It’s gone from the Play Store as well. Glad I managed to grab a copy of the early access version few days ago even though my phone isn’t fast enough to run it full speed. I guess the money I paid for the early access version went to Nintendo.
I’m sure something else will eventually come along. The only way to stop emulators from existing is to not have a system at all. I.e., if Nintendo were to stop making video game hardware, then there would be no new emulators except for ones developed for previous/existing hardware.
Decrypting the ROM ahead of time and requiring that to be used would be the safe alternative.
It would require a separate tool to do that first, but decoupling the steps would prevent Nintendo from going after the much-harder-to-develop emulator using the argument they used here. If they kill the decryption tool, another one pops up.
I don’t know if this would ‘satisfy’ them (I know it wouldn’t, I’m referring strictly to the legal stuff). From what I’ve heard, the point Nintendo was making wrt the encryption is that aquiring prod.keys in any way, shape or form is illegal. Of course, creating an emulator for a system that only runs games that contain encryption which can only be undone with prod.keys requires the developers to have this file. Since they’ve successfully made an emulator, this implies that the Yuzu team has in fact obtained a copy of this file and done something naughty.
The problem is that, regardless of whether or not the decryption happens in Yuzu or in another completely separate program, modern Nintendo games do not come unencrypted. This means that someone at some point has to decrypt the files, and thus has to use prod.keys to do so. According to Nintendo, using and creating any emulator for a modern system requires someone to do something illegal at one point in the chain, and therefore emulation (by parties not explicitly authorized by Nintendo) cannot legally exist.
I say that Nintendo should piss off after I’ve bought something from them and that I should be allowed to do with my property as I please, but even the most legally and morally correct way to emulate is not okay with them.
This raises the following question: if Nintendo does not respect in the slightest our property rights by pulling such stunts, why should we as end users respect their intellectual property rights? Why go through all the effort of clean room reverse engineering a console instead of blatantly copying as much of the official code base as possible if the legal system punishes you all the same? Why limit yourself to only emulating games you personally ripped from your own cartridges if the act of ripping has already placed your actions into the “illegal” category?
The emulator itself doesn’t necessarily have to exist only to run retail games. It could be used to develop or debug homebrew and marketed as such. They wouldn’t even need to have decrypted the operating system to understand it, as Atmosphère is a complete reimplementation untainted by Nintendo code.
If it ran retail games as a consequence of being accurate to real hardware, that would just be a happy accident. And as long as the developers don’t acknowledge running retail games and don’t directly assist in fixing them, they have plausible deniability.
This raises the following question: if Nintendo does not respect in the slightest our property rights by pulling such stunts, why should we as end users respect their intellectual property rights?
I’m a big fan of the “buy a game and crack it right after” philosophy. Respect property rights until something is in one’s legitimate possession, and then remove any encumbrances preventing it from being used in the way the purchaser wanted.
Their problem is - as always with this - the fact that they accept money for it. Granted in Ryujinx’s case Nintendo has a far far far bigger barrier to climb as they weren’t idiots who created a whole bloody LLC for it, which trivially proved commercial interest.
We’re talking about the prices of games that have already been made though. The supply of those specific games is infinite. We’re talking about the prices of certain games (old ones), not all games that are being released now.
I do agree that it makes sense to Nintendo to sell the old games at a high price, but I think supply and demand is probably the wrong phrase.
I’m talking about supply AND demand. If there is infinite supply and zero demand, there would be no point to rerelease these titles. Or they’d bring the price down. This is basic knowledge. If they can get that price for it, they will keep selling it for that price. It’s not rocket science.
I’m not defending the price, I’ve bought plenty and felt dirty doing so lol.
Tbh in a third world country, Nintendo is a very big luxury. I never imagined buying one at any point in my life. I will buy a steamdeck as soon as it launches in my country.
Pretty sure they’re all by other people. Maybe they were hosting copies on their own server or something? Possibly they were just using them for Yuzu development.
I imagine you’ll still be able to do so for a while, if not forever. But probably worth doing it sooner rather than later if you’re interested, just in case! Modding it has nothing to do with Yuzu, so I’m not sure why these other programs are involved.
Although the fact that these programs were named means that Nintendo’s Eye of Sauron is on them - the extra attention makes me nervous. I definitely would have modded it this weekend if I hadn’t already decided to last weekend.
There is no world where these tools exists and Nintendo does not know them. It’s not some deep darknet secret lore hidden behind seven-VPN. Anything that happens online about emulation, all the company knows it exists and how it works. The threat never goes away.
Of these, I would only really be concerned about nxDumpTool, nxDumpFuse, and Lockpick_RCM as possible to come after using the same strategy, though. And even then, Lockpick_RCM was already taken down and mass redistributed.
It’s not illegal to modify the hardware you own, and the rest of those aren’t directly interacting with Nintendo’s DRM-protected software. The only one that they could arguably go after is Atmosphère, but SciresM has held a very strong public pro-homebrew and anti-piracy stance which makes it extremely hard for Nintendo to argue that it’s primary purpose is DRM circumvention.
I plan on making offline archives of Hekate and Atmosphère at some point, in either case.
I’m not sure how it’ll work since I’m sure no one wants to be sued over a commit, but you pretty obviously can’t kill an open source project so easily.
Nintendo would need to prove that you had and ran the tools locally which is damn near impossible to do. I could create a commit without even opening the solution or compiling it.
It would also put Nintendo up shit creek by turning the entire FOSS community against them.
Given that other emulators are now taking down their public facing websites, im not too sure. Hope Im wrong. Going to upvote because Im hoping they are right.
No, they largely will go after people hosting and distributing the tools. Running it privately is obviously not legal, but wouldn’t rise beyond Nintendo trying to ban you from stuff.
Which is an important distinction, and when people compare this to Oracle that just tells me they - lucky for them, tbh! - never had to actually deal with Oracle on a corporate level. Oracle is so much worse than Nintendo, Disney and Audi all put together.
Personally never bought anything nintendo cause I’m on the younger side, and by the time switch came to my country it was already too old and expensive for me to even consider it.
The fact that they quickly agreed to this amount tells you all you need to know about how much money they - personally - made from the patreon.
No wonder Nintendo got this so easily, unlike the other emulators they went after. With that kind of cash, good luck arguing in front of a judge that you’re not running Yuzu as a commercial business.
Nintendo’s ToS doesn’t mean anything to people who never agreed to it. Someone can buy a fusee-vulnerable Switch and use tools to dump the prod.keys and legally-purchased cartridges without ever agreeing to a single thing.
Yuzu absolutely went into a gray area with not exclusively using pre-decrypted ROMs. That’s where they opened themselves up to Nintendo’s argument in the lawsuit.
The point is that the hypothetical user never used the console’s ToS-encumbered software. Fusee bypasses the bootloader and jumps straight into a user-provided payload, which doesn’t have any terms attached to it. Those payloads are capable of dumping prod.keys and the data off the cartridges to an SD card.
They’re NAND chips containing encrypted games soldered to a PCB and connected to the console through a proprietary data transfer interface. A cartridge is a glorified SD card, and you don’t need to agree to any ToS to buy one second-hand.
I guess i, and Nintendo, and yuzu’s legal team disagree with Lemmy on the idea that all this hoop jumping is free and open to do. Cracking encrypted content on proprietary hardware made with the express purpose of being used on fixed hardware with explicit TOS certainly seems like a violation.
I bet the original packaging of the game carts spoke to this, but I bet the cart itself doesn’t.
You have absolutely no idea what you are talking about. Saying your opinion must be correct because Nintendo made an unfounded legal assertion and a small emulator dev team settled rather than lose even more money battling their army of lawyers is like saying everyone ever shot by the police must have been a life-threatening danger to them because they wouldn’t have been shot otherwise. There is legal precedence in the US that emulators are legal because unless they’re made with leaked or stolen proprietary data there’s no reason for them to be with current law.
Nintendo’s ToS is not the law. I don’t know why you think that.
Lol I’m sorry you don’t like corporate IP law. I don’t love it either, I’m only maturely and realistically acknowledging reality.
You’re right I don’t know yzu’s thoughts, but we can see their actions. You don’t fuck with large IPs without readiness to back it up, so it was foolish for yuzu to be dancing on this.
Clearly the nuance of the hardware extraction made it a target of Nintendos lawyers.
If you wrre so sure this project was just like the “legal” emulators then we wouldn’t be here would we?
I would guess that they settled because they would go bankrupt fighting it. You have no idea if you and their legal team are in agreement, as far as I can tell. Feel free to comment with proof to refute my guess, otherwise my guess is as good as yours.
the hypothetical user never used the console’s ToS-encumbered software
I mean, yeah, sure. If you never ever actually booted the Switch OS or any games on your emulator, you were never subject ot the ToS. I would wager that’s a tiny minority of users though, no?
It’s quite clear that emulation of Nintendo’s private product is illegal
It’s not.
What is illegal - and what got the Yuzu team who blindly ran into it like idiots despite people warning them about this since ~forever - is making bank from emulating others’ hardware.
In this case, Yuzu made so much money from their patreon that they created an LLC to handle the cash flow. That part in particular made it trivial for a rightsholder - like Nintendo - to show commercial purpose behind the Yuzu project and hence take its developers to court. It’s how they got import injunctions against stuff like the R4 cards, too. Showing commercial purpose is trivial when bloody Amazon is selling your bloody physical product. Or in this case, if there’s a whole LLC just to manage all the money you’re making and blowing on coke/hookers (I don’t even want to know how much money they siphoned off personally if Nintendo could instantly make them agree to >2 mil, they must have a lot of millions around).
and against tos.
That it is, but that’s only grounds for losing online access and shit. Not the same thing as being open to a broadside from Nintendo’s lawyers.
Edit you may have your opinion on IP law, but that’s just an opinion . There’s no way these devs didn’t know they were in a grey area, at minimum.
No, they were fully aware they were in fully illegal territory, IMO.
They have been warned about this frequently since they started their patreon, and recently there was some R4-like action with Switch emulator cards. Which again led to the whole commercial-vs-free discussion for emulators, and they doubled down on their approach and made a company.
IMO, what actually happened is that they set a ton of money aside (we can estimate they got 1.2mil, but I would estimated it at 2x++ that based on how quickly they accepted). They knew Nintendo would eventually sue them. They got the 2.4mil recompensation offer, this is significantly less than they actually made. And hid. So they’re instantly accepting it to “cash out” the rest.
I wouldn’t call it a clear violation of 17 U.S.C. 1201, but it was a plausible one. I do agree that they would have been blasted for legal fees trying to figure that part out, however.
Nintendo had a leg to stand on, but it was highly dependent on whether the judge would find an emulator’s primary purpose to be DRM prevention. A good judge that does research into the subject likely wouldn’t find it to be the case, since the primary purpose is emulation and decrypting game titles is only a small part of that. Ending up with a luddite or corporate shill judge is always a huge risk, though.
They won’t, they are an LLC. They can declare bankruptcy and close down the company. The actual people behind it are not responsible for paying, the company is.
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