we know emulation is legal, but we’re still going to legally have a legal reason to take y’all emulators to court angry face
See also: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Strategic_lawsuit_against_public_participation
Strategic lawsuits against public participation (also known as SLAPP suits or intimidation lawsuits), or strategic litigation against public participation, are lawsuits intended to censor, intimidate, and silence critics by burdening them with the cost of a legal defense until they abandon their criticism or opposition
There are many, many variants. The idea is the smaller player can’t really afford to fight in court, so even if the larger actor has shaky legal claims they will still win.
Bypassing copy protection has always been the number one reason, it was never emulation per se.
Nintendo needs to burn. The fact they can just shut down whatever they want is disgusting and needs to be stopped.
I prefer my nintendont 2 (aka steam deck). Fuck Nintendo bastards and taking down all cool emulator free software projects.
$600 <-> prolly three fiddy
Uh, base Steamdeck is $399.
Not sure why this is getting down votes. Price is the key factor most parents look at, and most people who aren’t into technology probably don’t know what the steam deck is or know what “gaming on Linux” means. That is what is stopping a good friend of mine. Price is a huge factor, but the intimidation from lack of knowledge is just as big
Because it’s a false narrative, entry level steamdeck can be had for $399.
You can one for under $300 if you buy refurbished.
Not an argument, you can also buy refurbished switch for 150 - 200
It’s getting down voted because it’s not $600 it’s $400. Which is exactly how much the switch costed at launch. Well not exactly. The switch cost money to play online. So it’s actually cheaper
excellent point and not trying to be pedantic, just pointing this out because i used to make the same mistake, the past tense of cost is cost.
Fuck I’m usually good with grammar
most people who aren’t into technology probably don’t know what the steam deck is
Idk about that. Steam is a wildly popular platform and regularly markets the SteamDeck to its user base.
If it wasn’t for the fact that a lot of people here have a good sized Steam library, I doubt they’d have a Steam Deck either.
It’s more a “bonus way to play about half your PC games on the toilet” than it is a primary gaming platform.
I’ve tripled my library since getting a deck and use it more often than my PC.
Nah, you’re not giving the steam deck nearly enough credit. It fills a very similar niche to the switch - a viable mobile gaming option that can also be readily used for couch gaming. You don’t need a large steam library to get use out of that, just like how the average switch owner probably only has a few switch games.
You could. But realistically how many have?
AAAAAH. WAAAT. NO. DON’T PLAY ON THE TOILET. COME ON, GUYS.
Not sure why this is getting down votes
Because Lemmings are completely disconnected from the real world.
No, it’s just straight up misinformation, or at least a disingenuous oversimplification.
The base model steam deck is $400 (and you can get steam-certified refurbished ones for even cheaper), and we don’t know the price of the Switch 2 yet. If it comes with even some of the hardware upgrades that have been leaked, I very much doubt it’ll retail for as low as $350.
The base SteamDeck doesn’t have an OLED screen and is still more expensive than the Switch OLED. As for the price of the Switch 2, it’s a well-known and documented practice that console manufacturers sell them at a loss and make back the profits in games. If anything, you’re the one spewing misinformation.
The base steam deck blows the OLED switch out of the water specs-wise on everything other than the screen. Nothing I’ve said is untrue, the relevant top comment is pure speculation at best.
blablabla specs-wise
See? This is what I mean by disconnected from the real world. Next you’re gonna tell me how open source allows you to unlock the full potential of the Steamdeck’s hardware.
Nothing I’ve said is untrue, the relevant top comment is pure speculation at best.
Brother, you literally said the Switch 2 is not gonna be around 350 USD. You have exactly as much evidence of that as the relevant top comment has that it will be. The difference is that only your comment was serious.
What bugs me is i thought it was cause of the switch 2 pending, but turns out the switch 2 won’t be fully backwards compatible
The Switch 2 has a new hardware size and some software (like Labo and Ring Fit) has a physical component that is sized to the original Switch/Joy-Con. It could be referring to that.
Yeha but the pessimist in me thinks of box’s backwards compatibility where only the games they curated would work. Still can’t play eternal sonata anymore.
That would surprise me. It just doesn’t sound like their flavour of bullshit.
Just as a heads up, Eternal Sonata was released on the PS3 and Xbox360. Both RCPS3 and Xenia can play Eternal Sonata even on a steamdeck. If they wont let you play it legitimately, and youve bought a copy for your old systems… thats more than enough justification to emulate in my books.
Pretty sure you can still play Eternal Sonata on the last 3 generations of Xbox.
Nah it was never added to backwards compatibility on the xbone or series X. I tried so many times with hope in my eyes to put the disc in and nada.
Man I’m so sorry to hear that. For me it was Lucasarts’ Gladius and they finally did add that one somewhat recently. It’s the only game I was keeping my original Xbox for.
Our new console is backwards compatible*
* It isn’t
To be fair, (I hate Nintendo because of their crusade on open source software), but to be fair,
ps2 had issues on some Ps1 games, the list is short though, and the last few revisions of ps2 even software emulated Ps1 (don’t know the compatibility difference with hardware backwards compatibility)
Ps3 had issues with even more ps2 games, and only the first few revisions had hardware backwards compatibility, the ps2 emulation on ps3 without hardware compatibility is a mess
PS5 has issues with some ps4 games, including but not limited to psvr games, and I think I saw an official in incompatibility list by sony
Wii backwards compatibility i dont know about any issues except with games that use hardware accessories, maybe someone knows more? Later revisions dropped backward compatibility, but the hardware is still present, and homebrew will help you.
As for switch 2 to switch 1 backwards compatibility speculation, here is a educated guess. The asterisk is referring to lobo games and some other games with accessories. Why this speculative conclusion? Because of the way the hardware inside it works.
The arm cpu can be optionally designed to be completely backwards compatible. But is it? (more on that soon). The gpu part of the SOC, is most certainly not 100% binary compatible, because of what we already know about the architecture changes between these gpu generations. This isn’t limited to arm and nvidia gpus, ps5 also has these issues with x86 jaguar to ryzen, and Radeon generations.
So what about your experience with pc gpus, and cpus, and ps5 to ps4 compatibility etc? Well, emulation, the instructions, that are not compatible are emulated in software, this is common place, and in practice it works quite well. The main issue comes down to timing. Some things take different amount of time to do, like an instruction can take fewer cycles. Or if it’s emulated it can take more cycles. Emulation does work well, even if it often can have timing issues. Some times instructions from a future generation can possibly be emulated on your pc cpu. I can remember my friends computer using an installed windows driver, to emulate a future version of the SSE instruction set, I think it was SSE 2 or 2.1, it worked well enough to play VR games (oculus rift dev kit 1 days).
Another issue is that when cpu makers deprecate instructions some times, but they do this in a quite annoying way, they can add a wait, so an instruction takes much longer to run than previous cpus.
I’m not confident enough to talk in this detail about GPUs, because as we all experience, the high level compatibility api like directX or vulkan do all this all the time for us, and I don’t know graphics programming. But I do know this is more of an issue on consoles talking more directly to the hardware. But lots of switch games use vulkan so, those should TM work fine… But some games can also be programmed (intentionally like rogue squadron on GameCube, or unintentionally) to need an unintended or undocumented feature of the vulkan implementation on the switch, and those may or may not work on switch 2
Nvidia also is responsible for the Cpu design, directly or indirectly. I don’t know how much they care about being as backwards compatible with the cpu instructions as possible though. Probsbly if Nintendo has anything to say about it, they can be 99.999% compatible, with only some timing issues, which may or may not affect games.
So what is the conclusions? Of course this is speculation, and users have to test games, it will take years to know the full extent, but I think we will see near 100% compatibility for games that don’t need hardware accessories that are not compatible. If we exclude shovelware (low effort crap that somehow got into the eshop) maybe a couple to a handful of games will have big enough issues that they can’t be played. Maybe more games will have minor graphics issues, or things that look fine, but just slightly different to switch1
So the lawyer says that Nintendo, despite knowing that the emulators themselves are legal, has unlawfully caused take downs and reputational damage. Sounds kind of illegal
Not really. It sounds like they haven’t gone after them for emulation, but instead for emulation-adjacent things: copying ROMs, circumventing digital locks, etc.
They explicitly mention (one of?) the developers of Yuzu sharing ROMs in the article.
In other words, the emulator itself isn’t illegal, but in order to use the emulator the way most people want, you have to do illegal things, and that’s what they go after you for.
Logical conclusion takedown of the ROM’s and not the emulator. ROM’s can be obtained without problems, I don’t regularly read that sites are taken down or people are taken up. That’s just a convenient excuse. Nintendo just knows that their only argument is exclusive titles. Who would still want a Wii if you could use it better on the steam deck with yuzu?
I also remember that I often read that you have to organize such and such files yourself. Where then reference was made to original hardware/data carriers and not to Rom pages etc. I had problems with Zelda in particular.
Right, emulators aren’t illegal but a bunch of adjacent things can be - for example system BIOS/FW/encryption keys/ROMs if you don’t dump them yourself from your own personal hardware.
What got Yuzu in the crosshairs was announcing support for Tears of the Kingdom before it released, meaning they were testing their emulator on an unreleased game and the odds that every dev and tester had legitimately gotten a copy of the game before official release is so low that they weren’t about to fight it and go through discovery (which might have identified significant additional piracy on their part). It was easier to fold and settle, and probably saved them from an immense amount of fines for piracy used for testing.
I remember that Valve also caused trouble there. https://youtu.be/aRnZrSBK3R4 Since you saw the Yuzu surface briefly.
deleted by creator
Did you just all-black-people-look-the-same yourself
Yeah that’s clearly Prince
Formerly Prince.
FKA Prince.
AKA “the artist”
It’s not even Lionel Richie.
But he was the one I was looking for
- That is NOT Michael Jackson
- What is so amoral about MJ?
What is so amoral about MJ?
MJ had a very questionable relationship with children. Probably not GOP levels of questionable, but still disturbing.
It’s been proven that he didn’t do that shit, he was a weirdo, but sex did not interest him.
FBI tried to bust him for ages.
Every single allegation was walked back by the accusers, AFTER HE DIED. You are believing a version of a lie.
Every single allegation was walked back by the accusers
Source? I thought only more and more allegations came to light after his death. That “Leaving Neverland” documentary came out well after his death.
Also, that’s very obviously not Michael Jackson.
Also that isn’t MJ
I heard Rockwell was even worse.
WRONG AGAIN
Typical jealous man falsely accusing a dead man because he can’t defend himself
Now shoo shoo criminal
Whatever happened to presumed innocent until proven guilty beyond a shadow of a doubt
The court of public opinion sadly does not follow courtroom procedure.
Until it happens to them
There’s nothing new in this article. And I don’t think Nintendo ever said that emulation is illegal, just emulating their games is, which technically is true to some part at least in the United States, where sometimes you need to circumvent some security measures to get games emulated which is a forbidden (this is mentioned in the article).
A very strong case could be made that dumping your keys and your games is not bypassing encryption.
Get a load of the nerd reading the articles and making informed opinions. Just join the rest of us in mindless circle jerking.
Yea, if I recall correctly, the Yuzu team was sharing roms of latest Nintendo releases internally and Nintendo was able to prove it. At least Jeff Gerstman podcast suggested something to that accord when reporting on it.
Yeah and the Yuzu people had made something like 4 million bucks on the project too. When you start making serious cash off of tools for piracy (and when we’re talking about a current-gen console that’s essentially what it is, not a tool for preservation like older emulators) then you should expect some heat to come your way.
Nintendo has always been a bit on the bastardly side of things when it comes to fan projects but I can’t say that I blame them for going after Yuzu when they felt like they had a winnable case.
You don’t say, Nintendo. Pretty sure they’re also using open source emulators, from the developers they really hate, to run their older titles.
Idk their emulation is garbage except for the suspension and rewind. A lot of the open source emulation I have seen, especially of Nintendo products, is immaculate.
Zelda 64 on the Switch was a mess at release, but the emulator has improved greatly since then.
Not to mention the selection of games available is pretty paltry.
That’s just not true. They have their own emulators, but most of the time they are inferior to community ones. I think Virtual Console releases used some kind of optimized emulators for their hardware, but didn’t care about accuracy, etc.
The top IP lawyer at Nintendo agreed that emulators are technically legal at a panel for intellectual property rights.
They run afoul of the law when they bypass encryption, recreate copyrighted programs, or point users to pirated material.
Yes, this wasn’t an admission because it’s a well-known fact that is not inconsistent with Nintendo’s earlier actions. The headline is deceptive and people don’t read the article. The article itself contains no new information and it is only worth reading for someone who has been deceived by the headline and needs to be set straight by the same people who wrote the deceptive headline. It’s click bait that shouldn’t exist.
Nintendo used to have a page on emulation on their website incorrectly claiming that it was always illegal and all emulators had solely been created to enable piracy. This new claim is not compatible with their previous action of having that page.
Repeal the DMCA. One of the worst pieces of legislation ever passed.
while were at it, let’s get rid of copyright and IP law altogether
I’m sure we’ll have much better content too, once lots of companies stop investing in games, movies, and shows if that happens 🙄
Is it possible to emulate without bypassing encryption?
In theory, it’s possible for games that don’t use encryption. None of which are official Switch games.
I don’t recall finding any encryption on the NES.
Nintendo lost my business long ago nothing they make or say will get me to buy another Nintendo product
Needless to say I will not be buying a Switch 2 today.
I imagine the steam deck will be capable of emulating switch 2 titles nearly immediately, so there’s little reason to buy it. They really need to make their hardware comparable to their software (minus the notoriously awful Japan™ netcode)
Emulating Switch 2 games on the Steam Deck would be a challenge. Even though it’s on an outdated process node, I think it’s fair to say it’s in the same class of hardware as a Steam Deck (which is 3 years old at this point).
Deck 2, though…
Hardware aside, to my knowledge no one is really actively developing any of the Switch emulators due to the prior legal action that was taken.
Now, eventually it’s possible someone might do it for the Switch 2, but I wouldn’t expect anything quick as whomever does so will very likely incur the mighty wrath of Nintendo’s legal team.
I think it’s fair to say it’s in the same class of hardware as a Steam Deck (which is 3 years old at this point).
The switch was weaker than the PS4, which was the same age difference at launch
Shit, I think you could actually compare it reasonably to a PS3 from 10 years before switch launch
The switch was weaker than the PS4, which was the same age difference at launch
Steam Deck’s APU maxes out at 15W while a launch PS4 does 10 times that. Not a good comparison.
They’d have to sell it for $500, if it’s comparable to the steam deck. I find that unlikely, personally.
Good luck getting someone to continue emulation development. The only potential chance for development is exclusively on the under web, and the dev has said that “this was supposed to be a hobby” meaning they have an out if they don’t want to continue
Yeah you’ll have to wait until at least march
Yeah, that’s why I’ve been exclusively pirating and emulating your switch games, and will continue to do so
Nintendo never gets my money again, and it’s been a better experience so far doing so
So when they shut down Ryujinx and Yuzu, was it basically “Stop running this emulator or we will ruin your lives with legal bills”?
Iirc, and take this with a grain of salt, ryujinx actually got paid by Nintendo to stop development.
That’s a rumor. All we know is that they talked with the dev behind closed doors and he deleted everything related to Ryujinx afterwards. Sure, they could have paid him but it’s just as likely that they just threatened him. Let’s not forget how Nintendo made its money.
With the Switch 2 announcement, it’s kind of clear that they aren’t even trying to be a tech company anymore. While not every last one of their consoles released was a true innovation, it did feel like something that was built into part of their brand. Now we just have the Switch 2 which is mostly what you’d expect with some decent QoL upgrades.
Nintendo is pursuing the walled garden approach. You’re barely even buying a console anymore, a lot of this hardware has more or less converged. What you’re buying is access to the cultivated ecosystem. Like everything else these days, they entice you in with the big, recognizable brands and hope there’s enough else to keep you there. Emulators straight pierce that veil and it’s why they went so hard on them.
I’m not criticizing (too heavily) the people that choose to hold on to the franchises they love, but once you step outside and choose alternatives, there’s very little to bring you back. Pokemon lost me a few gens ago, honestly not the biggest Zelda fan, and Mario alone won’t do it for me. Metroid and Starfox are scattershot … Personally I’ll stick with the Steam Deck and wait for Switch 2 emulation to roll around. And if it doesn’t, there are just so many other games to play these days.
I don’t think Nintendo ever tried to be a tech company. They have always been a game company first and foremost. If they were ever a kind of tech company, the closest analogy would be Apple, another company that focused on consumer electronics.
I wouldn’t say ALWAYS, seeing as how they also tried their hand at taxis and love hotels for a while there.
. You’re barely even buying a console anymore, a lot of this hardware has more or less converged. What you’re buying is access to the cultivated ecosystem.
Bingo. In an age where most people’s phones have better hardware than the Switch, it’s all about access to the walled garden instead of hardware.
Not that I disagree with your point about walled gardens, but “better” hardware for a handheld gaming machine needs to have a decent balance between performance and battery life. Longest plane or train journey that I’m likely to take is about five hours, and I’d need to rate any gaming hardware on the ability to run for that length of time. On that basis, the Switch is pretty much optimal. My phone has a higher resolution and can probably push more frames, but it would run hot for about forty-five minutes maximum. Plus, I’d then not be able to make calls or listen to tunes at my destination.
Steam deck would probably be a better choice, though. Fuck Nintendo.
What walled garden are you talking about? Exclusive games? Literally every console ever made has those.
Nintendo bad for making QoL console releases? Again, Nintendo is not the only company to do that. PS4/PS5 Pro, the recent Xboxes, etc
With emulators, they’re only trying to protect their current hardware. They’ve put basically zero effort into shutting down emulators for consoles they don’t sell anymore. Yeah, I’m with everyone else in wishing they didn’t shut down the switch emulators but it’s somewhat understandable that they’re trying to protect their revenue from hardware sales
Nintendo bad for making QoL console releases? Again, Nintendo is not the only company to do that. PS4/PS5 Pro, the recent Xboxes, etc
Nintendo has a history of doing something different each hardware generation: Snes had the 4 button + shoulder buttons controller. N64 controller was designed for someone with 3 hands, DS had 2 screens, 3DS had 3d without glasses, Wii had motion controls, Wii U the tablet controller, Switch is a console and portable… Every system had something that made it unique. What’s unique about the Switch 2?
Nintendo is not able to compete with other consoles on power, it’s the unique hardware that gives a reason to own it over something else.They’ve put basically zero effort into shutting down emulators for consoles they don’t sell anymore.
Technically correct. They may not be shutting down emulators, but if they hear a whisper of a ROM for Mappy Land on the NES they have their lawyers on speed dial. ( Me typing that sentence means someone from Nintendo is now watching this thread to see if anyone links to a ROM.)
How do you see with your nose so far up Nintendo’s butt?
