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Ferris-AO Switch v0.5 — First Public Release

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@SyntaxNyah SyntaxNyah released this 02 Jun 12:29
· 14 commits to master since this release
0.5
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Ferris-AO Switch — v0.5 (First Public Release!)

Attorney Online 2, running natively on your Nintendo Switch.

Ferris-AO Switch is a homebrew client for Attorney Online 2 — the same courtroom roleplay you know from the desktop and web clients, now as a single .nro you can launch right from the homebrew menu. Hold court in handheld mode on the couch, or play docked with a Pro Controller. No PC required, and no base pack to download — characters, backgrounds, music and sounds all stream straight from the server.

Written from scratch in C++17 on devkitPro + SDL2. Same binary runs on real Switch hardware (Atmosphère) and the Ryujinx emulator.

Highlights

Full courtroom gameplay

  • Animated character sprites — idle, talking, and pre-animations (GIF / APNG / animated WebP)
  • Typewriter IC messages with word-wrap and the full AO2 text-colour palette
  • OBJECTION!, Hold It!, Take That! shout bubbles, realization flash, and screenshake
  • Character pairing (two characters side-by-side with offsets + flip)
  • Always-on IC scrollback log so you never miss a line
  • HP bars, music now-playing strip, and narrator mode

Everything you need to play

  • Server browser — pulls the live public server list; pick one and connect
  • Direct connect for private/unlisted servers (TCP, ws://, and secure wss://)
  • Character search — filter a 600-, 3000-, even 3800-character roster by name in seconds
  • Music, OOC chat, evidence, and room/area switching panels
  • Themes — drop any AO2 courtroom_design.ini theme folder on your SD card and pick it in Settings
  • Custom showname, master-server URL, and volume — all saved across launches

Built to feel fast and not sloggy

  • Assets stream on 8 background threads and decode off the render thread, so the courtroom never stalls on the network
  • WebP-first smart format probing that learns what each server uses (and remembers it next time)
  • An in-memory decode cache plus an on-disk cache, so anyone who just spoke re-appears instantly and revisits load from the SD card with zero network
  • Keep-alive HTTPS connection reuse — comfortably handles big Cloudflare-hosted servers with 3000+ files

Controls

  • Touchscreen in handheld — tap buttons/lists, drag to scroll, tap-to-talk
  • Joy-Con & Pro Controller — full button mapping
  • System keyboard for all text entry

Complete feature list

Click to expand the full list

Connecting

  • Public server browser (live master list; configurable master-server URL)
  • Direct connect by host / port / username
  • TCP, WebSocket (ws://), and secure WebSocket (wss://, TLS) — auto-detected from the address
  • Compatible with akashi, tsuserver, Ferris-AO and other standard AO2 servers
  • Full AO2 handshake; reconnects cleanly on disconnect

Characters

  • 8×4 character grid, paged, supporting huge rosters (thousands of characters)
  • Name search / filter (instant, case-insensitive)
  • Taken characters dimmed; streamed character icons; per-character char.ini (name, showname, emotes, blips)
  • Narrator mode (talk with no character)

In-Character messaging

  • Typewriter text with word-wrap
  • 10 AO2 text colours (white, green, red, orange, blue, yellow, pink, cyan, grey, rainbow)
  • Custom or character shownames
  • Idle / talking sprite animation, pre-animations
  • Shout bubbles — Objection!, Hold It!, Take That!, and custom
  • Realization flash, screenshake, horizontal flip, desk / no-desk
  • Pairing — partner character drawn alongside with independent offset + flip
  • Position support (wit, def, pro, jud, hld, hlp, jur, sea)
  • Always-on IC log — word-wrapped, colour-coded scrollback you can scroll through
  • Tap-to-talk bar with inline < > emote arrows (fire lines back-to-back)
  • IC composer — emote grid with thumbnails, live sprite preview, colour swatch, position

Other panels

  • OOC chat — send + scrollable log, with your own messages highlighted
  • Music — full server track list, play any track, now-playing strip, crossfade (OGG/MP3/Opus)
  • Evidence — viewer with thumbnails
  • Rooms / Areas — live player counts, status, CM and lock state (ARUP); hop rooms without reconnecting
  • HP bars — defense & prosecution (0–10)

Audio

  • Per-character typewriter blips, message SFX, and shout SFX
  • Background music with crossfade
  • Separate SFX / music volume controls

Assets & streaming

  • HTTP & HTTPS streaming from the server's CDN (ASS) — no base-pack download needed
  • Four-tier resolution: prefetch cache → server CDN → community base CDN → local sdmc: base → bundled romfs:
  • Optional local base pack (sdmc:/switch/ferris-ao/base/) with on-screen "detected" indicator
  • Persistent on-disk cache (per-URL) — revisits load from SD with no network
  • WebP-first smart probing + learned format per server (remembered across visits)
  • Off-thread image decode (workers decode; render thread only uploads)
  • Decoded-animation cache (recently-seen sprites re-show instantly)
  • Keep-alive connection reuse; 8-thread async prefetch; content-based format detection (handles mislabeled files like GIF-as-.webp)
  • Formats: PNG, APNG, GIF, WebP (static & animated)

Themes & settings

  • Standard AO2 courtroom_design.ini theme support — drop a theme folder on the SD card and pick it; live switching; auto-scaled to 1280×720; reads courtroom_sounds.ini
  • Persistent settings (config.ini): custom showname, theme, master-server URL, SFX/music volumes

Input & display

  • Touchscreen (tap + finger drag-scroll), Joy-Con / Pro Controller, system keyboard, plus mouse/keyboard on Ryujinx
  • 1280×720 native, docked & handheld; hardware-accelerated, vsync; full-screen stage with overlaid HUD

Under the hood

  • The render loop never blocks on the network — no join freeze or IC stutter, even on 3000+ file servers
  • Crash-resilient networking; streams the server's real background (no placeholder courtroom flashing)
  • One .nro, runs on Atmosphère hardware and Ryujinx — no keys, no title install

Why it's so fast

AO content can be gigabytes — thousands of characters, backgrounds and tracks — and the Switch is not a powerful machine. Ferris-AO Switch stays smooth anyway because the render loop never waits on anything:

  • Nothing downloads or decodes on the main thread. Eight background worker threads fetch files and decode the images (PNG/WebP/GIF/APNG) into ready-to-upload pixels; the game thread only does the final, cheap GPU upload. No hitches, no "loading…" freezes.
  • It asks for far less. AO files carry no extension on the wire, so most clients fire ~5 guesses per asset and let 4 of them 404. Ferris-AO probes WebP-first, learns the format a server actually uses from the first file, and then asks for only that one — and remembers it for next time.
  • It reuses connections. A single warm HTTPS connection per worker streams file after file instead of paying a fresh DNS + TLS handshake every time — the difference between sluggish and snappy on big Cloudflare-hosted servers.
  • It remembers what it's seen. A decoded-sprite cache means anyone who just spoke pops back instantly, and an on-disk cache means the second visit to a server loads from your SD card with zero network.

The payoff: it stays responsive even on 3000+ file servers, and on a repeat visit it's nearly instant.

Installing

On a modded Switch (Atmosphère CFW):

  1. Download ferris-ao-switch.nro from the Assets below.
  2. Copy it to the /switch/ folder on your SD card.
  3. Open the Homebrew Menu (hold the Album button, or launch your hbmenu entry point) and pick Ferris-AO.

On Ryujinx (PC):

  1. Download ferris-ao-switch.nro.
  2. Drag it onto the Ryujinx window, or File → Load Application from File….
  3. Make sure internet access is enabled in Ryujinx settings.

That's it — no firmware keys, no title installation, no base pack.

Controls (quick reference)

Where Button Action
Connect L / R Switch tabs · A connect/edit · R refresh list
Character select D-pad move · A pick · Y / tap search · wheel/drag scroll
Courtroom X IC composer · L OOC · R Music · Y Evidence · − Rooms
Courtroom ← / → cycle emote · A / Enter quick-talk or skip typewriter
Anywhere + disconnect · B close panel · touch-drag to scroll long lists

The chat bar has a tap-to-talk input with inline < > emote arrows — fire line after line without re-opening the composer.

✅ Compatibility

  • Connects to standard AO2 servers — Ferris-AO, Athena, KFO, tsuserver, akashi, and others — over TCP, WebSocket, or secure WebSocket (TLS).
  • Reads stock AO2 content: characters, backgrounds, evidence, music, themes. Mislabeled assets in the wild (e.g. GIF sprites saved with a .webp name) are detected by content and handled.
  • Servers without a CDN: drop an AO2 base pack at sdmc:/switch/ferris-ao/base/ and it loads locally; otherwise the community base CDN fills in the classics.

⚠️ Known limitations

  • Evidence can be viewed but not yet attached to an outgoing message from the UI.
  • The IC composer exposes emote + colour + position; some advanced toggles (flip, immediate, etc.) are rendered when received but not yet selectable when sending.
  • This is a 0.x first public release — expect rough edges, and please report bugs! The current download listened down below is up to this commit eb4a84b

Credits

Created by SyntaxNyah. Built for the Attorney Online community, devkitPro, and SDL2. Do what you like just put credit.

Ferris-AO Switch is not affiliated with the official Attorney Online project. "Nintendo Switch" is a trademark of Nintendo; this is unofficial homebrew.

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