PC Gaming @lemmy.ca alessandro @lemmy.ca 2 days ago

After shutting down several popular emulators, Nintendo admits emulation is legal

www.androidauthority.com After shutting down several popular emulators, Nintendo admits emulation is legal

After shutting down several popular emulators over the years, Nintendo's top IP lawyer just admitted that emulators are legal.

30 comments

By the way. that was settled long time ago...
I will not buy anything Nintendo again.
Fuck Nintendo. I would pay 60 bucks a game to get my entire N64 and NES library back but Nintendo will never make the bulk their older games available.
- I normally stay away from in production emulation, however, after what they did to Yuzu, I stopped giving a fuck.
  
  Isn't the switch the only in production console that you can emulate and hasn't it been like that for a long time?
Yeah, when I want to emulate old games, I don't really care if it's legal or not, especially when I'm emulating it bcz it's not available anywhere else.
- Are you emulating it because it's not available anywhere else? Because if you're willing to put in the effort, most games are available elsewhere. Just because it's not at GameStop doesn't mean it isn't "available".
  
  But yeah, I don't emulate new stuff. I emulate old stuff. And with even Nintendo's digital stores closing down and being replaced with subscriptions, sailing the seas becomes more and more promising of a solution.
  
  I mean, finding NES games that still play and dont require repair isn’t simple for a lot of titles. Not to mention the hardware requires modding in order to work on modern televisions.
  
  I’d call that “not available” or if we want to split hairs “not reasonably available”.
  
  Most games aren’t available elsewhere. There are a good amount of retro games have rereleased, but it’s mainly the popular titles and when you look at the whole picture that is just a small percentage of retro games.
  
  Not even all of Nintendo’s first party games are available.
Admits? Was it ever up to them?
- The legal proceedings technically were. Nintendo screamed illegal so a bunch of unfunded dev teams got sued into oblivion. Admittance can be from a perspective of guilt too.
sounds great, until you read literally the next sentence:

They run afoul of the law when they bypass encryption, recreate copyrighted programs, or point users to pirated material.

aka you can emulate stuff, just not for anything remotely modern.
- How does it bypassing encryption suddenly make it illegal??? That’s like saying you legally own this lockbox and can take it home however if you open it using anything but our official key you are breaking the law.
  
  DMCA says bypassing encryption at all, to copy something, is illegal.
  
  09 F9
- Ryujinx did none of that, which is why instead of taking it down, Nintendo just paid off the main developer to take it down.
  
  Yuzu generated keys programatically, which was the issue, and Nintendo took that down directly.
  
  So according to Nintendo's actions, they think Ryujinx was perfectly legal.
- Just because I'm legally not allowed to does not in the slightest mean that I can't.
- Or distributing the emulation.
Couple of weeks ago I played digimon world 1 on an emulator. After over 20 years of it releasing it runs flawlessly and looks much better than before, to make things even nicer it has been getting unofficial patches with the latest version coming out like a month ago. Games don't need to die, we can keep them going forever.
- How did you like it, btw? I loved the idea as a kid, but was pissed as hell I kept getting Numemon and dying. Didn't get back into it until Digimon World 3, which was very different gameplay-wise.
  
  I may have just been a particularly dumb kid though, wondering if it's worth giving another shot.
  
  Man it is fun and the patch/emulator really made it age quite nicely. HOWEVER, I cannot stress this enough, this game was NOT made to be played blind. Like, holy shit I dont think any kid ever beat it by himself.
  
  As a kid I didnt speak english so I didnt know the potty item was used for you digimon to poop, I also didnt know there were toilets around the owrld besides the one in town. Lets just say I got a lot of sukamon. This time I read about the game and as you can probably surmise, I know some english now so it was MUCH easier, managed to get an ultimate digimon first try.
  
  So overall its an easy recommend, just make sure to patch it and use a guide cause fuck figuring out the crazy stuff the game asks of you while your digimon life ticks away!

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