this post was submitted on 01 Oct 2024
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Steam Deck
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Emulators have been legal in the past I thought. Sure, there's something to be said about common sense and developing emulators for current generation platforms.
Whole reimplementations have survived. IBM BIOS was the only original BIOS for PCs. Phoenix Technologies had a team read the source code for IBM BIOS (it was published in the user manual for troubleshooting) and wrote a specification for it which a different team wrote software from, making IBM compatible machines possible
I don't know what law an emulator could be killed under, unless a license holder breached the user license as part of the development
IIRC, they're legal as long as they don't explicitly distribute any of the copyright owner's own code or files. That's why, for example, PCSX2 requires you to dump "your own" PS2 BIOS and doesn't provide any itself. Because PCSX2 doesn't distribute the PS2 BIOS and because its way of talking to the BIOS doesn't copy the source code, that emulator is in the clear.
Some modern emulators (ex. Ryujinx) don't even need BIOS files (or whatever they're called on Switch) to be able to run games. But they also don't use Nintendo's original code to run the game.
Take all this with a grain of salt. I'm saying it from memory.
You wouldn't download the PS2 BIOS 🎸🎸🎸
Yes, I wasn't trying to refute that. But Nintendo can still ruin your life fighting a losing battle if they wanted to. To me it's just not worth the risk of putting your name on it.