Hello and welcome to Reswitched Weekly, a weekly summary of the progress made by the reswitched team and wider community around homebrew development for the Nintendo Switch.

Most of the work done this week involved kgsws’s ace_loader. This software is tasked with multiple jobs : it has to clean up the browser environment, and allow loading more NROs through a TCP server. It will also set up stdio to route to a telnet server. The long term goal is to have graphic homebrew launchers use aceloader as the service to start apps.

What was done

• @kgsws and @misson20000 got stdio support into libtransistor, routing through a TCP stream.
• It is now possible to pass arguments when loading NROs.
• @dvdfreitag has integrated libssp into libtransistor, giving us working stack guards. Our programs are safe from stack smashing now !
• @misson20000 has integrated compiler-rt into libtransistor, fixing various hurdles related to missing symbols.
• A rather big cleanup of the Makefiles were done.

What people are working on

• @kgsws is working on getting Doom running. He got it to run, sending rendered GPU frames to a PC ! He got input working too, through libtransistor’s HID support !
• Graphics and audio support are being worked on by various members of the community, including @misson20000. According to last update, “am (Applet Manager), responsible for taking a framebuffer and drawing global widgets to it, uses pdm:ntfy, which is part of sdb, which our ACE kills.”
• @roblabla is working on getting a File Descriptor table into newlib, to properly implement FD-related syscalls (such as read and write).

Call for participation

Lots of things could be implemented properly into libtransistor/newlib without much more reverse-engineering. If you’re a developer and want to give a hand, make sure to hop on Discord so we can coordinate work.

Things that need work on :

• Pthread emulation layer
• Thread Local Storage, by implementing emutls
• Implementing more services into libtransistor