Surrogate.tv has developed a truly interesting way to play Pokemon Sword, with no Nintendo Switch or game purchase required. Using a Raspberry Pi 4, which is connected to a Nintendo Switch in the company's office in Finland, the game is now available on the web, though users must line up and take 60-second turns.
It's fun to watch and participate in the chat with other users as the group tries to go through this role-playing game. At publication time, the game was still going live and you can check it on Surrogate's page.
Stan Dmitriev, the co-founder of Surrogate.tv, developed the game by connecting a Raspberry Pi 4 to a Nintendo Switch, using a simple HDMI-to-USB adapter to capture outgoing footage and an Adafruit Trinket M0 board to emulate a USB-powered Switch controller. He used the NSGadget_Pi Python library to allow the Raspberry Pi (via Trinket) to send controller commands to the Switch and his own proprietary software to output it to his website.
You can learn more about how Dmitriev executed this Raspberry Pi project and see a video of it in action in his Reddit post.
We used a Raspberry Pi 4 and Adafruit Trinket M0 to hook a Nintendo Switch for anyone to play remotely in real-time. from r/raspberry_pi
Surrogate.tv features a host of physical games such as pinball and remote control car racing that live in its office, but you can control online. Earlier this year, the company debuted a multi-player version of Mario Kart Live you can play online, along with remote control pinball and robot battle games. All of the games are free to play, but supporters get some perks.
