Raspberry Pi 4 Mod Lets You Stream Nintendo Switch Games In Real-Time Over The Internet
Have you ever wondered what would happen if you paired a Raspberry Pi 4 board with an HDMI capture card and a Nintendo Switch? Nothing, really. But sprinkle in some clever coding and an Adafruit Trinket M0, and you end up with a nifty project that allows anyone to play hosted games in real-time, over the internet. At least until Nintendo sends in its legal hounds.
Add this to the growing list of neat mods that are capable with the Raspberry Pi 4. In this case, it is the 2GB version, which The Raspberry Pi Foundation slashed the price to $35 earlier this year. It's a capable board with the following features...
- CPU: Broadcomm BCM2711 (quad-core Cortex-A72) clocked at 1.5GHz
- RAM: 2GB LPDDR4
- Connectivity: Wi-Fi 5 (802.11ac), GbE LAN, 2x USB 3.0, 2x USB 2.0
- GPIO: Standard 40-pin GPIO header
- Video/Sound: 2x micro HDMI, 2x 2-lane MIPI DSI display port
- SD Card: microSD card slot
The entire Raspberry Pi family (as well as competing mini boards) has lent itself to some neat mods, turning a tiny NES Christmas ornament into a working game console, and stuffing a retro gaming experience into an SNES controller, to name just a couple.
Perhaps upping the ante, Reddit user DmitrievStan decided to turn his Nintendo Switch into a streaming hub of sorts.
We used a Raspberry Pi 4 and Adafruit Trinket M0 to hook a Nintendo Switch for anyone to play remotely in real-time. from r/raspberry_pi
"So this is one of our new Raspberry Pi projects... to hook up Pokemon Sword to the internet. So as you can see, when I press space[bar], I'm actually controlling the game through the website and the idea is that every player has 60 seconds at a time... and we're trying to figure out how long would it take the internet to pass the game," DmitrievStan explains.
If I'm understanding the mod correctly, he's hosting a Nintendo Switch game through his Raspberry Pi 4 mod, and users can hop online and get in the queue to play in real-time. You could sort of think of it as a low rent GeForce NOW, though it's not exactly the same thing.
The Raspberry Pi 4 handles the streaming chores, while input controls are handled by SurroRTG, which is currently in beta (and not available as open-source code). He also employed an Adafruit Trinket M0 to simulate the Nintendo Switch controller, and a "basic" HDMI capture card for capturing the Nintendo Switch video feed.
At present, he's hosting Pokemon Sword, which you can check out on Surrogate.tv. Neat stuff.
