Nintendo's GitHub takedowns reach Switch modchip firmware, and 144 Picofly repositories go offline

A notice dated 6 November names one Picofly repository, and GitHub disabled its whole network of 144. Three more notices the same day hit Citron Neo and two copies of yuzu.

AI-drafted from 7 sources. This story was written with AI from the outside reporting listed under Sources, and checked by automated tools before it went up. The originals have the full detail.

Nintendo has gone after Switch modchip firmware on GitHub. A takedown notice dated 6 November, which GitHub published this week, names a single repository, Ansem-SoD/Picofly, which offered firmware and instructions for a Switch modchip built on the small RP2040-Zero board. GitHub's note at the top of the notice explains why far more than one repository vanished: the network was larger than 100 repositories and Nintendo said all or most of the forks infringe in the same way, so GitHub disabled the whole network of 144.

What the notice says

The notice covers firmware for the SX Core, SX Lite, Picofly and HWFLY chips. Nintendo's argument is about the Switch's boot sequence: the chips are soldered to the console's board, and the firmware, in Nintendo's words, "circumvents the technological protection measures put in place on the Nintendo Switch console by bypassing the boot sequence". That, it says, breaks the anti-circumvention rules in section 1201 of the US DMCA. As support it cites the 2020 criminal case against members of Team-Xecuter, the group behind the original SX chips.

TorrentFreak went through GitHub's public archive and found that none of Nintendo's 90 earlier notices mention modchips. The closest were the 2023 and 2024 notices against key dumping tools such as Lockpick_RCM. It also points out that Gary Bowser's guilty plea in the Team-Xecuter case is not a court ruling on modchip firmware, but a takedown notice does not need one. The owner of the Picofly repository can still file a counter notice, and when TorrentFreak checked there was no sign of one. Several other repositories with Picofly and HWFLY firmware, including what GBAtemp users describe as the original Picofly source, were not named and were still up.

Emulators too

Nintendo sent three more notices the same day. The Citron notice names the citron-neo emulator repository and five forks; because the parent was being forked as the notice arrived, GitHub took down its whole network of 71 repositories. The other two each name one copy of yuzu. Those two repositories are still online, but TorrentFreak reports their owner has removed the code and history and left a README pointing elsewhere. The emulator notices make the same argument Nintendo has made since its case against yuzu's developers in 2024: that a Switch emulator needs the console's encryption keys to run games, so handing it out is trafficking in a circumvention tool.

This comes less than three months after Nintendo had more than 400 Switch emulator repositories removed in a single day in August. IGN notes that in 2024 Nintendo took down about 8,500 copies of yuzu with one notice aimed at 12 mirrors, and that the new notices arrived days after PC emulators began running the remake of The Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of Time. None of this touches the chips themselves; what has gone from GitHub is one large, easy-to-find home for the firmware they run.

Sources

Image: Image: TorrentFreak

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