Hector Martin

The cart isn't just a ROM, it's a ROM and a secure microcontroller. The MCU and switch together exchange information to make the communication different each time. Even if the data is the same, the comms will fail if the microcontroller isn't present and knows how to handle this.

Mirroring the rom worked for the NDS because there was very little verification. It didn't work for the 3DS until sky3ds cracked the cart protections and reimplemented. Issue here is that there is active protection in both the cart and the switch.

Basically, without an OS exploit + a hardware-modified switch in addition to the cart itself, you're SoL.

What about disc consoles? How do they know whether a disc is legit or not?

This one is actually super neat. I don't know for all of them, but for the Wii, first off the disks actually spun backwards! You couldn't use regular pc DVDs without some smart hax. Second, the manufacturer intentionally burned specific sectors of the disk as bad.

GC/Wii uses a different scrambling algorithm than the DVD standard specification. It was a myth that they spun backwards, but its simpler than that (and this simplicity is enough to make the originals unreadable on a computer and the burnt ones unrecognized by the console)

Yeah, I've since been educated as such. Again, Wii wasn't a platform I worked on past basic application of other people's haxx, I was like 14 iirc. Was just spouting something someone told me once. odds are they were talking about something else and I screwed up a-la telephone

It was several things: 1) sector format subtly changed, 2) scrambing seeds different, 3) some nonstandard media type in the lead-in, 4) a laser physically punches "scratches" into lead-in, 5) laser-cut BCA encodes PSNs of thusly damaged sectors, symmetrically encrypted.