A €40 USB-C hub becomes a Switch 2 dock with 540 bytes of custom firmware
Making a €40 USB-C hub work as a Nintendo Switch 2 dock
Nintendo's official Switch 2 dock is bulky, so this engineer reverse-engineered the USB-PD handshake it uses and taught a Cable Matters 7-in-1 hub to imitate it. Dumping and patching the VL103 PD controller with about 540 bytes of 8051 code got TV mode working; a second 108-byte patch to the RTD2142 fixed washed-out HDR by relabeling the HDMI colorimetry as BT.2020. VRR remains broken.
The pixels were fine all along, only the label was wrong.
- roger_
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.
- greggsy
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.
- superlupo
It would be nice if this would be somehow an open source script, so not everyone needs to burn its own tokens to do it.
- rootsudo
The hub is indeed fragile and will crack. Sucks if you have a nice one.
- gwbas1c
FYI: I bought an inexpensive Switch 2 USB-C -> HDMI cable on Amazon and it works great. It has a standard USB-C in for power.