A lot of companies do not appear to understand this. A lot of devices with silicon-level secure boot can be circumvented with signed images that have just never (officially) been distributed to the public, and anyone relying on their security is actually relying on vendors never accidentally trashing a drive containing one. In this case Nintendo (or a contractor) utterly failed to destroy media in the way they were presumably supposed to, but it would have been better to have never existed in this form in the first place.
I'd extend your thesis to "you need to audit your recovery tools with the _exact same_ level of scrutiny with which you audit your production secondary bootloader, because they're effectively the same thing," which is the same concept but not _quite_ as boneheaded as you suggest.
Recently, I see this class of exploit more commonly, too: stuff like "there's a development bootloader signed with production keys" has gone away a little, replaced with "there's a recovery bootloader with signature checking that's broken in some obvious way." Baby steps, I guess...
Some of the best gaming time in my life has been on handheld consoles, even when the games were available on PC or TV.
I wish there was a modern platform (not just a hobbyist Raspberry Pi kit or something) in the Switch or DS form factor, that boots straight into a coding environment like the legendary Commodore 64 and other "computer-consoles" of that era, with a central app store for indie devs to publish to for free. Add in dedicated support from a game engine like Godot, and I think something like that could spark a renaissance of solo devs/buddy teams experimenting with new game ideas and stuff.
I’m not sure if this will do what you want, but it is Linux on a DS! No active developers at the moment. They have instructions to build your own images as well as some software built for it.
shoghicp•4h ago