Can we unpack switch roms and remove movies etc?

nine0nine · Feb 29, 2024

I have fond memories of the xbox and trimming down ISOs by deleting foreign language movies and audio to squeeze as much as possible on the HDD. Is it possible to do the same with the switch? My SD card is not looking spacious at the moment.

I don't use online services and I expect that updates and DLC would probably not work on a trimmed nsp, but there's plenty of older games on my card that will never need an update or dlc.

Hayato213 · Feb 29, 2024

Possibly if you can figure out where those foreign languages video are stored. There is a 1.5 TB card out there, so get a larger card would help.

hippy dave · Feb 29, 2024

Yeah should be perfectly doable in theory. For stuff like video files you'd probably have to replace them with dummy files of minimal duration in the same format, otherwise the game might break. You could test dummy files with layeredfs, before going to the effort of rebuilding the whole game for installation. You couldn't really test just removing files that way, because the original files would just be used if they weren't present in layeredfs.

nine0nine · Feb 29, 2024

hippy dave said:
Yeah should be perfectly doable in theory. For stuff like video files you'd probably have to replace them with dummy files of minimal duration in the same format, otherwise the game might break. You could test dummy files with layeredfs, before going to the effort of rebuilding the whole game for installation. You couldn't really test just removing files that way, because the original files would just be used if they weren't present in layeredfs.

When i was seearching for info on this I found there was an unpacking app that was used to unpack and repack the nsp files, with the motivation of adding the dlc and updates but it appears to have disappeared off the internet. Do you know of any apps I should be searching for that could do the same?

hippy dave · Feb 29, 2024

nine0nine said:
When i was seearching for info on this I found there was an unpacking app that was used to unpack and repack the nsp files, with the motivation of adding the dlc and updates but it appears to have disappeared off the internet. Do you know of any apps I should be searching for that could do the same?

I just use hactool for unpacking, and hacpack for repacking. It looks like the github for hacpack is gone, but I'm uploading a zip of the source code (might not be fully up to date), which also contains a built executable for mac. Maybe someone else can upload windows or linux builds.

I remember NSCB being used for rebuilding stuff, but I never used it https://github.com/julesontheroad/NSC_BUILDER

Dust2dust · Feb 29, 2024

You would save yourself a lot of headaches just getting a bigger SD card. They're not that expensive. But if you enjoy messing with this stuff, it's perfectly understandable too. Several people here enjoy the hacking process more than actually playing the games (and that might include me too).

Absolute_Vile · Mar 1, 2024

This was a common practice back in the day with PSP games, games like god of war had half the size of it composed of just cinematics, what you did back then is open it and choose one video the shortest and ligthiest of em all, and direct all cutscenes to it, then delete all the others liberating a hell lot of space from it, that way the game keep functioning normally in gameplay, But its diferent, Back then it was videos, but now is dificult to check wich are cutscenes inside of gameplay and wich ones are outside gameplay, It would be more dificult to do, Games would broke if one is missing and most certainly crash.

nine0nine · Mar 1, 2024

Dust2dust said:
You would save yourself a lot of headaches just getting a bigger SD card. They're not that expensive. But if you enjoy messing with this stuff, it's perfectly understandable too. Several people here enjoy the hacking process more than actually playing the games (and that might include me too).

absolutely the latter for me too, most of the stuff I would like to trim down I know I will never play again anyway, but i cant just delete them.

hippy dave said:
I just use hactool for unpacking, and hacpack for repacking. It looks like the github for hacpack is gone, but I'm uploading a zip of the source code (might not be fully up to date), which also contains a built executable for mac. Maybe someone else can upload windows or linux builds.

I remember NSCB being used for rebuilding stuff, but I never used it https://github.com/julesontheroad/NSC_BUILDER

hactool was what i was looking for, I'd need the win build though. Glad you confirmed it was what i needed though.

Absolute_Vile said:
This was a common practice back in the day with PSP games, games like god of war had half the size of it composed of just cinematics, what you did back then is open it and choose one video the shortest and ligthiest of em all, and direct all cutscenes to it, then delete all the others liberating a hell lot of space from it, that way the game keep functioning normally in gameplay, But its diferent, Back then it was videos, but now is dificult to check wich are cutscenes inside of gameplay and wich ones are outside gameplay, It would be more dificult to do, Games would broke if one is missing and most certainly crash.

Yeah I had a whole library of custom videos in a variety of different formats to replace company logos etc for the xbox, was a doddle on that though as you didn't need to build an iso, you could just run the files on the hdd.

Can we unpack switch roms and remove movies etc?

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