Edit: of course there's the gray area of scrapers, game downloaders etc... but those are not emulators.
These SDKs are lavishly documented, full of worked examples and have top-notch toolchains. More than enough for Claude and a really big stack of tokens to turn into an emulator.
So who's to tell whether a new emulator didn't come from forbidden information? If there are any honest efforts left, this will surely drown them.
Nintendo (and others) are free to go after those who violate NDAs, and to go after scrapers or whatnot, but they can't declare the information itself off-limits to everyone.
"Computer programs and video games distributed in formats that have become obsolete and that require the original media or hardware as a condition of access, when circumvention is accomplished for the purpose of preservation or archival reproduction of published digital works by a library or archive. A format shall be considered obsolete if the machine or system necessary to render perceptible a work stored in that format is no longer manufactured or is no longer reasonably available in the commercial marketplace."
Circumventing a xor by xoring it back is still attempted circumvention.
Anything can be a murder weapon too. Kitchen fork. Rubber ducky.
Probably not worth losing lifelong customers and PR over piracy concerns.
The sad part is I would gladly fork over money, the new Zelda looks really nice, but, I'm not that desperate. I'll pay for another yacht for Gabe over Nintendo these days.
this is like their entire business model since they started selling console games
- Operated rom-bank.com, which provided downloadable libraries of >10k ROMs for the users
- Handled additional product marketing sites, distributor reviews, and advertising.
- Received ~$320,000 in direct payments and website ad revenue, which he fully knew came from this company selling pirating hardware/software as he operated the above to enable them to do so
- Probably more, I lost interest in trying to find actual details over repetition of minor pieces of it
This operation made 10s of millions, he made hundreds of thousands and clearly knew what was going on for many years. I'm not saying I'm happy with the punishments handed to him, but I also don't buy the claims he was just some dude that got fucked out of left field because Nintendo was pure evil (emphasis on the pure). I still feel like they could throw the dude a bone at this point though, but maybe the popular 5 minute take is already so set in people's minds that Nintendo just sees bringing the topic up in people's minds again as a massive liability for backlash. Or maybe they just don't care and wanted more. Either way, he's no martyr for those who just want fair use of what they buy and it doesn't make me hate Nintendo.
I mean 6/7 right? What do you expect? Nintendo never allowed it, always went for these 'projects'.
I don't think Nintendo lost any lifelong customers because lifelong customers don't need what Bowser and co did. so
Anyway, the team behind Yuzu is still at large and the development will continue elsewhere, from aside, like in older days of emulation. Not everything has to default to GitHub, and not everything can.
So they don't need to stamp it out completely. Pushing it further underground is good enough.
Edit: Where would they host it and not get taken down by DMCA?
There no lack in choice if you search, especially for these kind of project that don't need a ton of tool integration or CI/CD tools.
That was always the appeal of people exploring shared compute and storage on crypto networks, it was overhyped and burdened by the financial speculation (though I imagine it also helped fund development), because the cool thing for me was people trying to build resilient distributed systems that protect from these kinds of issues
For instance if I sent a DMCA to HN insisting that your comment violated my copyright, they'd probably ignore it, or ban my account.
But the tools are all there to create some kind of dark web, especially as the real web is going to be flooded with garbage.
Knotless.dev is now in the app store, manage your repos in your pocket - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=50462272 - November 2026
There is also a pds that supports being backed by an object storage system, for trivial pds node hydration, warmup, and underlying data durability: https://vlpds.jazco.dev/docs/overview | https://vlpds.jazco.dev/
https://radicle.dev/2026/09/23/disclosure-of-vulnerability-i...
Also, why are we basically re-implementing a P2P network for VCS when we already have a really good generic P2P networking system which also has Git support?
Looks like there are several backups/forks of Yuzu already shared there. Nice to see!
If there is one thing the emulator community is already good at... it's backing things up!
And just checked most Switch 1 emulator is still available too because they are not hosted on Github but rather on self hosted repos with their own domains.
Not that it matters because they will be back next week either way.
The only surprising thing is the PicoFly firmware but that's such a niche. Most peope who have a chipmodded Switch never touch that.
It is already happening at record pace. Just look at all the new ports, recomps and decomps coming out lately: https://www.youtube.com/@VideoGameEsoterica/videos
Almost all of these are native cross-platform PC versions of specific console games.
Everything even up to Switch 2, Xbox One and PS5 are now getting working static recompilations.
Nintendo's business is not just games, they need HW sales as well for the whole thing to make sense. Since I have both the game and the console, I can feel justified, but it's not their TOS and that's enough for me. Game/book/music preservation is another story I guess.
Tangent, but the new Zelda Ocarina of Time runs butterfly smooth in insane melees on an S2. Got it on day 1 and we are both over 40, pathetic. Sucks for me, she usurped it and I don't watch next to her so that I can go through the story on my own. Just watched a few encounters to get the tasted. Great game so far, 1-2AM isn't unusual.
Let's stop assuming stuff.
I own a switch 1, I own Zelda Breath Of The Wild, yet I have been playing it on Yuzu on my computer. First when the switch stopped working and needed a new battery, then I realized I could run it at better resolution on my computer, in any room with larger screen on my laptop thanks to moonlight and I don't have to actually look for it and find it abandonned and discharged by my daughters or that the joycons started drifting again and in need of a repair.
Did Nintendo lose a sale? No.
No? Virtually every game I've ever played under emulation, not counting emulators ported to consoles for official re-releases/collections, is for a console I've bought. Many of them are games and consoles I still have working copies of both of right now, and I play under emulation because I want save states or FPS unlocking patches or a more convenient cheats system or whatever. At the same time it's not at all unusual to use other original hardware (e.g., a Wiimote) with your emulator. So it doesn't prevent hardware sales in that sense either.
And even if you do have the hardware, it's perfectly legitimate to buy it used, or pick it up out of a dumpster! "Piracy" is deliberately a loaded word and we should probably avoid using it altogether. But regardless of the choice of words, the world doesn't revolve around forcing people to buy new hardware from the likes of Nintendo. No angel is stripped of its wings every time someone buys an FPGA-based, cartridge-compatible emulation device instead of buying a used SNES at a garage sale.
[1]: https://www.ft.com/content/a781c853-3fed-4dfc-b940-413754618...
There is also a very juicy accessory ecosystem. A Pro Controller is $90 these days. I've tried clones, but Nintendo paywalls a few things, like powering up from the controller.
An emulator is a piece of software and can't make assumptions. I'm not sure who you're referring to doing the assuming in your sentence.
> You bought the game but "stole" the console sale.
Not buying something and then not getting it isn't stealing or piracy.
> they need HW sales as well for the whole thing to make sense.
Nintendo has no legal entitlement for their business plan to work financially.
Ok, fellow pedant! By dumping and decrypting the ROM, one is breaking the license agreement. And these ROMs slip into the wild. You've read the EULA? It's DRM circumvention. You don't need to like it. No skin off of my nose, but this isn't a John Deer right to repair situation.
1. License Grant/Restrictions; Third-Party Content. Subject to the terms of this Agreement, Nintendo grants you a non-exclusive, revocable license to use the Software solely on the Console for your personal, non-commercial use. For clarity, the Software is licensed, not sold, to you, and you may not make use of the Software except as expressly authorized by this Agreement. Without limitation, you agree that you may not ( a) publish, copy, modify, reverse engineer, lease, rent, decompile, disassemble, distribute, offer for sale, or create derivative works of any portion of the *Software;*
NA EULA, perhaps different in your country - https://en-americas-support.nintendo.com/app/legal/a_id/6858...
Nintendo has no legal entitlement for their business plan to work financially.
Their lawyers will craft it. See ya!
That's why Nintendo usually tries to avoid going to court for emulators unlike when they sued for the R4 cartridge for example, they are afraid of the result.
In the past, Nintendo tried using their trademark as a watchdog -- the console would reboot if the game did not display it at startup -- then sued unlicensed games for trademark violation. The courts ruled the trademark was purely functional in that use case, and not a trademark, then ruled against Nintendo.
I imagine a similar ruling, if the defense is: The user has a valid key, and a copy of the media. Any circumvention happened before that point in time. We're simply building a compatible device.
Of course, I'm not a lawyer, and the DMCA is a terribly designed law.
That was Sega v Accolade [1]. Although Nintendo also uses boot time trademarks, I don't think they sued over them.
It also wasn't protecting the games from being copied. It was protecting Nintendo (actually Sega) from competition from other people making their own games. The Nintendo Game Boy uses the same technique.
This is not true, Switch emulators can also run unencrypted games / programs if you provide one.
Games are usually shared encrypted, that's true, but that's just a custom, not something required by the emulator.
GitHub also has the right (responsibility, some say) to pre-emptively take down anything Nintendo complains about from their platform and optionally ask questions later.
It's baffling how these projects keep choosing Microsoft as their host.
Congress has now illegally approved copyright theft of millions of works from small authors, EVEN where everything was illegal about it, down to the torrent client used to get the works in the first place. Oh and this was illegal for Congress too, you see, just about the only thing Congress isn't allowed to do is to change the law retroactively (OpenAI, Meta, Google violated the law BEFORE congress made it legal. So that doesn't matter according to the law. A lot of states even created criminal responsibility for copyright violations. Do these companies or CEOs get convicted for that? No, of course not). But to protection billionaires congress gladly ignores the law (yes, technically congress didn't do anything, the "copyright office" did, but it's a part of congress and you can bet your firstborn if 10 congresscritters disagreed with the font the decision is published in they would have changed it immediately)
Even courts do it. They make up equally absurd justifications. I mean, in order to protect the billionaire AI labs from software engineers claiming copyright they have now declared AI models persons [1]. The reasoning is that because if they are not persons they cannot create a copyright, and so cannot give it to customers, in other words: AI labs would have nothing to sell. You wouldn't be legally allowed to use AI outputs, as they would be owned by the people the model learned from. What do you think the odds are that AI models will now be treated as persons when it doesn't benefit billionaires? I believe we have found the first example of odds bigger than 100%.
Congress does NOT apply copyright used against billionaires, but it does apply when billionaires sue 9 year olds with download software, without proof even, in most cases. 9 year olds get threatened with 2 months prison plus 300,000 PER INFRACTION, billionaires get to violate the law. Oh, and by the way, the EU commission has, separately, agreed with this way of doing things over the objection of German courts (the EU AI directive, like any other directive, comes from the commission. They had the good manners to let parliament vote on it, but is there anyone who doesn't remember what happens when parliament votes against it, say, something like "Chat Control" for example?)
And this is after copyright violation was made criminal in many places. The CEOs of these companies have admitted to hundreds of millions of copyright violations, so at 3 months per violation ... even if they were the first human ever to evolve they would still not even have 1% of their prison sentence served if the punishments applied to normal people were applied to them, as the law clearly dictates.
Fundamentally, Anthropic and OpenAI (and Google and Facebook and ...) are based on massive violations of copyright. If any of these companies were held liable to the standards courts hold 9 year olds, their billions wouldn't be enough to protect them from bankruptcy (violating millions of works at hundreds of thousands per work adds up fast).
Can someone explain to me how I get to do that? If I can violate the law millions of times making up a billion dollar company is trivial, for obvious reasons. How do I get courts and congress to find technicalities to never hold me responsible. Because under the deal Sam Altman, Larry Page, Elon Musk and Dario Amodei get from courts and congress, and even from the EU, anyone can become a billionaire ... Just make the Netflix everyone wants for starters, and I have zero problems coming up with 100 more ideas.
[1] https://www.courthousenews.com/coders-lose-appeal-in-copyrig...
https://www.copyright.gov/ai/Copyright-and-Artificial-Intell...
See IV. Fair use, D. Factor Four
In other words, no matter the license, the fact that OpenAIs fair use of the works for training MIGHT take opportunities from the plaintiffs should, BY ITSELF, be an argument to make that AI training illegal. Even if the software programmers agreed to allow AI training, then still sued OpenAI, that is a valid argument accepted from billionaire companies.
In case you're wondering how the court argued that in this decision? It didn't. Not covered at all. Obviously brought up by the plaintiffs, not adressed. The weirdest pro-billionaire arguments are just accepted by the court (the big one is accepting AI models as making new works despite the copyright act clearly stating, 50+ times, only "natural persons" can make new works), and the most reasonable, long established principles, such as market harm (if the use of a copyrighted work harms its authors in the smallest way, even lost sales, even lost job opportunities, lost licensing opportunities, ...) is enough to forbid it's use EVEN WHERE THE LICENSE STATES DIFFERENTLY.
This was required because they wanted to forbid digital lending out of Disney's movies, where the lending software would guarantee that only one copy is actually in circulation (ie. use of DRM to let a library just show a movie without the patron coming to the library to get it). In other words: when billionaires want to make money of works, and the first sale doctrine as well as long standing fair use principles for libraries were in the way, the courts declared that market harm superseded fair use. And, of course, suddenly, when it protects programmers from billionaires, it doesn't apply anymore.
The courts deciding this way has done incredible damage to the availability of older works, to the point of destroying them entirely, since libraries cannot legally keep collections of older works and make those available over the internet, and it is impossible to keep the physical media in working condition and available over a large area, like the united states, for example.
Repeating theme here: absurd arguments to protect billionaire profits, silently rejecting and ignoring reasonable arguments to protect normal people.
I mean if it trained on open source, you'd expect it to always come up with Quake essentially. That's not true at all. It's always very close to Call Of Duty in how they play.
Very hard to believe in coincidences.
90% sure Anthropic did just that.
[IANAL] The Constitution prohibits ex post facto laws which retroactively criminalize (or increase criminal penalties of) past legal conduct. This does not apply to civil penalties, and does not apply to reductions in criminal penalties or decriminalization.
Your citation says no such thing. Maybe there’s more in the case itself (in which case, cite it), but I think you’re inferring that based on what I think is an incorrect understanding of what’s going on, also revealed in the rest of the paragraph.
(I’m not commenting on other parts of the comment directly, though I feel not identifying the “‘fair use’ exemption” claim or reacting to that in such a long tirade is a bit off.)
It cannot even be a company according to the law (because copyright is split up in my textbook into what's called natural rights, such as authorship, and economic rights, such as the right to set a license. It must always have a natural person origin because that natural person retains the right to state they were the author forever, no matter what agreements he or she entered into. Meaning it's never the employer that gets that right)
If someone writes a really great Harry Potter (or whatever other character) book that you wind up really liking and you give them a buck for it, but then some faceless corporation yanks it out of your hands and throws them into prison because they weren't the original Harry Potter author, what has society really gained by doing that? Seems like we just put a guy in prison and burned that book that you liked for basically no reason.
We have the sum of all human knowledge at our fingertips thanks to the digitization of academia. Great! Huge positive for society, we should be in a golden age where anyone can learn anything they want to, but we're not because some guy in a suit says you owe him a million dollars to get access to the journal some paper was published in (a paper which was made by someone unrelated to the suit on your tax payer dime). Unbelievable, debatably apocalyptic net negative for society.
Nintendo doing this is just more of the same again. It won't ever stop until the law is fixed to fight for you and me instead of being used to kill people like Aaron.
Sorry what? Is there an example of AI recreating a nontrivial, modern game from just video material?
And told it to make a game, and it made: https://petalwake.non.io
Vid is here if you prefer that: https://x.com/pwnies/status/2119987174884143348?s=46&t=bwJTI...
The claim is that AI can recreate GTA6 from a GTA6 stream, not create an off-model GTA6 clone from video footage.
What? Yes, most game use engines, but all of them customize gameplay systems, graphics/shaders, UI, etc dramatically. That's like saying that most programs are easy to reverse engineer because Windows/Linux are doing almost all of the heavy lifting.
> so the AI just has to reverse engineer the assets, gameplay and levels from footage.
The word "just" is doing an incredible amount of lifting here, you're basically appealing to "AI is magic and will eventually be able to do everything". If that's your argument I can't dispute it I guess, but the fact is that at the current time there has not been an example of AI reverse engineering a modern video game from gameplay footage alone.
How do these licenses gatekeep streaming when the only right granted by copyright is control over who can copy?
Don't forget the justification for copyright in the US is "To promote the Progress of Science and useful Arts". I don't see how blocking streaming fits under that justification.
The first step to their continued survival is admitting that they lost. They put up a good fight, but betting the farm on nostalgia was already pissing in the wind 20 years ago. AI is a hurricane in comparison.
The bear will only be poked so much before it decides to get up. If the fight seems existential, it’s not the content owners who are going to end up losing.
Intellectual property is a violation of nature anyway, so good riddance when that time arrives.
I’m all for copyright reform, but handing it to two companies puts us in a significantly worse position, imho.
There are also people who say Nintendo lost their way with the GameCube and that the N64 was the real deal. Well, I can see that with Zelda at least. I was a kid at the time and went back to play Ocarina.
https://www.ign.com/articles/nintendo-revises-user-agreement...
I'll also add that the indie scene on Steam is amazing. We're consistently getting great games at prices that are a fraction of any Nintendo game. Frankly, I don't miss Nintendo.
Oh, sweet summer child... either native or emulated, but 100% the same game.
Long may they live and keep making money - I wish them well, but no money will come from me.
A boycott is not a strong way to send signal but it's better than nothing!
But the fact is Nintendo is one of the most litigious of the copyright monopolists, a class of rent seekers who have systematically robbed us of our fair use and public domain rights.
There is no reason to believe they'd leave you alone if you refrained from hacking their latest games and consoles. In fact, they have repeatedly proved that they won't do that.
They have already made their fortunes many times over. They have already been more than adequately rewarded for their works. Even the Game Cube and its games are already old enough that they should be in the public domain, but Nintendo couldn't care less, they will absolutely hoard even NES games from the 80s, and they will absolutely reserve the right to sell you that exact same Mario ROM over and over again until the end of time. You and I will be dead and buried before this stuff enters the public domain. If they ever do. Who's to say the trillion dollar industry won't buy laws, I mean lobby the government for yet another copyright extension?
I just can't deal with it anymore. I think people should radicalize, not play nice with these monopolist corporations. I seriously hope AI hammers in the final nail into the coffin of intellectual property.
Regardless, for previous generations included, work on emulators and hacking consoles happened when the console was still current, of course.
You can’t start the reverse engineering work only after the console is superseded, by then it is too late for preservation, especially with live service games.
It's true that Nintendo hasn't always sicced its lawyers on emulator developers for current gen - I'm fondly remembering the GBA era, when emulators based on leak dev kits started popping up before the console was even released - although that really only hurts matheusmoreira's point all the more; they're clearly OK with giving devs a fair amount of leeway. As for why that didn't apply to Ryujinx, it's hard to say, though my best guess is Nintendo was trying to get ahead of the "Yuzu alternative tears of the kingdom" Google searches.
This is a minor point, but I'll mention there really weren't any real NES or SNES emulators during their lifetime and yet they're among the most well-preserved consoles. Although sadly this did mean we lost quite a bit of Satellaview content, speaking of live services.
On the other hand, it's fucked up people are playing Ocarina of Time for free 2 days after launch.
What's the answer here?
2) For creators: offer your products at a price & in a way such that for the vast majority of (potential) customers, your product is the most attractive. Jack up prices, add draconic DRM, and customers decide that pirates offer the better product. That's on you, not those pirates fault.
Failing that, Nintendo & co loose the moral high ground, and have no right to complain when people break DRM, distribute illegal copies to run on emulators etc.
Or maybe conclude that copyright laws don't serve the public, so maybe it's better to abandon / ignore the concept entirely.
Yet most of those are not lost sales. They never even want to buy the game to begin with (most of them doesn't even have a Switch 2). Also as easy emulation gets nowadays it's still a "technical hurdle" for most people.
The game sold 5.2m copies in 4 days https://www.nintendo.co.jp/corporate/release/en/2026/261111....
An opposite example would be emulating random NES games, probably only trying them out. And those are still sold on Nintendo's virtual consoles.
Money is a tool to exchange one commodity for another and not some divine arbiter of goodness, where the more you have the more good you are. To say some corporation deserves money when they have all the money they could ever use is so ridiculous to me. "Yes, we have made hundreds of millions, but poor little old us deserved billions!"
However, pirating brand new games sucks. The game industry itself and people's jobs rely on companies making a profit from the games they create.
Yes, Nintendo has a lot of money and is a huge company, they also have shitty legal practices, but they make great games and deserve to continue to make a profit on the huge investments they make in games.
Games are cheap compared to how expensive everything else has gotten. Just buy the damn games. There are so many other shitty companies you can pirate from, but most game companies aren't it.
You should consider who it is, that is pirating these games. It's basically entirely one of 2 categories of people
1. people who don't have the money to buy the game. And consider this too: maybe they had to make the choice between this game or another game. Either way, they only buy one game, and not both. There's no sale lost.
2. people who just decided that nintendo doesn't deserve their money for some moral reason and if they didn't have an emulator, they just wouldn't by the game anyways. Again, there's no sale lost.
OoT is still selling like hot cakes.
Then crush them?
And if that doesn't happen, wait till you find a legal letter sent from Nintendo lawyers in your mailbox.
Unless you want to play hide and seek like z library or pirate bay which will become a full time job.
This isn’t nearly as time-consuming as you’re making it out to be.
(Also, some random emulator will never become as big of a target as the giant hub sites like TPB.)
> And if that doesn't happen, wait till you find a legal letter sent from Nintendo lawyers in your mailbox.
The issue with all these projects is they host `ObliterateSwitchDRM` on GitHub under their account @FrankJohnson with the bio "The one and only Frank Johnson at 123 Mainstreet Ave. In San Francisco, CA working for Google!" and go all shockedpikachuface when Nintendo sends them a 'fuck you' letter through their gaggle of lawyers.
If you're @schizomariofan185 who hosts the project on a Gitlab/Forgejo/whathaveyou on fucknintendo.su hosted on a VPS in Bulgaria/Russia/Romania paid for with crypto, they will literally NEVER find you. Such an effort could easily be crowdfunded by the community. Bonus points if you yourself reside in one of those countries, so they can't even do anything to you, if they somehow did.
17 years ago, there was this guy who thought suing college students for pirating music was righteous, as it was the RIAA's only real recourse to enforce their rights. now he is president of the greatest copyright violating institution in all of history.
it is really unfair to go and point at the end user and say, "cognitive dissonance." the polite way of saying that someone is a moron. because the harvard and stanford dropouts leading these near $1T valuation companies, well, they changed their minds for money. to me, flip floppers are also morons. or perhaps, nobody's a moron. at the end of the day, piracy will lead to less Crysis titles and more Monopoly Go and Roblox brainrot, so time will tell if culturally we are better off.
elaborate? I don't see the connection
Piracy set a ceiling on the price and fuss they can ask for. A producer taking big risks will take the same losses as before but can't milk the hits. It's now better to aim for a steady supply of ok media to keep people paying subscriptions. Bonus if they can fit into some franchise so they can also milk the IP in non-piratable ways like merch and theme parks. Some point to tech alone (minus piracy) for killing theaters. Yes, but that's a different point. Without piracy, they could've charged a lot for digital streaming new releases. This did actually happen for some period of time. You only broke even vs theater tickets if like 10 people were watching, ignoring the cost of the equipment.
An alternative theory is that media companies consolidated and became monocultured, and that this would've happened without piracy.
The entertainment industry EMPLOYS people in such a wide variety of direct and indirect roles. People involved in creating the entertainment, translating the entertainment, marketing the entertainment, manufacturing and distributing the entertainment. Every aspect of creating an entertainment product (music, games, movies, theatre and more) employs people directly, and all of those direct employees spend their income in indirect ways that benefit you, for example spending in local businesses, paying their mortgages (which underpin pensions and economic stability), transport services (like busses, taxis etc), their family (days out, on kids etc), in their community, investing and also... on TAXES of all shapes and sizes.
You might have the opinion of "F the world", but unless you're living under a rock you directly benefit from all of the industries that are part of a functioning (local or global) economy.
Does Nintendo use LLMs to write games? AIUI, LLM output doesn't qualify for copyright protection. I guess maybe there's an argument for their older catalog.
"LLM output doesn't qualify for copyright protection" is an oversimplification. You aren't automatically disqualified from copyright protection if you've touched an LLM. It's just that copyright protections only apply to human creativity. You can qualify even when you use LLMs if you were humanly involved creatively with the output to a sufficient degree.
Also the focus seems to be on bypassing "technological protection measures" portion of the DMCA, which is much easier to go after than the code. Decomps are much more focused on purely the code angle and, for now, still don't seem to be in the focus of these attempts (I assume because it's harder to go after with the same kind of claim, but really only Nintendo will know why they haven't tried yet).