A elite hacker who describes himself as a "vulnerability researcher, reverse engineer and InfoSec enthusiast" has discovered evidence of a dual screen Nintendo Switch in the console's latest firmware update.
Mike Heskin, who published his findings on Twitter and has a bullet-proof past history in digging out and explaining Switch tech, notes that the new Switch firmware adds "preliminary support for a new hardware model" with the codename of "nx-abcd" and that "there's evidence of a secondary display of sorts being added exclusively on this model."
For those who are aren't familiar with Switch codenames, this lines up perfectly with the codenames for past Switch systems, including the original Switch's 'nx-abca' and the Switch Lite's 'nx-abcb', adding a good deal of weight to Heskin's findings in terms of authenticity.
Firmware 10.0.0 adds preliminary support for a new hardware model: "nx-abcd".3 of the 5 new DRAM profiles are for this new hardware type and there's evidence of a secondary display of sorts being added exclusively on this model. ( ͡° ͜ʖ ͡°)April 14, 2020
The discovery, which was reported on by British news publication Metro, once more re-awakens the long-running rumours of a new Nintendo Switch Pro variant of the console being in development.
That console, though, was thought to still be just a single screen device, but one that came with improved internal hardware. Talk of a clocked-up version of the Tegrax1+ CPU as well as a custom processor based on Nvidia's Volta platform emerged in January this year, for example.
Naturally, talk of a second screen will make Nintendo gamers fondly remember the Nintendo 3DS range of consoles, which boasted a second screen in a clamshell design.
Here at T3 we're not sure how a Nintendo Switch clamshell design would work, but as Heskin notes, the firmware seems to include evidence of a "secondary display of sorts", so we could be looking at a much more rudimentary setup rather than a full-blown high-resolution second screen.
Nintendo has said that there will be no new Nintendo Switch hardware in 2020 anyway, though, and with the current global economic downturn and both the PS5 and Xbox Series X set for release later in the year, that makes perfect sense.
A 2021 new Nintendo Switch console launch, though? That is definitely still on the table.
