There are hosts and nameservers located in countries that don’t give a fuck about companies like Nintendo.
In fact, the recent backlash about everything being hosted in the US has started to make this even easier as companies in other countries are stepping in to grab market share as companies look to flee US hosting.
At least on Android emulating your Steam library has become pretty good. A couple more years at this rate and any phone with a Snapdragon 8 Gen 2 or better processor and you’re good to play most games that would run on a Switch and more anyways
Switch emulation on PC is already great anyways. Getting there on Android. Sucks that progress has slowed down because of Nintendo takedowns
Gamehub is the most streamlined. As long as you have a recent as of the last like 3 years flagship snapdragon phone, you can emulate PC games pretty well. No root. Uses FEX, WINE, DXVK, etc. Pretty much the same software used for playing windows games on desktop linux
I should clarify, self hosted Gits for projects that may fall under targeted harassment by corporations (Eaglercraft, Switch Emulators, etc…) are becoming popular.
Ryujinx, operating out of Brazil, couldn’t be taken to court by Nintendo. So a lot of projects that could have Nintendo’s eye of sauron on them are looking for a safe country and self hosting as guaranteed insurance from a Yuzu situation.
There are alternatives, which will become more popular as it becomes more and more obvious that they are just part of the US national ‘security’ apparatus.
Primary hosting, but they can always have a fallback for at-risk projects or even just use p2p. Of course that already increases the risk of a potentially hacked provider/repo or just fake/malware versions in the wild
I personally got ahold of the final version of the source code to Ryujinx after it was pulled from
GitHub and put it on archive.org and I’m literally a random nobody who had nothing to do with the project so you are very incorrect. It was almost immediately picked up by other developers and is still seeing development to this day
The NES required companies to have nintendo make the cartridges for them and approve of games before doing so. You can say it improved quality over other systems but its still heavy handed and shitty from day one.
I love the games and consoles over the years but fuck nintendo all the same. They are capitalist greedy pigs like every other big game company.
Honestly, that kind of makes sense given the era the NES came out in. There was a fair amount of unplayable shovelware for the Atari, so having some oversight was probably good marketing at the time.
The practice of going after emulators and trying to establish exclusive rights to game mechanics that they didn’t actually invent is a bit further.
Lifetime of goodwill I believe the quote is. The OP is right on that too. I don’t know how old you are, but there’s a certain generation that allocates Nintendo an exceptional personal worth and views them as an exceptional company, due to the long standing memories that are associated with their products. Mainly the NES/Super NES era, but they had a few waves. It’s not really brainwashing, it’s literally like 20 or so years of memories with products that were key during crucial moments of our lives. So yeah, it’s a bit hard to reconcile that with the way they are acting in our modern age, honestly.
I am aware nostalgia is one hell of a drug, but they’ve never had “goodwill.” Dunno if you’re capable of reconciling goodtimes from a grift, but you better do so, and for your ill-associated fans.
I’ve hated them for far longer, and have given up hope you, and fans, will ever directly act upon this.
Wait, is this one of those “I didn’t know gambling was taboo and illegal too!” when making handmade cards used in gambling apologias? Or are you really going to defend gambling?
Good thing I’m not bothered by downvotes, because here they come.
As a retro gaming nerd with a ton of older Nintendo hardware, as well as modern emulation hardware, I don’t think it’s ethical to emulate the current gen. If the current gen supports the software, buy the game and play it on the current hardware. Shit, the physical games from prior eras have outperformed my retirement account in some cases.
That said, when you are given no legitimate options to purchase and play the game, well, you know, use your “legally acquired backup”
I get what you are saying, I’m not discounting it whatsoever. I mean I’m an accountant, I could talk all day and night about ways to maximize and protect your profits and cash flows.
That said, Nintendo has to be the laziest company from a coding perspective. Their stuff is always the first of the current gens to get jailbroken, and then it’s open season. I think we should have learned by now not to fight piracy like this either, because it’s both inevitable and it’s a terrible look. The smarter companies know how to use it to their advantage. They also don’t always go thermonuclear on their perspective clientele. It’s a rotten look. Make a product that people want to buy and they’ll buy it. If you make shovelware and then price it in the AAAA tiers, I think we all know what’s going to happen…
To be fair the switch 1 only got hacked because nvidia messed up the firmware. I think there still isn’t a software hack for switch 1 so nintendo’s os security is pretty good
I see where you’re coming from, but I think this attitude is rather shortsighted. Emulation is about much more than piracy, and I for example, run my switch library on my pc. I have my switch, and it’s essentially a game dumping device because I have such a better experience running those games on an emulator. Why should I spend money on another switch or a switch 2 to still have a worse experience than I’m getting now? Modding my games is easy, I can use and rebind any controller I want, and run most of my games without having to swap to another device.
I also care about the long term preservation of my games, and unfortunately my switch won’t last forever, it’s already in rough shape as is.
As far as switch 2, work on emulation now is going to make the preservation of their games long term possible. Emulating switch 2 doesn’t mean you don’t own one, or purchase your games, not by default. Ultimately though, even if someone pirates their games for switch 2, Nintendo is fine monetarily. They’ll be okay.
Another point, I am against purchasing the switch 2, as I am any new device using rechargeable lithium ion batteries. A large amount of the supply chain is mined via slave labor in Congo, and there’s not a good way to determine if it was or wasn’t.
Better to use the device you already have.
I don’t think it’s ethical to emulate the current gen.
I guess you haven’t noticed that the Switch is not current gen.
If the current gen supports the software, buy the game and play it on the current hardware.
I guess you live in a country where typical incomes can afford purchasing Nintendo games and hardware without giving up more important things, like food and shelter.
It’s dumb as shit from a business perspective. Get em hooked on it, and it’ll eventually get them buying it through a legit avenue. Emulations hardly perfected in most cases, and a legit product these days isn’t always procured at first point of touch. People would like to know if that $100 purchase you are asking of them is actually worth it, because quite a lot of the time in our modern age, it’s not.
As I stated to the other person that said this, all Switch games are backwards compatible with the switch 2. Compare that to the 3ds or DS. Nothing is in current production that will play those games, at least not physical copies.
The Switch was technically last-gen when it was new. The Xbox One and PS4 came out in 2013-2014. The Switch came out in like 2016 and was weaker than them, closer in performance to 360/PS3. The Switch was, in fact, a professionally modded Nvidia Shield 2014 model. The 2014 iPhones were better equipped, and the 2016-2017 Android flagships were as well (Android flagships lagged behind iPhone by a few years back then, now it’s more like one year or less). So by the time the Switch was a few years old, your phone was more powerful in most cases.
Anything that can run on a Switch 1 can easily run on virtually every phone released in the last 5-7 years. And they’re the same CPU architecture (ARM64, with only a couple Android phones not using that, namely the Asus… I forget the model number, but they were not popular).
That’s why having a Mac is kind of like a cheat code to emulating Switch. The Switch emulator is doing a lot less work since it’s talking to the same kind of processor. Of course, PC guys still have the advantage because a dedicated GPU more than makes up for the ARM64 advantage M-series Macs have! So your CPU is working harder but you have GPU to spare. We have like no GPU (it’s integrated).
Isn’t every processor today outside of niche embedded use cases and the dream that is RISC-V either x86-64 or ARM64? By that logic, everything is fair to emulate, because pretty much everything shares the same processor architecture.
I mean laptops, desktops, non-handleld consoles and servers broadly use x86-64, phones and some specialised low-powered laptops and servers, and handheld consoles use ARM64.
The only special case was pre-ARM MACS this century, they were on PowerPC IIRC.
The emulators have always been in a gray area, since they can play illegal copies of games with illegally sourced bios, etc. The emulator itself is simply the tool, which on its own isn’t proof of piracy much like owning a bong isn’t definite proof you smoke weed… just very suggestive (it can be used for tobacco I guess?)
As for current vs retro gen piracy, they’re equally illegal but obviously criminalized differently. And the ethics are obviously complex, you have people who pirate who otherwise wouldn’t be able to pay, you have people who pirate for a convenient copy of something they already own, and maybe people who could pay but simply don’t want to (although research has suggested this isn’t a huge group). And since it’s digital, there isn’t a loss in the same way as actual theft.
Personally, I just like taking control of the hardware and tweaking shit. I belong mostly to the folks who download copies of things I’ve already “bought” (which is a licence in many cases, as they don’t sell physical copies). A good example is Pokemon Scarlet, which ran like dogshit on the original hardware. I’ve been meaning to try it in an emulator to see if it works better, although I haven’t bothered yet. Would that be considered immoral, given I own the game and several switches?
I don’t even see downvotes, and I sort by date/time.
That said, I mostly agree with you. However, with prices and greed being what they are, and price gouging being ignored… I’d say it’s more of a fair play now than ever.
That said, if you’re trying to emulate a Switch 2, most likely, you’d have better luck with another platform. For one, Switch is an ARM-based system, and most Windows PCs are x86-64, so you’re emulating two things, the CPU and the code base. Emulating PlayStation or Xbox would be less work, provided you even can. If you have a Mac, of course those are ARM, but their GPUs are not really meant for gaming, unless you have a Max or Ultra variant. I had someone tell me their M1 Max (or Ultra, I forget) runs Cyberpunk as well as an Xbox. Well sure it does, but you paid 5-6 times what that Xbox costs, so what did you actually win besides a Darwin award? If you’re gonna spend big money on a Mac, you could have spent the same money on a solid Mac and a gaming PC/console and you’d have fewer issues. (Worth noting here, Macs can run Cyberpunk natively, but before CDPR ported it to ARM, Mac gamers were running the Windows version via Whisky and getting decent performance on comfortably (read: expensive) equipped Macs.)
If you just wanna play Mario Kart World and Donkey Kong Bananza, of course you can’t get those on an x86-64 console to emulate.
Anyway, the problem is, you are given no legitimate options to purchase the game because the consoles have nearly doubled in price and there’s no added value, it’s just “fuck you, pay us or don’t.”
I probably wouldn’t disagree that it’s not exactly ethical, but given the current state of society, it’s kind of at the bottom of a very large list of really really awful, unethical, shit that actually deserves my attention.
i disagree with you on the ethicalness of emulating current gen games, personally i think there’s nothing wrong with it, but regardless:
emulators for retro hardware often get their start while the console is still in production. for example, gamecube games nowadays are pretty expensive, so if you want to play them without breaking bank you’ll have to use an emulator, and the most mature by far is dolphin.
dolphin started being developed in 2003, while the gamecube was still the most recent nintendo console, and it grew from there. if dolphin started development in 2017, when nintendo discontinued the last console that could play wii & GC games natively, it would no doubt be far less capable today.
same goes for 3DS emulators like azahar, who descend from citra, which started development when the 3DS was recent.
nintendo here is not going after pirates, or even people who play legally backed up games, they’re going after emulator developers. even if it was unethical to emulate the switch now, stopping switch emulator development will ensure that switch emulation won’t be as good as it could be when it would stop being unethical.
in other words, it’s killing game preservation, or at least hampering it. that’s not good, even if you think piracy is unethical.
Go to Ebay, look for switch games, then come back and tell us with a straight face that’s a reasonable market.
Also, tell me the many innovative ways those overpriced glorified android tablets can be upscaled and run games at 60fps without either purchasing the overpriced switch 2 or emulation.
Emulation doesn’t just apply to games. The entire legality is based off of the fact that reverse engineering is also legal, which is how companies can replicate ideas or concepts from competitor products, or how 3rd party vendors make products compatible with other platforms.
It would be stupid to have to wait for a patent to expire before you can utilize the concept in your own product. Patent cockfighting would be a completly new level of hell, and no one would get anywhere.
Imagine having to wait 10 years before you can use 3rd party controllers for your switch because Nintendo uses a proprietary bluetooth driver. 3rd party Wiimotes wouldn’t even exist.
The only ethical conundrum is the aide in piracy, but we’ve already seen how little that has to do with emulation due to homebrew and flashcarts.
If anything, Nintendo has a higher moral ground on ROM libraries which they can argue aides in piracy due to “bypassing” copyright protection.
fun fact, most of the globe uses comma, anglophone sphere and china are the few ones using period for it
I got so used to using periods that I had to specify that I was using period as a decimal seperator in math exercises because here where I live it is uses comma
I love when this shit happens and it’s like oh, not the one I know about that literally has torrents bundling single games on pc to one click run the games lol
Meh, emulate it and get better frame rates and higher resolution.
Why would I buy a console that plays the game at an inferior state?
Nintendo is free at any time to release their games on Steam or even their own PC storefront and if I could play it with my hardware then I’d buy most games at full price.
Nintendo succeeded in killing Yuzu because they had decryption keys which Nintendo could argue is breaking their copy protection, which is why they settled for 2.4 million dollars in sales damages because they knew they wouldn’t be able to win in court.
All of these forks have since removed the key and require the user to supply it (legally from your own console).
So in theory they should be protected under US law since emulation and reverse engineering is completely legal.
However
Nintendo also has infinite money to throw at the problem, and FOSS devs are usually not willing to deal with insane amount of personal liability because of a hobby, which is how they killed Ryujinx.
So you better hold onto your guts if you plan to fight Nintendo.
I thought Yuzu also didn’t include the keys. They had instructions on how you could copy them from a device you owned. Or was that something different?
Nintendo succeeded in killing Yuzu because they had decryption keys which Nintendo could argue is breaking their copy protection, which is why they settled for 2.4 million dollars in sales damage
Was not it also because they have their Patreons subscribers things such as early access to leaked games?
Nintendo’s suit also claims Yuzu’s Patreon page allows its developers to earn 30,000 a month by providing subscribers with “daily updates,” “early access,” and “special unreleased features” to games like Tears of the Kingdom by circumventing the protective measures Nintendo has in place to prevent piracy of video games.
I despise Nintendo but if this claim was true, they were earning money with pirated content, right?
Ah that might have been it then. As others pointed out, they never had the keys in the emulator itself.
Dunno if Yuzu provided the game itself, or tools to extract the game successfully, but the main argument from Nintendo was still copy protection bypassing, which is illegal.
Actually now that I think about it, I’m pretty sure they also nuked the Switch dumping tools from GitHub long before they killed Yuzu for the same reason. All it did was extract the firmware and console keys, but it was enough to force the tools to be rehosted.
You could say “I wish their executives loved games as much as their developers and artists” or lament that they’re tied to such a cutthroat corporate machine or something. You do know you can express a more nuanced idea than “FUCK X THING” without kowtowing to some of the most high profile corporate bullshit out there, right
does the emulator need Nintendo server to play the game?
Not at all. Not even for online multiplayer, I remember Yuzu had some way to play multiplayer (there’s even a whole discord server for this).
I think Nintendo is trying to scare everyone by trying to take everything down and sue. But we have seen that it does not work, it’ll just split the base once again in multiple fragments (with different emulators).
Though, it feels like the development of Switch emulation has stagnated. I don’t see improvements for current games that have trouble running on the emulators (which often both original Yuzu and Ryujinx would fix by time).
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Eden’s primary git repo is self-hosted. This doesn’t affect them at all.
Do yo know which is the official website and repository? When I search different results popup and I don’t know which is original.
https://eden-emu.dev/
Nintendo’s lawyers have reach beyond github. They only need to chat with your hosting company or nameserver.
Sure, but since the project itself is not illegal, they could just keep mirroring it and even throw it up on a .onion site or an I2P eepsite.
There are hosts and nameservers located in countries that don’t give a fuck about companies like Nintendo.
In fact, the recent backlash about everything being hosted in the US has started to make this even easier as companies in other countries are stepping in to grab market share as companies look to flee US hosting.
Now that, im excited about 100%
This won’t fix your slumping sales Nintendo
At least on Android emulating your Steam library has become pretty good. A couple more years at this rate and any phone with a Snapdragon 8 Gen 2 or better processor and you’re good to play most games that would run on a Switch and more anyways
Switch emulation on PC is already great anyways. Getting there on Android. Sucks that progress has slowed down because of Nintendo takedowns
How do you emulate it? Need to root it?
Gamehub, GameNative, Winlator
Gamehub is the most streamlined. As long as you have a recent as of the last like 3 years flagship snapdragon phone, you can emulate PC games pretty well. No root. Uses FEX, WINE, DXVK, etc. Pretty much the same software used for playing windows games on desktop linux
Thanks, this sounds really interesting!
Open source is hard to kill off forever. Someone, somewhere is gonna have the repo.
Getting it off GitHub is usually enough to effectively kill it.
Until someone puts it back…
Naa most projects are still fine off github. Theres a couple of emus that are now officially off gh and they are still being worked on.
They’ll need to proactively clone it to a non-github repos before its shutdown.
Doesn’t matter if they clone it or not.
Why? Why is it harder to get it from codeberg or even self hosted forges?
It’s not like most people find it by randomly browsing Github
It’s not harder to get it from there, it’s harder to get contributors.
They absolutely do, that’s why devs are always begging for “stars”.
Self-hosted gits in a country that doesn’t care are becoming popular.
What makes you say that? Probably 95% of FOSS projects I see are still hosted on GH.
I should clarify, self hosted Gits for projects that may fall under targeted harassment by corporations (Eaglercraft, Switch Emulators, etc…) are becoming popular.
Ryujinx, operating out of Brazil, couldn’t be taken to court by Nintendo. So a lot of projects that could have Nintendo’s eye of sauron on them are looking for a safe country and self hosting as guaranteed insurance from a Yuzu situation.
Lemmy is a bit of an echo chamber in that regard
Maybe 95% of your FOSS projects aren’t “free” enough ;o
They’re not XD
Oh, github, a division of MicroSlop?
There are alternatives, which will become more popular as it becomes more and more obvious that they are just part of the US national ‘security’ apparatus.
No, I meant GoodHank. The younger, better version of Hank Hill.
Primary hosting, but they can always have a fallback for at-risk projects or even just use p2p. Of course that already increases the risk of a potentially hacked provider/repo or just fake/malware versions in the wild
I personally got ahold of the final version of the source code to Ryujinx after it was pulled from GitHub and put it on archive.org and I’m literally a random nobody who had nothing to do with the project so you are very incorrect. It was almost immediately picked up by other developers and is still seeing development to this day
Oh well if you archived it then its not dead!
It’s a meaningless battle.
It’s crazy to watch a company burn a lifetime of good will in just a few years of chasing copyright litigation.
They’re selling $80 games with no problems so it seems to be working out for them.
The NES required companies to have nintendo make the cartridges for them and approve of games before doing so. You can say it improved quality over other systems but its still heavy handed and shitty from day one.
I love the games and consoles over the years but fuck nintendo all the same. They are capitalist greedy pigs like every other big game company.
Honestly, that kind of makes sense given the era the NES came out in. There was a fair amount of unplayable shovelware for the Atari, so having some oversight was probably good marketing at the time.
The practice of going after emulators and trying to establish exclusive rights to game mechanics that they didn’t actually invent is a bit further.
Their propaganda brainwashed you too hard, eh?
Lifetime of goodwill I believe the quote is. The OP is right on that too. I don’t know how old you are, but there’s a certain generation that allocates Nintendo an exceptional personal worth and views them as an exceptional company, due to the long standing memories that are associated with their products. Mainly the NES/Super NES era, but they had a few waves. It’s not really brainwashing, it’s literally like 20 or so years of memories with products that were key during crucial moments of our lives. So yeah, it’s a bit hard to reconcile that with the way they are acting in our modern age, honestly.
Old to recall they were a card grifting company.
I am aware nostalgia is one hell of a drug, but they’ve never had “goodwill.” Dunno if you’re capable of reconciling goodtimes from a grift, but you better do so, and for your ill-associated fans.
I’ve hated them for far longer, and have given up hope you, and fans, will ever directly act upon this.
Starting a company is a grift! Selling hand made products is a grift!
Nintendo makes handmade products‽
Corporations are companies‽
Is your non-sequitur necessary‽
The page you posted said they started walking handmade cards in 1889, calling it a grift is laughable. And no need to be pedantic
Wait, is this one of those “I didn’t know gambling was taboo and illegal too!” when making handmade cards used in gambling apologias? Or are you really going to defend gambling?
Good thing I’m not bothered by downvotes, because here they come.
As a retro gaming nerd with a ton of older Nintendo hardware, as well as modern emulation hardware, I don’t think it’s ethical to emulate the current gen. If the current gen supports the software, buy the game and play it on the current hardware. Shit, the physical games from prior eras have outperformed my retirement account in some cases.
That said, when you are given no legitimate options to purchase and play the game, well, you know, use your “legally acquired backup”
I get what you are saying, I’m not discounting it whatsoever. I mean I’m an accountant, I could talk all day and night about ways to maximize and protect your profits and cash flows.
That said, Nintendo has to be the laziest company from a coding perspective. Their stuff is always the first of the current gens to get jailbroken, and then it’s open season. I think we should have learned by now not to fight piracy like this either, because it’s both inevitable and it’s a terrible look. The smarter companies know how to use it to their advantage. They also don’t always go thermonuclear on their perspective clientele. It’s a rotten look. Make a product that people want to buy and they’ll buy it. If you make shovelware and then price it in the AAAA tiers, I think we all know what’s going to happen…
To be fair the switch 1 only got hacked because nvidia messed up the firmware. I think there still isn’t a software hack for switch 1 so nintendo’s os security is pretty good
Its legal if you bought the game and dump the cartridge
I see where you’re coming from, but I think this attitude is rather shortsighted. Emulation is about much more than piracy, and I for example, run my switch library on my pc. I have my switch, and it’s essentially a game dumping device because I have such a better experience running those games on an emulator. Why should I spend money on another switch or a switch 2 to still have a worse experience than I’m getting now? Modding my games is easy, I can use and rebind any controller I want, and run most of my games without having to swap to another device. I also care about the long term preservation of my games, and unfortunately my switch won’t last forever, it’s already in rough shape as is. As far as switch 2, work on emulation now is going to make the preservation of their games long term possible. Emulating switch 2 doesn’t mean you don’t own one, or purchase your games, not by default. Ultimately though, even if someone pirates their games for switch 2, Nintendo is fine monetarily. They’ll be okay.
Another point, I am against purchasing the switch 2, as I am any new device using rechargeable lithium ion batteries. A large amount of the supply chain is mined via slave labor in Congo, and there’s not a good way to determine if it was or wasn’t. Better to use the device you already have.
I guess you haven’t noticed that the Switch is not current gen.
I guess you live in a country where typical incomes can afford purchasing Nintendo games and hardware without giving up more important things, like food and shelter.
All switch games are backwards compatible with the switch 2, so yeah, still current gen for software.
Yes I do.
The legality of emulating current gen hardware has already been decided. (At least in the US)
I don’t think it’s ethical to demand that if people want to play your games, they have to do so on your shitty $500 DRM machine.
Then don’t fucking play them
Nah. Fuck them. The last thing we need on this planet is more single-use proprietary e-waste consumerism.
It’s dumb as shit from a business perspective. Get em hooked on it, and it’ll eventually get them buying it through a legit avenue. Emulations hardly perfected in most cases, and a legit product these days isn’t always procured at first point of touch. People would like to know if that $100 purchase you are asking of them is actually worth it, because quite a lot of the time in our modern age, it’s not.
Nintendo is such a scummy company that giving them money is unethical, IMO.
The Switch is last gen now though, isn’t it?
As I stated to the other person that said this, all Switch games are backwards compatible with the switch 2. Compare that to the 3ds or DS. Nothing is in current production that will play those games, at least not physical copies.
The Switch was technically last-gen when it was new. The Xbox One and PS4 came out in 2013-2014. The Switch came out in like 2016 and was weaker than them, closer in performance to 360/PS3. The Switch was, in fact, a professionally modded Nvidia Shield 2014 model. The 2014 iPhones were better equipped, and the 2016-2017 Android flagships were as well (Android flagships lagged behind iPhone by a few years back then, now it’s more like one year or less). So by the time the Switch was a few years old, your phone was more powerful in most cases.
Anything that can run on a Switch 1 can easily run on virtually every phone released in the last 5-7 years. And they’re the same CPU architecture (ARM64, with only a couple Android phones not using that, namely the Asus… I forget the model number, but they were not popular).
That’s why having a Mac is kind of like a cheat code to emulating Switch. The Switch emulator is doing a lot less work since it’s talking to the same kind of processor. Of course, PC guys still have the advantage because a dedicated GPU more than makes up for the ARM64 advantage M-series Macs have! So your CPU is working harder but you have GPU to spare. We have like no GPU (it’s integrated).
Isn’t every processor today outside of niche embedded use cases and the dream that is RISC-V either x86-64 or ARM64? By that logic, everything is fair to emulate, because pretty much everything shares the same processor architecture.
I mean laptops, desktops, non-handleld consoles and servers broadly use x86-64, phones and some specialised low-powered laptops and servers, and handheld consoles use ARM64.
The only special case was pre-ARM MACS this century, they were on PowerPC IIRC.
And the PS3 Cell. Also PowerPC IIRC.
Wasnt’ the 360 PPC too?
The emulators have always been in a gray area, since they can play illegal copies of games with illegally sourced bios, etc. The emulator itself is simply the tool, which on its own isn’t proof of piracy much like owning a bong isn’t definite proof you smoke weed… just very suggestive (it can be used for tobacco I guess?)
As for current vs retro gen piracy, they’re equally illegal but obviously criminalized differently. And the ethics are obviously complex, you have people who pirate who otherwise wouldn’t be able to pay, you have people who pirate for a convenient copy of something they already own, and maybe people who could pay but simply don’t want to (although research has suggested this isn’t a huge group). And since it’s digital, there isn’t a loss in the same way as actual theft.
Personally, I just like taking control of the hardware and tweaking shit. I belong mostly to the folks who download copies of things I’ve already “bought” (which is a licence in many cases, as they don’t sell physical copies). A good example is Pokemon Scarlet, which ran like dogshit on the original hardware. I’ve been meaning to try it in an emulator to see if it works better, although I haven’t bothered yet. Would that be considered immoral, given I own the game and several switches?
I don’t even see downvotes, and I sort by date/time.
That said, I mostly agree with you. However, with prices and greed being what they are, and price gouging being ignored… I’d say it’s more of a fair play now than ever.
That said, if you’re trying to emulate a Switch 2, most likely, you’d have better luck with another platform. For one, Switch is an ARM-based system, and most Windows PCs are x86-64, so you’re emulating two things, the CPU and the code base. Emulating PlayStation or Xbox would be less work, provided you even can. If you have a Mac, of course those are ARM, but their GPUs are not really meant for gaming, unless you have a Max or Ultra variant. I had someone tell me their M1 Max (or Ultra, I forget) runs Cyberpunk as well as an Xbox. Well sure it does, but you paid 5-6 times what that Xbox costs, so what did you actually win besides a Darwin award? If you’re gonna spend big money on a Mac, you could have spent the same money on a solid Mac and a gaming PC/console and you’d have fewer issues. (Worth noting here, Macs can run Cyberpunk natively, but before CDPR ported it to ARM, Mac gamers were running the Windows version via Whisky and getting decent performance on comfortably (read: expensive) equipped Macs.)
If you just wanna play Mario Kart World and Donkey Kong Bananza, of course you can’t get those on an x86-64 console to emulate.
Anyway, the problem is, you are given no legitimate options to purchase the game because the consoles have nearly doubled in price and there’s no added value, it’s just “fuck you, pay us or don’t.”
I probably wouldn’t disagree that it’s not exactly ethical, but given the current state of society, it’s kind of at the bottom of a very large list of really really awful, unethical, shit that actually deserves my attention.
i disagree with you on the ethicalness of emulating current gen games, personally i think there’s nothing wrong with it, but regardless:
emulators for retro hardware often get their start while the console is still in production. for example, gamecube games nowadays are pretty expensive, so if you want to play them without breaking bank you’ll have to use an emulator, and the most mature by far is dolphin.
dolphin started being developed in 2003, while the gamecube was still the most recent nintendo console, and it grew from there. if dolphin started development in 2017, when nintendo discontinued the last console that could play wii & GC games natively, it would no doubt be far less capable today.
same goes for 3DS emulators like azahar, who descend from citra, which started development when the 3DS was recent.
nintendo here is not going after pirates, or even people who play legally backed up games, they’re going after emulator developers. even if it was unethical to emulate the switch now, stopping switch emulator development will ensure that switch emulation won’t be as good as it could be when it would stop being unethical.
in other words, it’s killing game preservation, or at least hampering it. that’s not good, even if you think piracy is unethical.
Go to Ebay, look for switch games, then come back and tell us with a straight face that’s a reasonable market.
Also, tell me the many innovative ways those overpriced glorified android tablets can be upscaled and run games at 60fps without either purchasing the overpriced switch 2 or emulation.
Emulation doesn’t just apply to games. The entire legality is based off of the fact that reverse engineering is also legal, which is how companies can replicate ideas or concepts from competitor products, or how 3rd party vendors make products compatible with other platforms.
It would be stupid to have to wait for a patent to expire before you can utilize the concept in your own product. Patent cockfighting would be a completly new level of hell, and no one would get anywhere.
Imagine having to wait 10 years before you can use 3rd party controllers for your switch because Nintendo uses a proprietary bluetooth driver. 3rd party Wiimotes wouldn’t even exist.
The only ethical conundrum is the aide in piracy, but we’ve already seen how little that has to do with emulation due to homebrew and flashcarts.
If anything, Nintendo has a higher moral ground on ROM libraries which they can argue aides in piracy due to “bypassing” copyright protection.
Funny, here I am still using Yuzu
Still seeding it. Build: 4176
Stats:
Size: 936,5 MB
Upload: 37,6 GB
RarioRatio: 41,117:)
Legendary ratio.
Oh you’re using the comma as a decimal point… Still pretty good.
Close enough lol
fun fact, most of the globe uses comma, anglophone sphere and china are the few ones using period for it
I got so used to using periods that I had to specify that I was using period as a decimal seperator in math exercises because here where I live it is uses comma
It’s-a-me, Rario!
nintendo got L + Rario’d
I love when this shit happens and it’s like oh, not the one I know about that literally has torrents bundling single games on pc to one click run the games lol
Meh, emulate it and get better frame rates and higher resolution.
Why would I buy a console that plays the game at an inferior state?
Nintendo is free at any time to release their games on Steam or even their own PC storefront and if I could play it with my hardware then I’d buy most games at full price.
Until then, nah I’m good.
God I would play all the Zelda games I missed not hassling with their consoles if they put them on Steam. Last Nintendo Console I owned was Wii.
Agree, as long as we are forced to bullshit, I’ll just keep my hands dirty.
Nintendo succeeded in killing Yuzu because they had decryption keys which Nintendo could argue is breaking their copy protection, which is why they settled for 2.4 million dollars in sales damages because they knew they wouldn’t be able to win in court.
All of these forks have since removed the key and require the user to supply it (legally from your own console).
So in theory they should be protected under US law since emulation and reverse engineering is completely legal.
However
Nintendo also has infinite money to throw at the problem, and FOSS devs are usually not willing to deal with insane amount of personal liability because of a hobby, which is how they killed Ryujinx.
So you better hold onto your guts if you plan to fight Nintendo.
Or move to i2p so they can’t disable you lol.
Emulation isn’t protected.
Yes it is
That was the use of emulators in advertising to show performance differences.
It does not protect emulation as the company went bankrupt before that could be decided.
Granted I’m not deep diving into sources, but
Unless I’m illiterate, isn’t that stating that even the sale of an emulator is protected?
Someone corrected me, different case than the one people usually source.
No that’s was the second lawsuit, Sony v Bleem!, which was a different emulator.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bleem!
You needed to acquire encryption keys for both Ryujinx and Yuzu.
Yuzu just requested money and put features behind a donator paywall
pokemon cards alone accounts for billions in profit/revenue. they have plenty of money.
I thought Yuzu also didn’t include the keys. They had instructions on how you could copy them from a device you owned. Or was that something different?
The emulator didn’t, but I think they had one somewhere in their git history or website.
I forgot now, but I vaguely remember Nintendo pointing out a specific key that was found under the parent company’s assets.
Could be wrong though, maybe they really did just get screwed over
probably not the git history, because if it was then that woould still be present across forks
Was not it also because they have their Patreons subscribers things such as early access to leaked games?
IGN Article
From the article;
I despise Nintendo but if this claim was true, they were earning money with pirated content, right?
Ah that might have been it then. As others pointed out, they never had the keys in the emulator itself.
Dunno if Yuzu provided the game itself, or tools to extract the game successfully, but the main argument from Nintendo was still copy protection bypassing, which is illegal.
Actually now that I think about it, I’m pretty sure they also nuked the Switch dumping tools from GitHub long before they killed Yuzu for the same reason. All it did was extract the firmware and console keys, but it was enough to force the tools to be rehosted.
Plus sending goons to his house.
Allegedly.
I was considering a Switch 2 but now… not so much.
Just wait until an emulator for switch 2. Then don’t buy it.
I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again: Fuck Nintendo.
FTFY
They still make banger games and consoles.
Who do you think they work for
It must be someone who doesn’t understand the situation. Surely not Nintendo. My parasocial relationship with that company tells me they’re swell!
You could say “I wish their executives loved games as much as their developers and artists” or lament that they’re tied to such a cutthroat corporate machine or something. You do know you can express a more nuanced idea than “FUCK X THING” without kowtowing to some of the most high profile corporate bullshit out there, right
Lick more boots
I never thought to emulate the switch until they killed the first emulator. Now I download the latest emu and roms nearly every month. Fuck Nintendo.
Yeah me too, i used to stick to the classics, gba and all but after they took down yuzu and eden became a thing i started using it
Nintons doing direct acts about this: 🦗
I don’t understand. How will Nintendo shut down an emulator? does the emulator need Nintendo server to play the game?
If you read the article they speculate it’s to slow down the development of a Switch 2 emulator.
Not at all. Not even for online multiplayer, I remember Yuzu had some way to play multiplayer (there’s even a whole discord server for this).
I think Nintendo is trying to scare everyone by trying to take everything down and sue. But we have seen that it does not work, it’ll just split the base once again in multiple fragments (with different emulators).
Though, it feels like the development of Switch emulation has stagnated. I don’t see improvements for current games that have trouble running on the emulators (which often both original Yuzu and Ryujinx would fix by time).