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A comment on Yuzu – Nintendo Switch Emulator. Parent comment

Re:Yuzu – Nintendo Switch Emulator by Cthulhu_ on Monday January 15, 2018 @10:48AM (#16151164)
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.

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Re:Yuzu – Nintendo Switch Emulator by davweb on Monday January 15, 2018 @10:54AM (#16151214)
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

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Re:Yuzu – Nintendo Switch Emulator by dtech on Monday January 15, 2018 @11:13AM (#16151345)
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.

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Re:Yuzu – Nintendo Switch Emulator by Brockenstein on Tuesday January 16, 2018 @11:14AM (#16159222)
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.

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