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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
See also: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Strategic_lawsuit_against_public_participation
Strategic lawsuits against public participation (also known as SLAPP suits or intimidation lawsuits), or strategic litigation against public participation, are lawsuits intended to censor, intimidate, and silence critics by burdening them with the cost of a legal defense until they abandon their criticism or opposition
There are many, many variants. The idea is the smaller player can't really afford to fight in court, so even if the larger actor has shaky legal claims they will still win.
Bypassing copy protection has always been the number one reason, it was never emulation per se.
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.
Yeha but the pessimist in me thinks of box's backwards compatibility where only the games they curated would work. Still can't play eternal sonata anymore.
Just as a heads up, Eternal Sonata was released on the PS3 and Xbox360. Both RCPS3 and Xenia can play Eternal Sonata even on a steamdeck. If they wont let you play it legitimately, and youve bought a copy for your old systems... thats more than enough justification to emulate in my books.
That would surprise me. It just doesn't sound like their flavour of bullshit.
Pretty sure you can still play Eternal Sonata on the last 3 generations of Xbox.
Nah it was never added to backwards compatibility on the xbone or series X. I tried so many times with hope in my eyes to put the disc in and nada.
Man I'm so sorry to hear that. For me it was Lucasarts' Gladius and they finally did add that one somewhat recently. It's the only game I was keeping my original Xbox for.
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
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.
Right, emulators aren't illegal but a bunch of adjacent things can be - for example system BIOS/FW/encryption keys/ROMs if you don't dump them yourself from your own personal hardware.
What got Yuzu in the crosshairs was announcing support for Tears of the Kingdom before it released, meaning they were testing their emulator on an unreleased game and the odds that every dev and tester had legitimately gotten a copy of the game before official release is so low that they weren't about to fight it and go through discovery (which might have identified significant additional piracy on their part). It was easier to fold and settle, and probably saved them from an immense amount of fines for piracy used for testing.
I remember that Valve also caused trouble there. https://youtu.be/aRnZrSBK3R4 Since you saw the Yuzu surface briefly.
