Nintendo's First Modchip Firmware Takedown Removed 144 Repositories. The Notice Nobody Covered Removed 71 More

2026-11-12 · News and analysis

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Nintendo filed four DMCA notices at GitHub on 6 November 2026. GitHub published them on 10 and 11 November. Between them they disabled 215 repositories.

The one getting covered is the modchip firmware notice, and it deserves the coverage. It names SX Core, SX Lite, Picofly and HWFLY, it argues that firmware for a soldered circumvention chip is unlawful trafficking, and it is the first time Nintendo has made that argument on GitHub. It removed 144 repositories.

The second notice is the one worth your attention if you own a handheld. It named Citron Neo, the Switch emulator a great many guides recommend as a first install. It removed 71 more repositories. And it exposed something that turns out to have been wrong for months, in a claim this site published too: Citron Neo does not host its own code. It is a GitHub project with a domain name pointed at GitHub. Every stable download link on its own front page is dead right now.

We read all four notices and then checked what is actually standing. Everything here assumes you are playing games you already own. We do not link to game files, key files, firmware or circumvention tools, we do not explain how to obtain any of them, and we do not say where anything that survived this is hiding.

The Short Version

• Four notices, one day, 215 repositories disabled. All four were filed 6 November 2026 and published by GitHub on 10 and 11 November.
• Modchip firmware: 144 repositories. One repository was named. GitHub processed the whole fork network, because the submitter claimed all or most forks infringed to the same extent.
• This is genuinely a first. We read every earlier Nintendo notice in GitHub's archive. Ninety of them. Not one mentions a modchip, SX Core, SX Lite, HWFLY, Picofly or a boot sequence.
• The legal theory is circumvention, not copying. Nintendo cites the DMCA's anti trafficking provisions and says the firmware defeats the console's protections by bypassing its boot sequence.
• The case it cites was filed in 2020. The notice points at the Team Xecuter prosecution. There was no new trial behind this filing, despite how some coverage framed it.
• Citron Neo: 71 repositories. The second big notice listed 38 forks and the parent. GitHub processed 71, because the network was still being forked while the notice was in flight.
• Two of the four notices removed nothing. The repositories they named are still live. Their owner emptied them instead, and GitHub never had to disable them.
• Citron Neo is not self hosted. Its domain redirects to a GitHub Pages site. Its code, issues, mods and every stable release link point at GitHub. We said the opposite and we were wrong, and there is a correction on the article that said it.
• Its nightly builds survived on a technicality. They live in a separate repository the notice did not name. That repository is still up and its Android build is still being downloaded.
• Nothing on your handheld stopped working. Not your installed emulator, not your Linux handheld, not your firmware. A takedown removes a hosting page, nothing else.

What Nintendo Actually Filed

Four notices, same date, same boilerplate about the console's protection measures, four different targets.

Two mechanisms are doing the work in that right hand column, and both of them are GitHub policy rather than extra effort by Nintendo.

For the modchip notice, the submitter did not list a single fork. It ticked the box that says the forks infringe to the same extent as the parent. Because the network was larger than 100 repositories, GitHub processed the notice against all 144 at once.

For the Citron Neo notice, Nintendo did list forks, 38 of them. GitHub removed 71. Its own note explains why: the parent repository was being actively forked while the notice was being processed, and the submitter had identified every fork that existed when it filed. So the sweep caught copies that were made after the paperwork was signed.

That second mechanism is the more interesting one. Mirroring a project faster than a rightsholder can enumerate it has been the scene's standard defence for years. Here it stopped working, because GitHub treated the network as the unit rather than the list.

The Legal Argument, and Why Firmware Is the Easier Target

Nintendo's argument here is not that anybody copied a game. It is a circumvention argument, under the DMCA's anti trafficking provisions, and the notice spells it out.

The firmware, it says, bypasses the console's boot sequence, which means it is "primarily designed or produced for the purpose of circumventing a technological measure that effectively controls access" to copyrighted work. The protected work in question is the games, and the notice lists four of them by copyright registration number: Mario Kart 8 Deluxe, Animal Crossing New Horizons, Super Smash Bros. Ultimate and Breath of the Wild.

Put that beside the argument in the emulator notices. There, Nintendo has to claim that an emulator cannot function without using unauthorised copies of the console's cryptographic keys, which is a chain of reasoning about how software behaves at runtime. We walked through why that chain has never actually been tested by a judge in our coverage of the August takedown wave.

The firmware claim needs none of that. A chip that is soldered to a board to defeat a boot check does not have an alternative use to argue about. That is why this notice reads as the most confident of the four, and it is why it leans on a criminal case rather than a civil settlement.

The case is United States v. a defendant whose name GitHub redacts, number 2:20-cr-00127-RSL. That is the Team Xecuter prosecution, the group that sold SX Core and SX Lite. One defendant pleaded guilty to conspiring to circumvent technological measures and to trafficking in circumvention devices, was sentenced to 40 months, and faced a civil judgment reported at $14.5 million.

Worth being precise about one thing, because some coverage has it backwards. That prosecution was filed in 2020 and the guilty plea and sentence it rests on came years ago. Another defendant named in the same case has never appeared in a United States court. No new criminal trial preceded this filing, and Nintendo did not win something in November and then act on it.

We should also be clear about what we are not doing. We do not cover modchips, we would not recommend soldering one into a console you own, and we are not going to tell you which copies of this firmware are still reachable. We are naming the products because the notice names them.

Why "First" Is a Real Claim

"First ever" is the kind of phrase that usually falls apart when you check it, so we checked it.

GitHub publishes the text of every DMCA notice it acts on, in a public repository, with the complainant named and the affected repositories listed. That makes this answerable rather than arguable. We pulled every notice in that archive filed in Nintendo's name, which is 90 of them going back to 2014, and searched all 90 for any mention of a modchip, SX Core, SX Lite, HWFLY, Picofly, or a boot sequence.

Zero hits. The claim holds.

What the scan does show is a clear progression, and it is more interesting than the headline.

• 2014 to 2020. Game assets, ROM sites, a handful of one off repositories.
• July 2022. The first signature patch notice. Patches that make a console accept unsigned software.
• May 2023. Key extraction tooling, in volume. Eight notices across two days, half of them naming a key dumping tool, and one listing copies of it page after page.
• February to June 2024. Key dumpers and signature patches together, plus the first mention of a custom firmware by name.
• August 2024 onward. Emulators, relentlessly. Hundreds of repositories at a time.
• November 2026. Firmware for the hardware itself.

Read down that list and the direction is consistent. Nintendo started with the games, moved to the files that unlock the games, then to the software that runs them, and has now reached the code that runs on a chip. Each step is further from the copyrighted work and closer to the machine.

One honest limit on the method. We searched notices filed under Nintendo's own name. A notice filed by an outside agent under a law firm's name would not have been caught, so read this as "first in the archive under Nintendo's name" rather than a mathematical certainty.

The Two Notices That Removed Nothing

Here is the part no coverage mentioned, and it is a useful thing to know about how this process actually works.

Two of the four notices targeted repositories describing themselves as up to date backups of the discontinued Yuzu emulator, one for Android and one for the desktop build. Both repositories are still there today. You can open them.

They are also both empty. Each one now contains a single file, a one line README pointing readers at an Internet Archive search instead. The code is gone. The commits that emptied them landed on 7 and 9 November, which is after Nintendo filed on the 6th and before GitHub published on the 10th.

That is GitHub's pre disable step working exactly as documented. Before acting on some notices, GitHub contacts the repository owner and gives them a window to make changes themselves. Take the infringing material down in that window and the repository survives. The notice still gets published, so from the outside it looks like a takedown, and the page is still live.

This gives you a quick way to tell what happened to any repository you had bookmarked, without guessing:

1. A 451 response, "repository access blocked". GitHub disabled it over a notice. This is what the modchip firmware repository returns, and what every Citron Neo fork we sampled returns.
2. A 404. It is gone, but not necessarily by takedown. An owner can delete or rename a repository at any time, and that looks identical. The Citron Neo parent returns this, where its forks return 451.
3. A 200 with nothing in it. The owner cleaned it out. Check the push dates against the filing date and the story is usually obvious.

That distinction between 451 and 404 is the whole reason we can be specific here rather than vague. The paperwork tells you what was asked for. The status code tells you what actually happened.

The Part That Affects Your Handheld

Now the correction, because it is ours to make.

This site has told you, more than once, that Eden and Citron survived Nintendo's earlier sweeps because both projects moved off GitHub and host their own code. Half of that is true. Eden runs its own git server and it was reachable when we checked. The Citron half is wrong, and it was wrong when we wrote it.

Here is what the project's own front page looked like when we went through it:

• The domain it advertises does not serve the site. It returns a 301 redirect to a GitHub Pages address.
• The links for code, issues, pull requests, branches, mods and compatibility all point at GitHub.
• Its four stable releases, the versions dated between March and April 2026, were all download links to GitHub release tags. All four are dead now.

So the project was not self hosted in any meaningful sense. It was a GitHub project with a domain name pointed at GitHub Pages, which is a very different thing from the self hosted git server Eden actually runs. When the notice landed, the source repository went, every fork of it went, and every stable download the project advertised went with them.

Two things did survive, and neither is a secret the project is keeping.

The organisation account is still there, with the website, the mods fetcher, the compatibility tracker and the build pipeline still on it. And the build pipeline is the important one, because the nightly builds are published there rather than in the repository Nintendo named. Nightly builds for Windows, macOS, Linux and Android were published on 6 November, the same day as the filing. The Android package has been downloaded a few thousand times.

That is survival by technicality. Nintendo named the source repository. The binaries live one repository over, under a name that does not look like an emulator, and the notice did not reach them.

Whether that holds is the obvious question and we cannot answer it. A second notice naming that repository would take a morning to write.

Does Anything on Your Handheld Change?

Mostly no, and the one thing that does change is small.

Your installed emulator is untouched. A DMCA notice removes a hosting page. It does not reach into an Android handheld and delete an APK. If Switch emulation worked on your Odin or your Retroid yesterday, it works today, at the same frame rate, with the same games.

Emulator software is still legal. Nothing here changes that. Nintendo's circumvention theory has still never been ruled on by a judge, and a takedown notice is not a ruling.

Your Linux handheld is not in this story at all. ArkOS, muOS, KNULLI, ROCKNIX and the rest are nowhere near it. There is no Nintendo protection measure on an Anbernic or a Miyoo to circumvent, so there is no claim to make. The same goes for PortMaster, which hosts none of this.

The one real change is reinstalling. If you need Citron Neo on a new device, or you need to reinstall it, the stable download links are dead and the nightly builds are what exists. A nightly is a build from whatever the code looked like that day, so it has not been through a release check. That is a meaningful step down in reliability from a stable version, and it is worth knowing before you flatten a working install.

It also makes a familiar problem worse. When the official download for something moves, fake mirrors appear within days, and emulator packages are a popular wrapper for unpleasant things. Our guide on downloading emulators safely covers how to tell a real build from a dressed up one, and it is more relevant this week than usual.

If you are shopping for the hardware this actually runs on, a Snapdragon 8 Gen 2 handheld remains the sweet spot for the Switch 1 library.

What Coverage Got Wrong

Three things are circulating that the notices do not support.

The emulator list is too long. Several outlets listed Sudachi, Suyu, MeloNX, Eden and Kenji NX among the targets. None of those names appear anywhere in the four notices. The emulator names that do appear are Yuzu and Citron, and that is all.

There was no recent trial. The criminal case the modchip notice cites was filed in 2020, and the guilty plea and sentence it rests on came years ago. Framing this filing as the follow up to a fresh courtroom win gets the sequence backwards.

"144 repositories" is one notice, not the day's total. The day's total is 215 disabled across two notices, plus two more notices that disabled nothing. If you only read the modchip story you missed a third of the action and all of the part that touches handheld owners.

What to Watch Next

1. Whether the nightly build repository gets named. It is the only thing standing between Citron Neo and having no downloads at all. If a notice reaches it, that project's distribution is finished on GitHub.
2. Whether Citron Neo actually self hosts now. It has the obvious incentive and Eden has already shown it works. A real git server at its own domain would change this story.
3. Whether the two emptied repositories are left alone. They are a live test of whether cleaning out a repository in GitHub's grace window is a durable outcome or a delay.
4. Whether the next firmware notice reaches custom firmware rather than modchip firmware. Signature patches and key dumpers have been targeted before, and a console's custom firmware has been mentioned in passing in one 2024 notice, but never made the target of one the way this chip firmware just was. That would be the next rung on the ladder.

Frequently Asked Questions

What did Nintendo take down on 6 November 2026?

Four DMCA notices, published by GitHub on 10 and 11 November, which disabled 215 repositories in total. One notice targeted modchip firmware for SX Core, SX Lite, Picofly and HWFLY and took 144 repositories, because GitHub processed the whole fork network. A second targeted the Citron Neo Switch emulator and took 71. Two more targeted repositories holding backups of the discontinued Yuzu emulator and disabled nothing, because the owner emptied them first.

Is this really the first time Nintendo has gone after modchip firmware?

On GitHub, yes, as far as the public record shows. We searched all 90 earlier notices filed in Nintendo's name in GitHub's public DMCA archive, and none of them mentions a modchip, SX Core, SX Lite, HWFLY, Picofly or a console boot sequence. Earlier notices worked through game assets, key extraction tools, signature patches and emulators. A notice filed under an outside law firm's name rather than Nintendo's would not have turned up in that search, so the accurate phrasing is first in the archive under Nintendo's name.

Can I still get Citron Neo?

Yes, but not the way the project's own site tells you to. The repository holding the source was disabled and so were 70 copies of it, which killed every stable download link on the front page. The nightly builds are published from a separate repository that the notice did not name, and that one is still live and still receiving builds. A nightly has not been through a release check, so treat it as less predictable than the stable version you may have installed today.

Did my Switch emulator stop working?

No. A takedown notice removes a hosting page, not software from your device. Anything already installed on your handheld keeps running exactly as before, with the same games and the same performance. The only practical difference is where a fresh install comes from.

Does this affect my Anbernic, Miyoo or other Linux handheld?

Not at all. Custom firmware like ArkOS, muOS, KNULLI and ROCKNIX runs on hardware with no Nintendo protection measure on it, so there is nothing for a circumvention claim to attach to. PortMaster was never hosting any of the affected projects either. Nothing in this story reaches that side of the hobby.

Is it illegal to own a modded Switch now?

That is not what changed. These notices are about distributing the firmware, not about owning a console. Nintendo's claim is that supplying code whose purpose is to bypass the console's boot check counts as trafficking in a circumvention tool under the DMCA, which is an argument about the supplier. The criminal case it cites was against people who sold the chips commercially. We are not going to offer a view on your own hardware beyond that, and nothing here is legal advice.

Why do we know any of this, when GitLab removals come with no explanation?

Because the two hosts have opposite policies. GitHub publishes the full text of every DMCA notice it acts on, naming the complainant and listing the repositories, which is how anybody can count 144 and 71 rather than guess. GitLab publishes only aggregate yearly figures and nothing about any individual project, so a removal there never comes with a public reason. We wrote about what that difference does to a scene in our piece on the GitLab recomp removals.

Related Reading

• Nintendo wiped 400 Switch emulator repos in one day — the August wave, now carrying a correction this story forced
• Why GitLab removals come with no explanation — the host that publishes nothing, and what that does to a scene
• The legal status of emulation in 2026 — where the circumvention argument sits
• Eden vs Kenji NX vs Citron — picking between the three, with the November change noted
• Switch 2 emulation on handhelds — the state of the harder problem
• How to download emulators safely — more relevant whenever an official download moves
• ROMs and legality — the part of this that has not changed in years
• Nintendo patched the Switch 2 jailbreak — the other side of the same enforcement posture

Written 12 November 2026 from the text of the four notices in GitHub's public DMCA archive and from live checks of every repository involved on that date. If the nightly build repository goes, or if Citron Neo moves to its own infrastructure, this piece needs updating and we will date the change rather than quietly rewriting it.