November 3, 2023: One Weird Nintendo Switch Tip

I love handheld video-game devices; I have a literal bookshelf of them. I particularly enjoy portable gaming on the Nintendo Switch. However, a lot of times – especially on games ported from desktop platforms – the text is too small to read comfortably on the handheld screen, at least for my mole-esque eyes.

I recently discovered that Nintendo has added a new feature to their operating system: Zoom. With a double-tap of the Home button, the screen zooms in as if by magic. Double-tap again, and it zooms back out. Buttons and the joystick allow you to control how much the screen zooms and the position of the window.

Enable this feature by going to "System Settings" -> "System" -> "Zoom."

It's not a perfect fix; the zooming doesn't add any additional pixels to the screen, so if a letter is only made of six pixels then they'll be six bigger pixels when zoomed. But it's still helpful for some apps . . . and, as a free built-in, it's worth twice the cost.

-- Steven Marsh