this post was submitted on 21 Jul 2023

300 points (98.1% liked)

Nintendo

18921 readers

15 users here now

A community for everything Nintendo. Games, news, discussions, stories etc.

Rules:

No NSFW content.
No hate speech or personal attacks.
No ads / spamming / self-promotion / low effort posts / memes etc.
No linking to, or sharing information about, hacks, ROMs or any illegal content. And no piracy talk. (Linking to emulators, or general mention / discussion of emulation topics is fine.)
No console wars or PC elitism.
Be a decent human (or a bot, we don't discriminate against bots... except in Point 7).
All bots must have mod permission prior to implementation and must follow instance-wide rules. For lemmy.world bot rules click here
Links to Twitter, X, or any alternative version such as Nitter, Xitter, Xcancel, etc. are no longer allowed. This includes any "connected-but-separate" web services such as pbs. twimg. com. The only exception will be screenshots in the event that the news cannot be sourced elsewhere.

Upcoming First Party Games (NA):

Game | Date

Xenoblade Chronicles X: Definitive Edition | Mar 20 [Switch 2 Direct] | Apr 02 Metroid Prime 4 | 2025

Other Gaming Communities

founded 2 years ago

MODERATORS

300

The GameCube And Wii Emulator Dolphin Is No Longer Coming To Steam (www.nintendolife.com)

submitted 2 years ago by CosmicSploogeDrizzle to c/nintendo

113 comments fedilink hide all child comments

you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments

[–] [email protected] 25 points 2 years ago (2 children)

Not sure why it was coming to steam in the first place, made no sense. All it would do when you open it through steam is open the dolphin program, the games themselves weren’t being integrated into steam.

Just seemed like a bizarre decision by the devs that was always going to get blocked.

[–] Hextic 20 points 2 years ago (1 children)

Cloud saves kinda big ngl

RetroArch is on steam right now and that has Nintendo emulators in it. So I dont see why not.

[+] [email protected] -30 points 2 years ago (2 children)

Dolphin uses literal copyrighted Nintendo code, that’s the issue.

[–] HelloGodItsMeGod 15 points 2 years ago (1 children)

No, it doesn't and no, it's not. The blog post from dolphin that I'm assuming this article is parroting articulates that perfectly.

[+] [email protected] -18 points 2 years ago* (last edited 2 years ago) (3 children)

It does actually.

Nintendo’s lawyers argued in a letter to Valve that Dolphin operates by incorporating Nintendo’s “proprietary cryptographic keys” by decrypting the ROMs of GameCube and Wii software, thereby violating the DMCA. Nintendo is referring to the Wii Common Key, a decryption key built into Wii hardware that was extracted more than a decade ago by a separate group — known as Team Twiizers — and incorporated into Dolphin’s code.

The team behind Dolphin argued in their blog post about the emulator’s Steam release that “only an incredibly tiny portion of our code is actually related to circumvention,” and that using the Wii Common Key does not apply to GameCube games.

[–] doggle 18 points 2 years ago (1 children)

It doesn't. Encryption keys are not code and are not copyrightable. Distributing them is also not illegal. The word "proprietary" here is meaningless at best and dishonest at worst.

Of course actually using that key to circumvent drm may be illegal, but I'm no lawyer. Send like that would be on Dolphin's users anyway.

Food for thought: if Nintendo genuinely thought they had a good legal argument against Dolphin, why wouldn't they just send them a cease and desist directly instead of just getting them kicked off Steam?

[–] [email protected] 1 points 2 years ago (1 children)

They very well might now - valve went to Nintendo to ask about dolphin. Nintendo might not have looked into it previously but now they have. They recently got the android switch emulator “skyline” shut down via dcma. Dolphin might be next.

[–] [email protected] 7 points 2 years ago

There's no chance that a company as litigious as Nintendo somehow didn't know Dolphin existed or how it works.

They know that they have no chance of winning because Dolphin is legal.

[–] [email protected] 9 points 2 years ago

Keys aren't code.

[–] HelloGodItsMeGod 9 points 2 years ago (1 children)

Nowhere in there does it say it's copyrighted. And, once again, in the blog they point out that you can't copyright a string of numbers and letters, which is all the key is. Additionally, they point out that the key has been freely shared in other contexts for years.

Idk, man. Go read the blog. They consulted with an actual lawyer before making any claim. Unless you'd like to pit your law degree against theirs? Are you a Nintendo lawyer trolling Lemmy on the sly?

[–] [email protected] -3 points 2 years ago (1 children)

Valve thought it was a good enough case to not allow dolphin on steam. Maybe talk to their lawyers.

[–] HelloGodItsMeGod 6 points 2 years ago

This is the funniest thing. It didn't go through Valve's lawyers. There was no DMCA takedown. They asked Nintendo if they were comfortable with Dolphin being up, Nintendo said no and claimed a bunch of legal things but never filed a legal request.

But whatever, dude. I'm done summarizing the blog for you. Obviously you want to act like you know what's going on without doing research and I'm tired of doing it for you.

[–] [email protected] 9 points 2 years ago (3 children)

I think cuz integration with steam dick would be more seamless

[–] [email protected] 5 points 2 years ago (1 children)

I'm going to guess you mean deck. But all steam features. Like community controller configuration, guides etc.

[–] Nullpointer 2 points 2 years ago

They know what they wrote

[–] [email protected] 2 points 2 years ago

Ouch

[–] doggle -3 points 2 years ago

Please don't integrate with steam dick