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
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.
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.
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
$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
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.
Because it’s a false narrative, entry level steamdeck can be had for $399.
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.
AAAAAH. WAAAT. NO. DON’T PLAY ON THE TOILET. COME ON, GUYS.
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?
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 lose and make back the profits in games. If anything, you’re the one spewing misinformation.
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.
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Did you just all-black-people-look-the-same yourself
Yeah that’s clearly Prince
It’s not even Lionel Richie.
But he was the one I was looking for
Formerly Prince.
FKA Prince.
AKA “the artist”
- 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.
emulation is only legal if you pay Nintendo to steal open-source code for their emulator as a service subscription
Nah, they use Higan now.
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.
Nintendo 5 years from now: “After suing multiple fan projects and intimidating them to cease projects, Nintendo admits that they were just fan projects”
This is the company by the way that’s behind on the times of technology. Like, how long did it take them to adopt broadband technology on their consoles? The Wii?
Didn’t the GameCube have a broadband adapter you could buy. Swear I had one to play PSO
I don’t think people remember, but there was a time when no twitch streamer or youtuber would play Nintendo games because they fucking take down their streams for copyright infringement.
That’s not entirely true, you could keep the videos up if all the ad revenue went to Nintendo. In other words, if you paid them so you could promote their game.
I owned Mario Kart 8 for Wii U and it had a feature to record gameplay and post it to YouTube.
I post a clip once and they fucking claimed ad revenue on it.
What a brilliant racket. Have people do all the work of getting a channel going, then claim the money for yourself.
Sue them back, for a feature built in!
They killed Splatoon’s grassroots Esport community thanks to them making a quick buck with splatoon 3, that promised a bunch of network functionality improvements that never materialized.
So now, a game that used to have multiple small but growing international tournaments now has nothing. Hell, they used to have tournaments on the main stage at PAX East.
They’ve been shutting down Smash Bros tournaments as well.
How they treated professional Melee and especially Project M was the moment I realized Nintendo was just another out-of-touch company. So many indie devs would kill for fans that passionate, let alone a modding scene that robust. Nintendo threw it all away.
Edit: and that ignores the graveyard of fan games Nintendo has killed. AM2R, Pokémon Uranium…
Yeah this was my first moment also and largely why I will never pay for NSO+. How they treat the esport community is crazy.
Ok but like… given what I was hearing from those scenes that was probably for the best
I never understood why they abandoned Splatoon 2. Like, I get that they have a new game, and that’s great, I guess…but why not support Splatoon 2 until Switch 2 comes out? I never bought the splatoon 3, because I JUST bought splatoon 2 like 2-3 years prior when it came out. You NEED online to play that game.
So you’re paying $59.99 for the game, and then $20 a year for online. All for a game that exists in a time bubble. Once it’s time for the next game, fuck you. Buy the new game. Your old game means nothing.
Well fuck you too Nintendo. I’ll just not buy Splatoon 3, and not pay for online anymore. How about that?
Never got into Splatoon but it looked like great fun and kind of perfect for low-stakes competition.
Fucks sake Nintendo
It’s a great game with a very high skill ceiling, but the MMR and team balancing was absolute garbage. It was very rare that it was a close match. You usually clapped or got clapped.
As one of the leaders in said community for the NA scene I wouldn’t lay the blame entirely on Splat3. Things were slowing down before then and a lot of the old guard were hanging up their hats.
Networking left much to be desired, but we also started the grassroots on the Wii U after all.
Fair, I have connections to a few that were fairly serious during 2, most of which were in tournies, one of those never bought 3, but the rest gave it a shot.
The ripoff that is S3 seems to be nails in the proverbial coffin.
Yeah the transition between games was hard. 1 to 2 was ok-ish as there was excitement on the switch. 2 to 3 was rough as the average comp player was between high school and college aged which had less disposable income to get the game right away. Not to mention each time was a hard reset on both maps and equipment that slowly rolled out over time made getting cohesive teams extra hard…
Folks pointing out GCN/Wii internet abilities are missing that the experience was awful. Like sure, the guts of broadband were there, but actually playing a game with friends online was way more trouble than it was worth.
So to your point, real online gaming was indeed way behind other consoles (IMHO).
I stopped playing Mario Kart online with others on the Wii. Some players had set an infinite blue shells hack on. Just wasn’t fun to play. Complained to Nintendo and they replied like there was nothing they could do or something like that.
on the bright side you could literally use their eShop to download games you don’t own if you had a hacked switch
I’m pretty sure the switch didn’t support Bluetooth connectivity for years until they finally decided to enable it just after I bought one.
That is the action of a company either incredibly incompetent, or that was hoping to exploit it for financial gain.
Nintendo is competent at exactly 1 thing - designing great video games.
They are run by the equivalent of dwarven master blacksmiths… They’re one of the few gaming companies with employees on staff with more than 40 years experience of game dev (and whom have ONLY ever worked at Nintendo their entire careers) in charge of things.
That’s great if you like Zelda and Mario games… but because they’re run by a bunch of old-school grandpas… they’re not good at much else.
Terrible store, multiplayer, ancillary modern network-driven services like voice chat and partying up, little to no 3rd-party support (whether it’s games, media apps, or even tech integrations with formats like Dolby ATMOS), and - as a benefit - really terrible device security so it’s usually pretty easy for folks to reverse engineer, run custom boot-loaders / jailbreak / scrape their store servers / etc. - stuff that companies like Sony and Microsoft either never had issues with - or have taken seriously long enough that they have locked down.
The only reason they’re still in business is that they still do the one thing that matters most the best - design really great game-play mechanics for IP that is beloved by multiple generations of gamers who will overlook everything else.
Why not both
Why not both
Yup, they changed their minds. Bluetooth, Titles on mobile. It’s this mish-mash of bullheadedness for the sake of being bullheaded, then the try like a decade later.
I’m personally surprised by Nintendo continuing to include user accessible SD cards in their consoles from the DS through the Switch. It becomes incredibly convenient for piracy and I would have thought they were doing it on purpose to at least sell the hardware if it wasn’t for all the evidence you the contrary.
IMO SD cards are not good for gaming and accessible M.2 should be more common
I’d love a handheld with a little slot where you just slide a 2242 M.2 without having to open the device.
Okay, but as I understand PlayStation and Xbox do not have easily accessible drive ports at all. Or am I mistaken?
It’s not about what is common but instead that micro sd cards aren’t typically designed for so many reads and writes.
The ps5 port only requires one screw to access. I know the hard drive on the PS4 was only one screw to access as well. I’m uncertain of the Xbox, they had a proprietary hard drive for the 360 so I didn’t go down that path. While that is slightly more complicated than inserting a SD card, it is not technical.
M.2 seems easier for normies to mess up and SD cards have traditionally been significantly cheaper… plus a microSD card is smaller than M.2 by an order of magnitude.
Yeah that way the ROG ally can cook them right
Game Cube had a network adapter, but few games used it. It did let you do 8 player Mario Kart.
Like, how long did it take them to adopt broadband technology on their consoles? The Wii?
As on addon or built-in? I know the GameCube had an Ethernet add-on and I think the N64 had a dialup addon (Would have been the fastest at the time for home users, nobody had home broadband on N64 release)
The Wii was the first to have it built in
As built in.
Like, how long did it take them to adopt broadband technology on their consoles? The Wii?
While I agree they’re behind the times on their consoles re online, I think it’s more a software issue. I don’t think criticising the hardware functionality is quite fair.
The predecessor to the Wii was the Gamecube which came out in 2001, where few people had broadband internet
The other consoles in that generation were the ps2, xbox, and briefly dreamcast. Of those, only the xbox came with built in networking, until the playstation slim release in 2004. The dreamcast, ps2 and Gamecube all offered additional adapters to provide ethernet (and the dreamcast and Gamecube had dial up modems available too). So the Gamecube was in line with most of the competition.
The Wii had out of the box WiFi (and an adapter for ethernet available) which put it in a similar space to its competitors. Only the ps3 had both WiFi and ethernet out of the box at launch. The 360 only had ethernet until a refresh that added WIFI. And the Wii was also coming in at a significantly lower price point.
Just mild correction, the Dreamcast came with the dialup modem. So while it wasnt as good, it had functional internet for 99 out of the box
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The original Xbox (2001) came with integrated Ethernet
I think you forgot about the XBox360
And the OG Xbox. And the Dreamcast.
360 didn’t launch with built in wireless though. But yeah you’re right that’s worth mentioning
If we’re just mentioning internet connectivity, the PS2 did end up getting the ethernet + HDD expansion adapter
.I remember playing MGS Online that way with friends back in the day.
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.
Nintendo lost my business long ago nothing they make or say will get me to buy another Nintendo product
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.
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
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.
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.
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
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…
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
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.
