this post was submitted on 16 Jan 2025

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

submitted 23 hours ago by [email protected] to c/[email protected]

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[–] whostosay 16 points 17 hours ago

Admits? Was it ever up to them?

[–] NocturnalMorning 65 points 22 hours ago (1 children)

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.

[+] [email protected] -36 points 18 hours ago (2 children)

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.

[–] [email protected] 27 points 18 hours ago (1 children)

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”.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 8 hours ago

Yeah, I guess I was being overly pedantic, lol

[–] [email protected] 14 points 18 hours ago (1 children)

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.

[–] [email protected] 0 points 8 hours ago (1 children)

I was being overly pedantic, yeah.

What I was getting at is that there's still a way to play retro games using original hardware. It's not impossible, and using original hardware can be fun for its own merits.

But yeah, "not available anywhere else" can be implied to mean "for sale by the rights owners" and that's fair.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 6 hours ago* (last edited 6 hours ago)

But yeah, "not available anywhere else" can be implied to mean "for sale by the rights owners" and that's fair.

Not really true. For loads of classic games....and this might come as a shock to you....there are no rights holders.

There's uncounted games where the Dev company went out of business, so they don't have the rights. The publisher of these games also can go out of business. The original devs can attempt to get rights to their game before all other holders are dissolved, this isn't always possible.
This leaves the used market. The used market where there's one major valuation company, who has been verifiably manipulating the "collectables" market so that the owner and his pals can make an absolute metric shit tonne of money selling off their games.

On top of all that other bullshit. As if all that wasn't enough. Physical media degrades over time. So even if you manage to find an original dingdongdoodle box, and a cartridge for fiddlefart9000 that you loved playing as a kid.....both the original hardware and cartridge could be completely fucked due to age, expired electrolytic capacitors leaking and destroying all the traces and chips, humidity destroying all the traces and chips etc etc etc etc. And you might pay $1mil for it.

Edit: also.... maybe we should both look up the definition of pedantic, because I'm pretty sure what you were doing wasn't pedantry, but being incorrect.
Emulating modern games, sure, knock yourself out, but for classic games there's often literally no legal(in most parts of the world, regional laws often have little to do with American law) way to acquire or play them.

[–] [email protected] 38 points 22 hours ago (4 children)

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.

[–] [email protected] 7 points 14 hours ago* (last edited 14 hours ago)

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.

[–] Supervivens 23 points 21 hours ago (2 children)

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.

[–] [email protected] 14 points 21 hours ago* (last edited 21 hours ago) (1 children)

DMCA says bypassing encryption at all, to copy something, is illegal.

[–] Arbiter 28 points 21 hours ago

DMCA needs to be repealed.

[–] [email protected] -3 points 21 hours ago

09 F9

[–] [email protected] 15 points 21 hours ago

Just because I'm legally not allowed to does not in the slightest mean that I can't.

[–] PunnyName -1 points 21 hours ago

Or distributing the emulation.

[–] Dagnet 14 points 22 hours ago

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.