Read a walkthrough on top of any Switch game, without reaching for your phone

You know the moment. A block puzzle, a boss with a trick you have forgotten, a heart piece you are sure you missed. You put the Switch down, pick up your phone, find the guide, lose your place in it, and by the time you are back in the game the mood is gone.

I wanted the guide on the console instead. So I built Guide Watch, an overlay for Ultrahand that opens the walkthrough right over the game you are playing.

What it does

Open Ultrahand mid-game, pick Guide Watch, and the walkthrough slides in over the left 70% of the screen. The game is still there behind it: no quitting, no reloading.

• It knows what you are playing. It reads the running title and compares it with the names of your guide files. One strong match and it opens straight away. Several, or none, and you get a short list with the best matches on top.
• It remembers. The guide you pick is remembered for that game, and the line where you stopped is saved per guide. Close it, play for an hour, open it again and you are on the same line.
• Text size on the right stick. Six steps from 16 to 26 px. At 18 px most lines of a classic 79-column GameFAQs guide fit without awkward breaks.
• Maps stay maps. Those hand-drawn ASCII maps and tables that turn into soup in most readers are drawn on a fixed grid, so the columns line up.
• Touch works too. Drag to scroll, tap a guide in the list to open it.

Install

You need a Switch running Atmosphère with Ultrahand.

1. Download GuideWatch.ovl from the latest release and copy it to /switch/.overlays/ on the SD card.
2. Put your guides as .txt files anywhere under /Guides/. Subfolders are fine and show up as a small tag next to each guide.

That's it. Open Ultrahand in a game and pick Guide Watch.

Where the guides come from

The walkthroughs are plain-text FAQs from the GameFAQs archive that lives on archive.org. Many of them were written by fans twenty or thirty years ago and they are still the best guides ever made for those games.

I don't host any of them. If you would rather not hunt for files by hand, the browser tool at guides.retromodlab.com matches your games to guides and pulls each one straight from archive.org onto your card.

The two problems that took the longest

Overlays are narrow. A normal Ultrahand overlay is a 448 px strip down the side of the screen. That is fine for a menu and miserable for reading a guide. Guide Watch asks for a 896 px wide panel at the same sharpness. If the console doesn't have enough overlay memory for that, it falls back to the standard width instead of crashing.

ASCII maps fall apart. The overlay font is proportional, so an i is thinner than an m, and every carefully aligned map in an old guide collapses. The fix was to spot the lines that look like art (lots of symbols, box-drawing characters, wide gaps between words) and draw just those on a fixed grid, at the largest size where the widest line still fits. An 80-column map ends up at about 17 px.

Known limits

I'd rather you know these up front:

• Maps drawn smaller than your text size look a little taller than intended, and maps wider than about 120 columns are cut off at the right.
• The whole guide is loaded into memory. Guides up to about 1.5 MB are fine with the usual overlay memory. A file that doesn't fit shows a clear message instead of crashing.
• Homebrew started by holding R on a game is reported as that game, so it gets that game's guide.

Also on other handhelds

Guide Watch started on the Miyoo Mini Plus (OnionOS), and the same idea now runs on the 3DS, on DS with a DSpico, and through TWiLight Menu++. Each one gets its own post here. The idea itself comes from the Real Time Game Guide feature in cbepx-me's StockOS mod for Anbernic handhelds, so credit where it is due.

Guide Watch is free and open source (MIT) on GitHub. If it saves you a trip to your phone mid-dungeon, you can buy me a coffee.