Also historically emulation only gets into a state usable for pirates after the end of the console's lifetime, or at the least near the tail end.

So right at the time emulators are good enough to enable piracy the impact is significantly less because you can't buy the original console and games anymore.

> Also historically emulation only gets into a state usable for pirates after the end of the console's lifetime, or at the least near the tail end.

The Nintendo 64 was an exception since Ultra64 was released quite early and worked impressively well on PCs of that time (as long as you had a 3Dfx card).

I suspect you mean UltraHLE (Ultra 64 was the original name of the Nintendo 64) - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/UltraHLE

Another oddity is the GBA - an emulator for the machine existed before it was even released (GBAemu - I believe it was capable of at least running Nintendo's tech demos), and BoycottAdvance was, IIRC, at least somewhat viable around the time of the US launch of the console.

ARM-based machines are kinda a gimme though. The ARM is remarkably well documented, very straightforward to decode (both THUMB and ARM modes) and every ISA level is a superset of the previous.

You could write the entire opcode table for an ARMv7 chip and run ARMv3, ARMv4, etc code on it. Assuming there aren't any illegal instructions and that you've got the timing right, it should run just fine. So, essentially, you've got 1/3 the hard part done.

The GPU for the GBA was basically a chimera of the GB engine and the SNES's. Even had similar modes built into the BIOS. The Switch has a Maxwell based GPU. One very similar to that in the Tegra X1, which is very well documented (If you're willing to dig through their massive Technical Reference Manual (https://developer.nvidia.com/embedded/downloads) and the nouveau source.

That just leaves audio, the bus, game formats, etc to be "discovered" or reverse engineered.

IIRC the official GBA SDK was leaked online pretty early, and that was really useful to the emulator developers. I've tried searching to verify it's as I remember, but looks like the dev forums are long vanished. (Used to follow the scene pretty closely and still have my flash cartridge for loading homebrew stuff somewhere around, even if I didn't actually do anything with it.)

The dev forums are dead-ish†, but the docs are still around; I was just trying to pick it up the other day and I found everything I needed (including modern things like a Rust libgba: https://github.com/tbelaire/rusty-TONC).

I decided against pursuing GBA homebrew in particular, though, because Nintendo DS homebrew is slightly more fun while not being particularly higher-level than the GBA. You've still got sprites and backgrounds and scale/rot/shear effects; but now you've got two GPUs (where either GPU can address either screen), and a 3D layer sandwiched in amongst the background layers and sprite layers.

† Though, I mean, that's a matter of interpretation; all the modern 3DS and Wii U homebrew is still released/discussed/developed on the GBATemp forums, which—obviously—had its roots in the GBA homebrew scene.)

Almost 20 years later, I'm still following and intrigued by the homebrew scene and I take my hat off in particular to emulator developers... but I get to do embedded/microcontroller development in my day job, and that's enough difficulty for me. ;)

I'm myself wondering how much use Nouveau will be here. I imagine the approach that Yuzu will take is actually to HLE the entire operating system and implement things on the service level. During the Switch hacking talk at 34c3, they mentioned that there was a service containing the GPU driver. So basically, the idea would be to reverse engineer how the API works and try to implement the GPU on top of it.

At least, this seems like a sane approach to me. It benefits from less of the existing reverse engineering work on NVidia chipsets, BUT it's higher level, which probably means it will be easier to understand and yield better performance in practice, especially since it is going to have to be implemented on top of higher level GPU APIs anyways.

Of course, emulating a portable gaming system on the PC is only half as damaging, since it is not portable.

I'm enjoying some of the Switch games, and might want to relive the experience one day, but for now an emulator cannot easily duplicate the portability of the Switch. I would still be happy to know there's a good emulator out there though.

Nintendo DS and 3DS emulation both were attained pretty early in the lifetime of the consoles.

The dev's of GBAemu had access to a full devkit and documentation from nintendo, which is pretty rare for emulator developers these days. They usually have to wait for them to trickle out on the secondary market.

Also Bleem! and Virtual Game Station for the PSX, right?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bleem! https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Connectix_Virtual_Game_Station

The PSX was one of the first consoles where emulation didn't typically imply piracy. Because the PSX used the same CD-ROMs as computers, you could stick your game CD in your computer and play it in an emulator.

In college, I had a lot of fun bringing my laptop to class with my legal copy of FF Tactics in the drive so I could play it during boring lectures. It was the perfect game for that, since it was turn-based, so if I ever needed to stop playing and pay attention, I could.

Yup. The PS1 also had a major advantage in the size of its games. During that day and age, reliably downloading a 700 MB file was a luxury few could afford, and dial-up connections were still especially popular. These days you can just pop on over to your friendly torrent hosting site and pull down any PS1 ISO within minutes, but the technology back then was far less mature, and potential nasty-grams from AOL for downloading torrents put many people off the idea.

I fondly remember Bleem, and played my real PS1 disks through ePSXe for years, because it turned my laptop into a portable Playstation. That was a neat trick. I still have my original PS1 and it's in good condition, but I'm glad I don't have to actually rely on the aging hardware to continue to enjoy my collection of games.

Conversedly, there's higan[1] (formerly bsnes), a multi-system emulator focused on accuracy, even if it's at the expense of speed. A very beefy current CPU is necessary to emulate the sfc/snes.

[1] https://byuu.org/emulation/higan/

It "worked" but as someone with a 3Dfx at the time I'm not sure I would call it performant. I'm not sure N64 emulators were close to performant until I had a Geforce 3 Ti or so...

At the time, you could also use a wrapper for the 3Dfx card that would work with directx, but the frame rate was much lower (probably around 7 fps with the ATI card I was using at the time).

Also the PS1, with Bleem.

That generation of consoles seems to have been the only one where current consoles could be emulated on a low-spec PC with good compatibility. I'm not sure why. Perhaps that PC technology was still skyrocketing in the late '90s, outstripping current consoles so rapidly that emulators didn't need to be efficient, and the console devs hadn't yet made any major attempt at DRM.

Funnily enough the PS1 and N64 are probably two of the worst mainstream consoles to emulate now. Progress on them seems to have been completely outstripped by most other consoles in the past decade.

Since the Switch is similar to the 3DS and it uses a well documented chip (Nvidia Tegra) development should be faster.

Recent consoles are well abstracted from the hardware. The only case where this is usually not true is the GPU, and it's rare to have something completely custom there nowadays (the 3DS and its weird PICA chip is very much the exception). Most of the difficulty is in properly emulating the operating system, and this is not helped by having SoC datasheets.

> Most of the difficulty is in properly emulating the operating system, and this is not helped by having SoC datasheets.

That’s assuming that you reimplement/HLE parts of the operating system rather than running the whole system in the emulator, in which case you wouldn’t need to care much about how the OS works. I suppose you think HLE is nevertheless easier overall?

Plus timing issues, bugs & errata, etc.

Meh. Timing issues become almost irrelevant in a world where consoles have dynamic clock scaling, deep sleep modes, etc. Games are usually not written around specific timings anymore.

Bugs and errata can be a concern (I think I remember some issues regarding PowerPC atomic instructions misbehaving on the Wii U for example) but I would expect them to be fairly minor compared to the whole work of REing a custom microkernel and its associated services.

Hopefully it will be comparatively easy. But (presumed) similarity is not a guarantee - see the XBox emulation: http://emulation.gametechwiki.com/index.php/Xbox_emulators#E...

yuzu is a fork of the Citra 3DS [1] emulator, maintained by the same people [2].

[1] https://citra-emu.org/ [2] https://yuzu-emu.org/

Emulators are not illegal. Sony even lost a lawsuit: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bleem!#Sony_lawsuit

This the equivalent of "this pipe is for tobacco use only" or "BitTorrent is used to share Linux distros".

Yes, emulators are legal. But we all know that the overwhelming use of them is in illegal situations.

EDIT: Since this comment is currently sitting at -2 points, I figured I would expand on my rather glib comment. From Nintendo's website:

>whether you have an authentic game or not, or whether you have possession of a Nintendo ROM for a limited amount of time, i.e. 24 hours, it is illegal to download and play a Nintendo ROM from the Internet.[1]

What percentage of emulators are only used to play homebrewed games or commercial games that an individual has personally backed up? Almost all other uses are illegal.

[1] - https://www.nintendo.com/corp/legal.jsp#emulator

They can claim something is illegal all they want, but that has no impact whatsoever on the actual legality of it. Anti-consumer EULA/TOS items haven't held up in court for a while now.

That isn't a EULA/TOS rule, it is a summary of the law. Can you find any reputable source to disprove what Nintendo says?

Here is an independent summary from Tech Radar that agrees with Nintendo. [1]

[1] - http://www.techradar.com/news/gaming/are-game-emulators-lega...

Depends on jurisdiction a lot, quite honestly. Nintendo can say it's illegal all it wants, but if I own a physical copy of a game, and make a digital backup of such, then I'm in the clear as far as Canadian law (see our copyright bill C-11) goes. A ROM made from an official copy vs. downloaded from the internet are pretty hard to tell apart, but regardless you are allowed to own and retain such copies if you own the original.

That being said, if there's DRM and you break it, then you have a different issue entirely. Owning the ROM wouldn't be illegal, but breaking the DRM certainly would be. Even if in the process of legally backing up your data off of the disc you break the DRM, you're still in legal hot waters.

Quite frankly I'm convinced Nintendo can say all it wants, it's a scare tactic and for the most part they're full of shit unless you take into account a specific part of US or Japanese law in a specific state or jurisdiction. I would not assume that they know exactly what they're talking about globally.

There is an important distinction however with regards to exercising the so-called "private copy rights" — at least in the case of European law, I cannot speak about other regions — which is that the source of the data you copy must be licit. Which means that your private copy right allows you to copy the ROM from a cartridge that you bought, but not copy the data from a torrent since (presumably) the uploader had no right to put it there.

Post-scriptum : read that for a better understanding of why it matters where the bytes came from, even if they are identical and should make no difference from a computer science point of view : http://ansuz.sooke.bc.ca/entry/23

That article is a long run-on that doesn't actually provide an argument other than "silly computer scientists are in la la land" name-calling.

Can confirm: my jurisdiction has a clause that allows private copies including (but not limited to) digital backups.

https://es.wikipedia.org/wiki/Derecho_de_copia_privada

I'm sorry I couldn't find this article on English Wikipedia.

Nothing you said disagrees with anything Nintendo said.

You also should note that page is from the Nintendo USA/Canada region website. It isn't trying to explain the situation for every jurisdiction globally.

ThatGeoGuy: "A ROM made from an official copy vs. downloaded from the internet are pretty hard to tell apart, but regardless you are allowed to own and retain such copies if you own the original."

Nintendo: "whether you have an authentic game or not, or whether you have possession of a Nintendo ROM for a limited amount of time, i.e. 24 hours, it is illegal to download and play a Nintendo ROM from the Internet."

Those seem like conflicting statements, if you assume that "such copies" means both "a ROM made from an official copy" (i.e. read by the individual from their own cartridge) and a copy "downloaded from the internet".

And further, Nintendo claims that game copying devices themselves are also illegal.

>ThatGeoGuy: "A ROM made from an official copy vs. downloaded from the internet are pretty hard to tell apart, but regardless you are allowed to own and retain such copies if you own the original."

A dollar bill stolen in a robbery is "pretty hard to tell apart" from a dollar bill you received as change from a legal cash transaction. It is silly to argue that how those bills were acquired is not a factor in your claimed ownership of them.

>Those seem like conflicting statements, if you assume that "such copies" means both "a ROM made from an official copy" (i.e. read by the individual from their own cartridge) and a copy "downloaded from the internet".

I read it differently. The subject of the sentence is "an official copy" and the "vs. downloaded from the internet" portion was a prepositional phrase. On second reading it is certainly possible I misinterpreted it. The author should have used a conjunction like "and" instead of a preposition like "versus" if they wanted both copies to be the subject.

>And further, Nintendo claims that game copying devices themselves are also illegal.

Nintendo says nothing about making ROMs from official copies. It does not claim they are illegal. They are definitively legal. However almost all games sold today have some sort of DRM included. A copying device is illegal if it tries to circumvent this DRM. Therefore if a game has DRM, there is no legal way for a person to own a ROM of that game.

To summarize Nintendo's point and the one that Tech Radar seconded, the only legal ROM of a commercial game is one you create yourself from a DRM free game that you already own.

> It is silly to argue that how those bills were acquired is not a factor in your claimed ownership of them.

Robbery and online downloads are worlds apart. The first is a violent act that deprives someone of their property. It's an unjust action that harms one party for the benefit of another. Downloading a ROM from the internet, for a game that the downloader already owns, lacks all of the negatives that make robbery repugnant. Legality is a different question entirely, of course; legally, it matters how I acquired the ROM.

> Nintendo says nothing about making ROMs from official copies. It does not claim they are illegal.

False. They claim that making ROMs from official copies, as well as the devices that allow you to do so, are illegal because they can be used to illegally distribute the games online. Quoting from Nintendo's FAQ:

Are Game Copying Devices Illegal?

Yes. Game copiers enable users to illegally copy video game software onto floppy disks, writeable compact disks or the hard drive of a personal computer. They enable the user to make, play and distribute illegal copies of video game software which violates Nintendo's copyrights and trademarks. These devices also allow for the uploading and downloading of ROMs to and from the Internet. Based upon the functions of these devices, they are illegal.

> A copying device is illegal if it tries to circumvent this DRM. Therefore if a game has DRM, there is no legal way for a person to own a ROM of that game.

That's not Nintendo's claim, but it's a claim with stronger legal support than Nintendo's. It's also moving the goalposts, IMO. Take an NES game as an example. There was a game lockout system (and similar systems in the SNES and N64 consoles), but those don't prevent access to game data, just cause the console to reboot if authentication fails. Those are 3 of the major systems that I'm thinking of when I think about getting copies of ROMs.

> Yes. Game copiers enable users to illegally copy video game software onto floppy disks, writeable compact disks or the hard drive of a personal computer.

Source that says copying bits from my own retail game disc to my own hard disk is a crime, please?

> They enable the user to make, play and distribute illegal copies of video game software which violates Nintendo's copyrights and trademarks.

If I make a copy of a DVD and place it on my shelf beside the original, which laws/copyrights/trademarks have I infringed upon? Redistribution may well be an issue in most jurisdictions, but we weren't talking about that.

> Source that says copying bits from my own retail game disc to my own hard disk is a crime, please?

That's Nintendo's claim, not mine ;-) You'll have to ask them.

> If I make a copy of a DVD and place it on my shelf beside the original, which laws/copyrights/trademarks have I infringed upon? Redistribution may well be an issue in most jurisdictions, but we weren't talking about that.

In the specific case of DVDs, and in the specific case of my jurisdiction (I live in the US), I think that the argument would be that you circumvented the DRM of the Content Scrambling System, in violation of the Digital Millennium Copyright Act. In other jurisdictions, you'd have no problem. In the UK, for example, my understanding is that there's no restriction against breaking DRM, and that creating a copy of a copyrighted work for personal use is perfectly legal.

> If I make a copy of a DVD and place it on my shelf beside the original, which laws/copyrights/trademarks have I infringed upon?

Which country are we talking about? There's something about "circumvention of technical prevention measures" which is part of WIPO and so in many laws. It's in the DMCA and in the European laws. Some of these contain exceptions for backups, but not all of them.

The parent isn't arguing that these things are true. Just providing quotes of things Nintendo says.

no skin in this, but maybe it is legal to create a digital copy of your own but illegal to download someone else's generated copy? Not sure if they could say that you couldn't play the backup directly (as in, that you'd be forced to push it to an official cartridge or disk), but I would wager the amount of people with the hardware to migrate NES/SNES/Genesis/etc. cartridges to ROMs is pretty low.

> no skin in this, but maybe it is legal to create a digital copy of your own but illegal to download someone else's generated copy?

I think that's probably true, but it's not what Nintendo is claiming. They claim that the copying devices themselves are illegal to own or use, since the result is a file that can be illegally uploaded and shared, and that as a result, any digital copy that a consumer might create is also illegal, even if kept for personal use.

> but I would wager the amount of people with the hardware to migrate NES/SNES/Genesis/etc. cartridges to ROMs is pretty low.

Yes, but not terribly exotic. There are EEPROMs that are drop-in replacements, in many cases. So they're also the kinds of chips that you can just connect an EEPROM reader to, to dump the data. Reading the data from the cartridge pins themselves can be a little more complex; I know that the 8-bit Nintendo systems broke their games into swappable sections, with access controlled by a mapper chip. To dump those games from the cartridge connector, one would need to send bank-swapping signals to the chip. The NES had a couple hundred variants of these mapper chips; the Game Boy had about 5 common ones. Not sure about the SNES. Sega Genesis/Megadrive just exposed the cartridge pins directly to the CPU's address bus, I think.

I know that people build Arduino-based ROM dumpers. The secret sauce is more in the mapper-handling code than anything else.

Newer systems like the Nintendo DS are likely to be less straightforward, but I haven't looked into it that closely.

I recall using a Nintendo DS to dump ROMs to a device in the GBA slot, which would then store it in memory, so you could then eject the cartridge in the DS slot and insert another device that could write to a MicroSD card. GBA and GB cartridges could be transferred directly from the GBA slot.

The difficulty there was in loading and running the software.

Once games distributed on discs, backing up for swap-free play became easier, but I still recall having to use the original Wii hardware to read discs and write their files to a specially formatted hard drive.

If you have the device designed to read the original game distribution medium, you can modify it, sometimes just with software, to read game files and write them to the medium of your choosing. The original console has to decode the data and get it to the CPU somehow, and if you can run your own code on the CPU, you can always dump, even if it is just by displaying a series of 2-d bar codes on a TV screen and taking photos of them.

It is also worth noting that you cannot trust a company like Nintendo or Sony to make a distinction between civil-illegal that results in a tort, where the company can sue you for damages (if they find out about it), and criminal-illegal that results in a crime, where the state can put you in prison (if they find out about it).

> The original console has to decode the data and get it to the CPU somehow, and if you can run your own code on the CPU, you can always dump, even if it is just by displaying a series of 2-d bar codes on a TV screen and taking photos of them.

That would be a novel hack, and I've considered something similar with an old IBM computer with an almost-dead floppy (probably a stretched drive belt?) The floppy will read something like the first 50-100KB from a disk, and fails on the rest. That'd easily be enough for a little program that reads the hard drive sector by sector, displaying them on screen as a colored grid, or something. Then it'd be an exercise in video processing to extract the data.

Not novel. I heard about it from a possibly apocryphal espionage story wherein a program was loaded to an airgapped machine, then it flashed a rapid sequence of 2-d bar codes on the screen, and the attacker exfiltrated the data as a video file.

For your problem, I'd try pumping the data out of the serial or parallel ports first. An RS232 to USB cable might work.

>Not sure about the SNES. Sega Genesis/Megadrive just exposed the cartridge pins directly to the CPU's address bus, I think.

The Genesis/MD and SNES work the same way. Expose an address bus and data bus via the pins and let the cartridge handle any sort of mapping.

Sorry, my comment was badly-worded. I was thinking about older systems having 16-bit memory spaces, into which all IO is mapped (including the cartridge). So all but the absolute simplest games would need bank-switching hardware.

Looking at the Genesis and SNES, each exposes a 24-bit address bus. I was speculating that the increased area would be enough that bank switching wouldn't be necessary (the largest SNES game seems to be around 48Mbit, right? A little over a third of the CPU's memory, although I haven't looked up where the cartridge data's window is usually mapped).

Of course, there's the added fun of external coprocessors and such.

Disclaimer: I've only read your quotes and I am not a lawyer. Copyright is not a law about having a copy. It's a law about making a copy. A copy is neither legal nor illegal. Copying may infringe copyright or it may not.

Generally speaking, unless you have permission from the copyright holder (or the copyright has expired), you may not make a copy of something. Again, generally speaking, if you do not make a copy of something, then you can not infringe copyright (although, you might be liable for conspiracy or other similar things so your action may still be illegal).

The provision for private copying complicates things a little bit, but not that much. Usually private copying allows you to make a limited number of copies of things that you own, as long as it is for private use. It does not allow you to make a copy of something that you don't own. So you can't borrow it from the friend or a library and make a copy without infringing copyright.

(Quick side note since there is some discussion about Canadian copyright law: Historically there has been a levy for recorded musical performances which allows Canadians to make copies for private use. In the past you did not have to own the copy in order to make your own copy! This is a completely different issue than what I'm talking about. It only applies to recordings of musical performances, so it doesn't apply to games. I moved away from Canada a long time ago, so I've lost track of what's going on with the levy. Most misunderstood copyright law ever, I think...)

It doesn't matter if you own a copy of X. You can not make a copy of your friend's copy of X. They can not make a copy of X and give it to you. Both of those actions are infringement on copyright. Downloading off the internet doesn't change anything at all. The only grey area is which action is considered "copying" from the perspective of copyright infringement: uploading, downloading or both. My understanding is that in most countries both actions are considered "copying".

The end result is that whether or not you own a copy of a ROM, it is still infringement to download a copy from somewhere else. It may not be infringement on your part to buy or be given a physical copy. If that copy was made in an infringing way, the person who made the copy would be liable, not you. However, like I said, consipiracy, etc can still apply to you if you are knowingly entering into these kinds of arrangements.

What people usually get confused about is that if someone comes to your house and says, "You have infringed copyright" and points to your copy of the ROM, the copy itself isn't really evidence that you infringed the copyright. They would have to show that you made a copy of a different ROM (which may or may not be difficult).

Long story short --

ThatGeoGuy: technically correct since they didn't say "it's legal to download the copy from the internet". But basically misleading as hell because how did you get the copy without infringing copyright?

Nintendo: In most countries they are correct and not misleading at all. You may not download a copy from the internet unless they give permission. Also you may not play ROMs that are under copyright unless you have a license because some people have successfully argued that loading a game (or any data) into a computer is "making a copy". This latter argument may not stand up in some countries, but I wouldn't really want to be the landmark case that tests the law where you live...

Hope that makes things more clear.

Wow, you’re really going wild with the burden of proof.

Maybe we should add “Appeal to Nintendo” to https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_fallacies?

Am I going crazy? I provided an honest source for my point. It was pointed out the source I used is likely biased. I therefore provided a second independent source that agreed with the original source. No one has yet provided any source that disagrees with anything I stated or anything stated by either of the sources I linked. And yet is a fallacy for me to ask that someone should have a source if they are going to argue against the two sources I provided?

Your source was someone asserting, without justification, that it is illegal. That's not a legal argument. Even without considering that the source is very, very biased, it's not helpful.

They're right, it isn't legal. The only legal way to acquire a usable ROM in the US is to rip it yourself from a disc/cartridge that you own.

That doesn't mean that it's wrong to download ROMs. I've done it. It's just not legal. People are confusing a factual accounting of the law with personal moral condemnation.

Have an upvote. I don't agree with you, but those group downvoting are really mass bullying, to me.

Regarding the topic, I wonder what part of revenue for game console creators is in selling the console, and which part is to licencing games, that is, allowing them to be built for the platform. I would presume console creators get some royalties or something on sells for their platform? Anyone know about this?

Of course, the real piracy problem is game isos.

Console makers don't make much money off of the hardware themselves. Here's a few examples:

Switch: ~$40 profit[1]

PS4: ~$18 profit[2]

Xbox One: ~$30 profit[3]

As for software, a Forbes estimate from 2006 put the console manufacturer cut at around 11.5%, however that could be different nowadays.

This also changes with exclusivity deals in which the fee is presumably waived. I believe Sony would gain a little extra from licensing the Blu-ray technology on top of that.

But yeah, you're right. Much like printers and ink cartridges, the money is in the contents, not the device.

Disclaimer: I'm not in any way a part of the industry, just an interested fan of the medium so take this with a grain of salt and feel free to provide any knowledge you might have

[1]: https://www.polygon.com/2017/4/5/15195638/nintendo-switch-co... [2]: http://allthingsd.com/20131119/teardown-shows-sonys-playstat... [3]: http://allthingsd.com/20131126/microsofts-xbox-one-cost-90-m... [4]: https://www.forbes.com/2006/12/19/ps3-xbox360-costs-tech-cx_...

Your numbers are ancient, 2013 for both the PS4 and the XB1. I'm sure they've become way cheaper/profitable to produce since then, they're not cutting edge tech any more.

They've also lowered the price significantly since then. Entry-level units can be had for $199, much less than the $399/$499 launch prices of the PS4 and Xbox One, respectively.

That's a good point, didn't think about that.

This is the part that both amazed and confuses me about Nintendo.

They refuse to do proper sales on the Switch hardware, and yet all they have to do is have a decently discounted sale and if they sell 1 game per console they're already back in the black.

All their profit comes from the games, whereas the choice of buying a console for the consumer is high% the price of the console and only low% the price of games.

The Switch is fairly new, it's also selling very very well at full price. So what's the incentive for a sale? Not to mention consoles, especially successful, popular ones, don't see much in the way of discounted price early on.

So I guess I'm not sure what the source of the confusion is. It's not like anything weird or unusual is going on compared to the rest of Nintendo's 35 years in the console market, or compared with the console market in general.

It's possible that a smaller install base would lead to less software being developed though (even if the games would sell for use on emulators, that's harder to predict), so hardware sales induce software profits to some extent.

Btw (sorry for double comment, I can't edit my previous one anymore), all of this makes me think one thing: maybe console companies could build emulators themselves? There are guys like me who won't ever buy a console anyway. I use steam linux, and I've add a few custom launchers to it to play otherwise non-available retro games through emulators. I wouldn't bother paying for an official emulator if it allowed me to buy games that are exclusive to consoles (as in, games that are not on Steam).

This would also be an opportunity to generate revenue on retro gaming: if they make it easy to use, people will buy it. They could make an emulator for steam which then includes its own marketplace "in game". Despite the large availability of retro roms, I keep buying old final fantasy games for about 15€ each on android just because it's easy and requires no configuration.

Good point. I guess it would be only fair that emulators publish download numbers :)

> Have an upvote. I don't agree with you, but those group downvoting are really mass bullying, to me.

Why? This is literaly lying FUD which is perpetuated by the companies who try to deny you law-given rights.

Emulators are legal (emulators that don't themselves violate copyright law to function). Pirating software is not. It's really that simple. And right now emulator authors aren't legally responsible for how their users use their software so long as the authors keep their noses clean.

That's some red herring argument there. For people not aware, the parent comment is applying https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Appeal_to_consequences where s/he focuses on the consequences to detracts from the legality of a emulator in this case.

The same type of argument is often used to warrant banning guns simply because the consequence of having them will result in mass murder.

> Yes, emulators are legal. But we all know that the overwhelming use of them is in illegal situations.

I use emulators to play games that I rip myself, so it's not because something can be used in an illegal way that it should be forbidden. It's like saying "oh, pot could be used legally but most of its use is illegal" - if people use it this way and it's against the Law maybe there's a problem with the Law in the first place.

For all of Nintendo's posturing on this subject, they've been selling games on emulators for the past few years, both on the Virtual Console and in the form of the NES and SNES Classic.

to be fair, they have the rights to do so, apparently. Was a bit shocked Earthbound made the trip due to that one, rumor anyway, having rights to the music and what not expiring.

That makes no sense. You're saying that it's hypocritical for a company to object to people pirating software if they also sell that software.

I paid for Bleem. Even though I had used other emulators for things like NES, Sega, etc, it seemed like absolute magic to be able to throw a PS1 game in a computer and have it work.

pour one out for Bleemcast!

Although most here probably know this already, I'll take this opportunity to point out that the Internet Archive has a great collection of games playable in your browser.

https://archive.org/details/consolelivingroom

bless the internet archive for having an exception to the DMCA clause!

The DMCA isn’t the main issue here. Its anticircumvention clause, which is what the exemptions are for, is specifically about breaking DRM, which isn’t even present in most of the stuff they’re offering for emulation.

Rather, the issue would be straight-up copyright infringement: they’re hosting copyrighted ROMs and sending copies to any browser that visits the page. There are various little-known exemptions for copyright infringement, too, written in the statute, but I don’t think any of them are applicable. The Internet Archive would have to claim either copyright abandonment or fair use. Fair use would be a stretch, since they’re sending the entire ROMs, not just parts of them, and they’re offering a replica of the original, intended user experience rather than creating something “transformative”. As for copyright abandonment… I don’t know much about the case law for that, but at least according to Wikipedia[1], it wouldn’t hold much water either, any more than it would for out-of-print (but non-public-domain) books.

Heck, they’re even hosting games that are still being sold, such as Sonic the Hedgehog and Pac-Man. They’re marked “Stream Only”, but that just means they’re not putting a “save a copy” button in the UI; the game is still being downloaded in full into your browser, in order to run the JavaScript-based emulator. (Though even if they were running the emulator on a server and streaming a video feed, that would still typically be infringing.)

My guess is, they know they’re violating copyright, but they expect that the vast majority of copyright owners won’t care (and/or won’t notice), and anyone who does will send a DMCA notice rather than going for a full-blown lawsuit. Alternately, they might have negotiated a license for at least some of the games in the collection, but in that case I’d expect they’d say so.

[1] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Abandonware#Law

I completely agree. In that regard reading the replies to the Twitter announcement[1] was an exercise in frustration

[1] https://twitter.com/yuzuemu/status/952461671368478721

I shouldn't have clicked that link, it was very frustrating. It's like when watching AVGN, any time they bring up emulators it's always in a negative way. "Yeah, this is where people on emulators would cheat and make a save state" etc...

I've got a Switch, I buy all the games that I play, and I am extremely excited for this emulator to come out.

In my Steam library I have several games that are DOSBox wrappers around the original title. They're emulators, and I paid money for them, and they're perfectly legal.

Digital archival is a growing problem, so much of our culture is going to be lost without efforts like these.

On a side note:

When I talk to fellow gamers about my history of modding games, there's generally two groups. The ones who play on PC ask what I added, new levels, skins, etc.... And the ones who play only on consoles typically get upset because they think it means I made cheats for online play.

(For the record it was usually new features in code)

When I was in film school (2004-8), there was a huge concern about what the growth of digital formats would mean for archiving. Film from the 1800s can still be projected (so long as it's in physically-good condition), but tape formats (at least at the time) went obsolete every few years.

This is why open standards are so important.

DRM and proprietary drivers/blobs/formats are enemy to humanity. This is also why it should be (and in some places is) 100% legal to circumvent such measures, including via reverse engineering.

But it shouldn't be that way! I'd say society should go a step further and grant copyright on works only if the specification of the underlying formats is fully released, just like patents exist(ed?) to grant legal protection in exchange for disclosure.

Maybe DRM etc should only be legal in combination with code escrow.

Anyone who has bought a Virtual Console game from Nintendo: Emulators. Ditto, anyone who has bought the NES/SNES Classic consoles. Those are just an ARM chip, a bit of flash, and a custom Linux with an emulator running ROMs that match the exact contents of files available online.

Emulators are also great for the speedrunning community. They especially help in developing TAS's (Tool Assisted Speedruns), which contribute strats back to the human runners and push the boundaries of how fast games can be beaten.

The kind of insight offered by TAS experimentation and reverse engineering enables some really impressive stuff, like manual arbitrary code execution. There are multiple ACE exploits in Super Mario World, which have been used for credit warp runs and even poking code into RAM to turn the game into a Flappy Bird clone.

I've been told that even some authorized arcade emulator releases actually use bootleg MAME sets because they lost the original code that ran in the "protection MCU". If you don't know what that is: to delay bootleg production, arcade vendors used to put some bit of important code inside a microcontroller, so that just copying the ROM chips produced a broken game and bootleg vendors would have to reverse engineer it and reproduce it in the main CPU program, sometimes leading to gameplay differences (IIRC, the generation of the "EXTEND" bubbles in Bubble Bobble was an example noticeable to expert players).

I'm inclined to agree, but it's a debatable grey area. Archive.org has emulators for some older systems, so that's great. I've also heard of the big console manufacturers actually using community-built / open-source emulators themselves to allow for re-releasing their own games on newer systems.

I think every console manufacturer should release their own legal emulators; companies like Nintendo could make a lot of money off of a NES or GB(A) emulator on smartphones, they can keep selling their classics for $1-$5 apiece.

Nintendo have been doing exactly this for years [1], albeit only on their own hardware and not on smartphones.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Virtual_Console

Even with Virtual Console and backward-compatibility around emulators are still a good thing.

Backwards-compatibility is usually only 1 generation, so it just pushes the bitrot forward 5-10 years.

Relying on original manufacturers to re-release old games depends fully on that manufacturer's ability and willingness, and up to now the only manufacturer doing it, Nintendo, has been very selective in which games they re-release. And it's a separate release per console so again only pushes the rot for that game forward to that console's lifespan.

Thanks to emulators I'm willing to bet that in 100 years you will be able to play currently-emulatable games since I expect a good Windows/PC emulator to exist at that time.

Sure, but how many people run a CDC 6000 emulator today? Sure, there's a niche, albeit it a very small one. Certainly not enough to warrant the fuss that people tend to raise.

Why would someone in a 100 years be using an emulator from today (say SNES) inside a Windows emulator? Seems like if there was any interest at all some folks would write a native SNES emulator in the native hard/OS of the time. There's nothing about Windows that makes is especially ideal for emulating consoles for the last 40 years.

True, but lets not forget when a fully playable version of Breath of the Wild became available on Wii-U emulators last year just after release.

It's a tricky area.

It doesn't seem to have hurt sales, it's outpacing Zelda: Twilight Princess in terms of sales and that's currently holding the record.

The WiiU has been dead since the Switch released. Nintendo put out BotW on the WiiU because they hadn't put out a Zelda game on it yet and Switch supplies were short. I wouldn't say that it's hurt sales for the game for the Switch - BotW had an above 100% attach rate at launch on the Switch.

BotW was developed for the Wii U. They've been promoting it to fans almost since the console's debut. Releasing it on that system was them living up to their promise. It's just a shame that it turned out to be the console's final major release.

In fairness though, talk about going out on a high!

Twilight Princess was released on the Gamecube and Wii, as well.

It's not entirely true they didn't put out any Zelda games for the WiiU, just not any "flagship titles that were WiiU exclusives." They rereleased The Wind Waker and Twilight Princess. Hyrule Warriors was a WiiU Zelda title but it wasn't a flagship action RPG title, it was a hack and slash.

(I also believe that Breath of the Wild was originally developed for the WiiU)

History is full of examples where a developer/publisher decided to port or remaster a game from its back catalog only to realize they have lost the source code and need to rely on an emulator ROM. Sega, Nintendo, and Capcom I think are the most infamous examples.

Of course the hypocrisy is lost on these same companies who for decades have used piracy as the boogeyman to vilify archival work and fair use.

I operate under this as a guideline. If the game can't be bought anymore in a way where money gets to the devs then (you can always get random box copy's from eBay or some such) then it's OK to use an emulator.

You're confusing (pirated) ROMs with "emulators."

There are emulator products that you can only play with original games (such as bleem!) and/or ROMs provided by the publisher (such as Nintendo's eStore)

The devs at mainstream game studios are salaried, they've already been paid for their work performed no matter if the game sells or not. If the game is never released (which happens) they still get a paycheck.

While this is true, I would imagine that sales figures affect the future of devs at the game studios (layoffs, new projects, etc).

I know the difference, just stating my stance in this matter. Besides Yuzu can't even be used like that in it's current state, and like has been said if a game doesn't sell during its shelf life it doesn't bode well to any of the makers. It's enough to kill medium/small studios and entire IP's.

I bought my Switch after playing BotW via CEMU.

I have a WiiU, but trying out BotW at 1600p was intriguing.

Emulators don't make piracy legal. So it would be the same argument as for DRM-enabled videos or music. And that is a pretty bad argument.

And there's great legal uses for emulation:

https://hyperkin.com/Retron5/ (it was pointed out to me they violate open source licenses, so forget this one.)

every game system's "virtual store"

wrapping old games around an emulator to make them (seamlessly) compatible with current computers. Allows the publisher to continue to sell decades old games with vert minimal effort.

I don't know how much rereleases of games use emulation vs rewrites, but I assume at least some use emulation.

I believe I heard that the xbox360 contains an Xbox emulator for backwards compatibility. If it wasn't the Xbox360 it was some other console.

Then there's the failed bleem! commercial emulator.

Funnily enough the Retron5 is illegal. Not because it emulates games, but because the emulators it uses are stolen from open source projects that forbid commercial use.

https://www.libretro.com/index.php/appeal-to-game-journalist...

Aren’t open source licenses that forbid commercial use kind of rare? All of the big name ones I can think of have no such provisions.

It's more common in the emulation scene. The two emulators that Retron5 infringes on have licenses roughly based on MIT/BSD, but with no-commercial-use clauses added.

https://github.com/snes9xgit/snes9x/blob/master/docs/snes9x-...

https://github.com/ekeeke/Genesis-Plus-GX/blob/master/LICENS...

> Aren’t open source licenses that forbid commercial use kind of rare?

In fact, they're so rare, they don't exist. The OSI Open Source Definition forbids discrimination against fields of endeavour, which means a licence with a non-commercial-use clause is not an open source licence.

This really bugs me about Genesis Plus GX. It's a great emulator, but I believe FOSS emulation is the best way to ensure preservation of a gaming platform and Genesis Plus GX technically doesn't fit the bill. So, I'm keeping my eyes out for other Genesis emulators to use. BlastEm looks promising (GPLv3.)

Wow, I didn't know that. I don't know much about the product other than it's pretty mainstream so I assumed they played by the rules.

> I believe I heard that the xbox360 contains an Xbox emulator for backwards compatibility. If it wasn't the Xbox360 it was some other console.

The Xbox One uses emulation to play a (growing) subset of original Xbox and Xbox 360 games.

The original Xbox was x86 and the XB360 is 3-Core PowerPC - but the Xbone is x64. I’m curious how they were able to emulate PowerPC with acceptable levels of performance (my guess is high-level emulation by reimplementing the XB360’s APIs) - I’m also curious if the Xbone’s original Xbox emulation is just CPU virtualisation - or actual emulation.

> I believe I heard that the xbox360 contains an Xbox emulator for backwards compatibility. If it wasn't the Xbox360 it was some other console.

Yep, the external HDD for the Xbox 360 has the "secret sauce" / binary blobs that allows this to work and emulates certain Xbox games.

Similarly, the Xbox One also has the backwards compatibility library to emulate 360 games, but doesn't require an extra accessory. Each game download contains its own wrapper of the 360 emulator.

> the external HDD for the Xbox 360 has the "secret sauce" / binary blobs that allows this to work and emulates certain Xbox games

IIRC, that's _partly_ because it requires Microsoft to pay a licensing fee to Nvidia for the original Xbox GPU, so baked that cost into the cost of the hard drive rather than the console itself.

The original Xbox always had a hard drive and games expected it. The 360 had no-drive models.

I assume that’s why the drive was required.

Copyrights don't last forever.

I'm likely to be dead before copyrights expire on anything that came out during my lifetime.

I don't think you need an excuse, really. Could be educational, or other honorable things (or not), so long as they're open source for others to hack on top of or learn from.

Not just for archiving, but also for playing at higher framerates and resolutions. 30fps games give me headaches but the same game running at 120fps can make a huge difference.

Exactly, emulator are good for archiving. It allows on to play decades old games. Even some museums use emulators.

Yuzu Switch emulator is made by devs of a 3DS emulator Crita: https://citra-emu.org

3DS is unique with its 3D display that doesn't need a 3D glass. The "New 3DS XL" is especially great, as it has a stable 3D effect because of infrared eye-tracking. While most gamer got a bad impression from the first gen 3DS 3D effect without eye-tracking. I would pay premium for such a 3D PC monitor. Unfortunately Nintendo Switch doesn't feature such a 3D display nor does any other device available.