alt Hacker NewsNo, my argument is that the information on the web is about how to pirate games, no matter how it is couched in the tool documentation.
The case for homebrew is in the homebrew software that is available, and all of the homebrew software that I have ever seen is absolute shite. Toy programs and simple SDK test tools, nothing of value other than the 3rd party SDKs themselves.
It does not matter if you make a legitimate backup copy of a cart you own for safekeeping, emulation of legitimately owned copies of retail games is not an exemption of the DMCA.
It doesn’t matter if you own a copy of the game, making a copy for any reason is not in accordance with the DMCA, as far as I’m aware. Exemptions to the DMCA are granted every few years, and some exemptions are rescinded at the same time. Copying game cartridges has never been an exemption.
And even if it was, you can’t put your copy back onto a legitimate blank cartridge to regain playability if the original is destroyed.
It’s a shitty situation to be sure, and it is wholly unfair. Blame gamers who are “morally opposed” to paying for games that they play. There are a lot of them, and they play a lot of games, and are often popular streamers on YouTube and Twitch.
If people stopped pirating games so much, the homebrew and legitimate use people would have a solid defense and maybe even support in government, but the amount of piracy that goes on absolutely dwarfs legitimate uses of unlocked hardware.
I personally am fascinated with Nintendo hardware and the choices made when they design their systems, and despite repeated efforts to get a Switch dev kit, I have been denied approval time and time again. I have no interest in piracy, I have interest in hardware platforms. But I am in the extremely small minority with that focus.
If piracy slows somewhat dramatically, Nintendo won’t be able to do this with impunity like they do today. They will simply not have a leg to stand on when they say emulators are purely piracy mechanisms. But today, they really are.
How many new games come out for the SNES every year? How many SNES emulators are there under active development? Are you going to say that all of those emulators and all of that time spent making them and perfecting them, making them cycle-perfect is done so that 1-2 games can come out every 1-2 years? EMULATORS ARE PRIMARILY USED FOR PIRACY.
Until that changes, Nintendo will keep doing this.
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> EMULATORS ARE PRIMARILY USED FOR PIRACY.
Even if that is true (and I guess for that you'd have to classify downloading abandonware as piracy): Valve founder Gabe Newell famously said that piracy is a "service issue".
So if you give emulator users the option of playing or buying legitimate copies without jumping through hoops, then piracy rates will drop.
Computers are primarily used for copying data, and thus by extension are perfect piracy machines. Should Nintendo go on an epic crusade to ban computers because many people use computers for piracy?
It doesn't help that the copyright system is heavily unfavorable for the common folk and society as whole. Some pirate as a workaround or in protest of the current draconian copyright rules.
Morally there is an argument to be made for recent works against piracy, but why should we care about old stuff that arguably should have already entered public domain like SNES games from the early 90s?
> EMULATORS ARE PRIMARILY USED FOR PIRACY
Emulators are primarily used to play games that are no longer available on hardware that no longer exists.
That is preservation, not piracy.
> EMULATORS ARE PRIMARILY USED FOR PIRACY.
It is funny that when you replace EMULATORS with GUNS and PIRACY with INJURING AND KIllING, the very same people advocacing for the bans of emulators are the ones arguing that guns are for protection and not to harm others.
But all emulators user combined don't harm nearly as much humanity as a single gun owner does.
> EMULATORS ARE PRIMARILY USED FOR PIRACY.
This is not a piracy issue. Please stop framing it as such.
The primary use case is to run all your games on a single device.
Nintendo want to lock customers into their ecosystem rather than competing on game quality alone.
They know if you have a switch then you will likely buy other switch games etc. If you buy and play Mario Kart on your PC then you are much less likely to invest in the rest of the ecosystem.
We should carve out legal provisions for emulators and circumventing DRM.
Nintendo can then still go against individual people pirating software.