Yeah their problem was to make it a commercial operation. At that point it’s trivial for Nintendo to show they’ve enriched themselves on the back of ripped ROMs by enabling them.
Whereas if you do everything for free and don’t even accept donations, they’d have a big problem showing that you have any commercial interest and hence can be sued for damages.
Reverse engineering software (and even using small bits of proprietary code when required) in order to make it compatible with other hardware is fully legal (tons of precedent, for emulation specifically see Sega v Accolade and Sony v Connectix), and selling emulators commercially is also fully legal (Sega v Connectix was about a commercial Playstation emulator for the Mac, Sony v Bleem was about a commercial emulator for the PC and Dreamcast)
Nintendo’s legal claims against Yuzu are completely untested and dubious at best, it’s the threat of spending millions of dollars on lawyers that’s very real and effective, they are yet again simply weaponizing the courts and the DMCA like all the other corpo scum before them
The problem is that this shit is a lot of work that we all benefit from… So how do we compensate the devs?
That’s the neat part, you don’t.
Same as any other type of internet piracy. I don’t give money to some guy ripping his movies or games.
The only way to do things like this is anonymously for the shits and giggles. A Patreon to make it their job is one thing, but the fact that they can pay $2.4million shows it went beyond that.
Yeah fuck that. That’s unsustainable and will only result in the end of piracy. We should feel bad for being leechers forever, imo. And we should strive to assist the causes we believe in, however we can.
On a similar note, I struggle to reconcile my contempt of Russian/Chinese policies with my adoration and support for piracy and the brave souls that maintain all the big projects we enjoy/rely on.
