Switch on Time Friend

Switch Emulation on a Snapdragon 8 Gen 2 Handheld: Why a Bigger Memory Layout Is Less Stable

Thu, 24 Sep 2026 14:00:00 +0000

My AYN Thor handheld runs a Snapdragon 8 Gen 2, and I mostly use it to play Switch games through Eden. For a stretch, Zelda: Tears of the Kingdom kept “dropping to the background” or crashing outright, on both the stable build and the nightly. My first guess was a memory shortage — the device has 15GB, so I pushed Eden’s memory layout all the way up to 8GB. The problem got worse.

Why Eden's Stable and Nightly Saves Don't Line Up: Profile IDs and Byte-Reversed UIDs

Sun, 20 Sep 2026 10:00:00 +0000

I moved my main Eden build from stable to nightly. They use different package names, so both can coexist, and every game launched fine. But once inside, none of my saves loaded — every game behaved like a first run. My first thought was that nightly had wiped its data directory or overwritten the saves, so I went to check the files.

The files were all there. What was missing was that nightly was looking in the wrong place.

Extracting Switch Saves from an emuMMC Image: Non-Standard AES-XTS, FAT32 and DISF

Wed, 16 Sep 2026 10:00:00 +0000

For a while the only thing left of my hacked Switch was its 512GB SD card. The goal was narrow: rescue the game saves I had accumulated and move them into Eden, a yuzu fork on Android, so the games could continue.

I plugged the card into a USB adapter and opened Nintendo/save/ first. Two saves were there, 8000000000000000 and 8000000000000124, both NAX0-encrypted system saves with no relation to game progress. I walked every visible directory and found nothing resembling a game save. That was counterintuitive: the console had produced those saves, so why were they not on the card.