage), don&#x27;t want you laying the switch face up (nubs on the controllers getting in the way), face down (scratching the screen), plugging in a usb-c controller and dragging the spiderweb of wires off the entertainment center, or trying to use the touch screen while attached to a TV.They wanted a vertical dock that managed airflow, charged at the appropriate rate, and guided you away from asking why you couldn&#x27;t have some janky setup where you&#x27;re trying to treat it like a gameboy advance (local screen simultaneous to big TV) being held by kindergarteners who pull the TV off the stand)....so the dock is effectively a sacrificial buffer&#x2F;safety system to prevent your switch from causing damage to your TV.

Because they are Nintendo, that&#x27;s why.DS Lite famously had a silly proprietary connector for charging, which required their special wall charger... which was literally a 5V charger. It could have been mini&#x2F;micro USB from the beginning, but no.

&gt; doesn’t justify the development and manufacturing costsAt Nintendo scale, I bet it does though

Curious to hear why they did this to begin with.I can understand the warranty aspect: they don’t necessarily want to be in the hook when users stuffs up the port using a janky 20-in-1 USB-C hub.Why play around with the VRR and HDR side of things too?Edit: I know someone will say ‘because they want to sell more docks’, but it already comes with the console… the market for people buying multiple docks I doesn’t justify the development and manufacturing costs.

Making a €40 USB-C hub work as a Nintendo Switch 2 dock