Create online accounts on your modded Nintendo Switch with Linkalho

Modding your Nintendo Switch allows you to use the console to its full potential. But one of the big drawbacks is that your homebrew activity has to be kept secret from the Nintendo servers to avoid your account being banned.

If you follow the basic rule of never performing bannable actions on your sysMMC, which is the actual hardware NAND devices, then you can still use the Official Firmware or OFW to play your online games using your real Nintendo account.

But most of us will be using games installed from our backup files which must be run withing the emuMMC environment. This side of your modded Switch must never be connected to the Nintendo servers.

But some games need an activated Nintendo account to be able to run. For example I’m trying to play the Nintendo Classics N64 title but I can’t get past the account login page. My local account on my emuMMC isn’t logged in to my Nintendo account, and of course the custom firmware is very correctly blocking me from trying to connect. So at the moment this game is just unplayable for me.

But luckily there is a workaround with a clever bit of homebrew software from a developer going by the name of impeeza.

Linkalho

Linkalho, available from this GitHub repository, quite simply takes your local Switch console account and creates a fake link to a Nintendo account. Your games will be able to test this link, and you’ll then get past the requirement to login.

To install the app you can scroll down the page to the installation section. Don’t forget that all these homebrew developers offer their software for free so do please consider donating to say thanks for their continued effort. Installing the app is simply copying the .nro file to your Switch SD card as detailed.

So on the latest release section scroll down to the assets section and download the zip file. On your computer extract the archive and you should end up with a switch folder, inside which you’ll find the linkalho folder with the .nro file inside. You simply need to copy the whole switch folder to the root of your Switch SD card and everything will be in the right place.

Activating an Account

Once that’s installed all we need to do is to make sure that we’re in the emuMMC environment and then go to our album and open up the Linkalho app.

By default the app will automatically select the account you are using for linking, but if you want to link another account or multiple accounts in one go you can scroll down to the Select accounts option and pick from your list of accounts.

Press B to get back to the main menu.

The only option we need to set before linking is the country. So scroll down to that and then find the country you want to attach to this account. In general I’d advise selecting the correct country for you as games will be able to read this and may present different options depending on your setting.

After that all we need to do is select the link account option and let the app do its magic.

After linking you’ll need to reboot the console for the changes to take effect. But once you’re back into your emuMMC world you should now find that your online only games will boot up normally.

One caveat with this system though is that this account activation will only work to fool games into thinking that you’re logged in to a real Nintendo account. Of course you’re not so please don’t try to use this technique to play online for real. If you use this on your sysMMC side or try to force emuMMC to go online you will get banned. So just stick with your emuMMC and playing offline.

So you should now be able to play a whole range of extra games on your modded Switch.