Nintendo Takes Down Emulators and Firmware in Massive GitHub DMCA Sweep

Reminder to all that barring access to internal docs, use of internal software/firmware components and information obtained through nefarious means, emulation is 100% legal pretty much everywhere in the world.

Edit: of course there's the gray area of scrapers, game downloaders etc... but those are not emulators.

FWIW Nintendo, I refuse to give you guys any support after you went after Bowser. I genuinely found that to be awful behavior

Probably not worth losing lifelong customers and PR over piracy concerns.

The outcome was obvious.

Anyway, the team behind Yuzu is still at large and the development will continue elsewhere, from aside, like in older days of emulation. Not everything has to default to GitHub, and not everything can.

May the forks live on. Also people seriously need to consider Radicle.

- https://radicle.network/

Every single Switch 2 emulator is still available on Github and Gitlab.

And just checked most Switch 1 emulator is still available too because they are not hosted on Github but rather on self hosted repos with their own domains.

Not that it matters because they will be back next week either way.

The only surprising thing is the PicoFly firmware but that's such a niche. Most peope who have a chipmodded Switch never touch that.

I thought I had the right to use circumvention procedures to back up my own games. If I own game and run it on an emulator with a firmware extracted from my device, what law am I breaking?

After the Switch emulator takedowns - yuzu and ruins - I decided to permanently boycott Nintendo.

Long may they live and keep making money - I wish them well, but no money will come from me.

A boycott is not a strong way to send signal but it's better than nothing!

I don't see how they are going to stop the re-compilation projects like nxrecomp and others as they are not redistributing anything.

In the long term, the only way for them to fight this is streaming video games. But even then AI can be used to recreate gameplay from video material..

On the one hand game preservation is a wonderful thing, a gift to humanity. It's the reason why I can play Eternal Sonata today on my computer in 4K instead of never again probably.

On the other hand, it's fucked up people are playing Ocarina of Time for free 2 days after launch.

What's the answer here?

Leave community-built projects up just long enough to further foster those communities and reinforce interest in your products across long time spans....

Then crush them?

Luckily, that's a fight Nintendo won't win

When will people learn to stop putting Nintendo emulators on GitHub?

Should use that leak of GitHub source code from some years back to fire up an `.ru`-based clone at this point. These people are clowns.

That makes sense if their hardware is so bad that it's not a strong enough differentiator.

As somebody who is involved in the rom hacking scene and cares a lot about game preservation, I think the "bleeding edge" emulators do us a lot of harm. Want to emulate the Game Cube? Awesome. Want to allow people to run the Ocarina of Time remake on PC less than a month after its release? I mean come on. I want to support these projects for purposes of preservation, but because we often do so little to distinguish between retro and current, the outright piracy makes the whole community look bad.

the discourse on this stuff has really gone downhill. that said...

17 years ago, there was this guy who thought suing college students for pirating music was righteous, as it was the RIAA's only real recourse to enforce their rights. now he is president of the greatest copyright violating institution in all of history.

it is really unfair to go and point at the end user and say, "cognitive dissonance." the polite way of saying that someone is a moron. because the harvard and stanford dropouts leading these near $1T valuation companies, well, they changed their minds for money. to me, flip floppers are also morons. or perhaps, nobody's a moron. at the end of the day, piracy will lead to less Crysis titles and more Monopoly Go and Roblox brainrot, so time will tell if culturally we are better off.

> ... This process protects Nintendo’s copyright-protected video games

Does Nintendo use LLMs to write games? AIUI, LLM output doesn't qualify for copyright protection. I guess maybe there's an argument for their older catalog.

Instead of fixing their broken platform, they would rather spend time and money on lawyers.