How many suits against console emulators have gone to trial? I would think nobody who makes or sells console hardware actually wants to risk such a case going to trial, because the best case is that they win and can't recover any meaningful damages, but the worst case outcome is that they establish precedent that the emulator is legal.

Well, that's exactly it. It has gone to trial before and emulator devs win every time. The precedent has already been set. That's what spawned my comment, because I don't understand the differences between x86 emulation and, say, Cell processor emulation, from a legal standpoint.

Bleem did, at least.

Possibly because emulators didn't provide a source of potential licensing revenue—they're all free.

Some devs are making quite a bit on their Patreons right now through donations.

https://www.patreon.com/cemu

https://www.patreon.com/Nekotekina

2 of the more well-known dev teams.

Interesting. I wonder why there is such a disparity between CEMU (building a Wii U emulator) getting $28k/mo and Nekotekina getting $1.2k/mo (building a PS3 emulator).

Easy. Breath of the Wild. I bought the game so I could emulate it on my PC and it runs almost flawlessly. Between the launch of the game and now, their monthly donations have just been going up and up and up. Just a few months after release, it runs at a higher (more consistent, anyway, because it's still capped at 30) FPS and resolution than either the Wii U or Switch could provide. The PC BotW experience is actually already the definitive experience.

It will probably stay decently high for a while too while they hammer out compatibility for other Wii U games.

See, it's still worthwhile for me to pick up an old PS4 and amass a decent library while also still being able to buy new titles, but the Wii U was an absolute dud and there is 0% incentive to buy one now that it's already been axed. Emulation will be the only saving grace for its stellar exclusive titles. And since the Switch has its own share of problems handling BotW, it's really a no-brainer to invest a little in CEMU's future. The CEMU devs are absolute demons, on par with Dolphin's team.

As for RPCS3, the PS3 has a big enough library and is cheap enough to make it worth just buying one until the devs can catch up. AFAIK there isn't a single fully working commercial game on it yet.

While botw plays in cemu, certain game elements was broken last I tried, like the camera, and photo book

If you copy the pictbook folder from your extracted game files into the appropriate memory card folder and make it read-only, when you snap pictures of objects it will register the default image for the item.

The only thing really broken, besides little graphical things and certain ambient shaders, is that you can't zoom in on the photographs of the memories. Not really an issue when you can just put your face closer to the TV. Oh, and yeah you can't take custom photographs yet. And, of course, FMV only works when you download a third-party plugin because x264 decoding isn't high on the CEMU dev's list right now.

But in general it runs almost flawlessly, as far as being able to complete the game is concerned. Some people report predictable crashes after encountering Ganon or any of the Blight creatures, but I have not had this problem. Just occasional crashes here and there.

Because you can play Breath of the wild in CEMU :-)

Not really. Bleem and VGS were a big business, Steve Jobs himself advertised VGS during Macworld 1999

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VUfu-xOGr1U&t=9m0s

Sony sued the shit out of them and lost, and then bought VGS from Connectix. Sony bankrupted Bleem withe legal cost and later hired Bleem programmers :/

Most of the classic consoles didn't have patents covering their architecture. For example, the NES had a patent covering the security chip on every game cartridge, but since the chip was a purely hardware thing that didn't affect the operation of the game software, NES emulators happily ignore the whole thing.

I was really thinking more about the modern, active emulation scene. See my other comments to your sister posts.