You don’t admit that something legal is legal. You’re the asshole that says “OK, maybe you’re right.” I’m fed up with their crap, I’ll emulate everything from now on.
They set the stage that they never said otherwise, but circumventing piracy protections is somehow illegal…
Now the question arises, what counts as piracy protection? Is a nag enough? Can you be criminalised in clicking away a nag you dis not read?
🤔
Here in Denmark, it’s legal to circumvent piracy protection, if the purpose is to legally use the product.
The example that was used in the media when this was new, is when you buy a DVD and want to play it on a PC instead of a DVD player. Usually piracy protection would stop it from working on a PC. Of course the circumvention also makes it easy to make and distribute a pirate copy.
So the ability to use the product in the way the customer choose (within reason), is weighted higher than stopping piracy a little.
Piracy protection is things like encryption, firmware checks, pairing systems, unique game identifiers per instance of game, unique console id’s, …
Basically any system put in place to make, or identify, a game/console to be genuine or make sure a genuine game running on genuine hardware and nothing else.
These are all systems the switch had btw.
Switch emulation bypassed or faked all of those, which counts as piracy protection circumvention.
Subverting copy protection had always been a vuage notion because they sell you encrypted content, but they still have to sell you something with the decryption keys as well.
Now, using the key to remove the encryption falls under “subverting” but if you use the key to play the encrypted media directly, why does it matter what hardware it is happening on?
When it came to switch emulation you didn’t really circumvent the copy protection, you exported the keys from a switch. The game images are basically dumped as is.
Yes, you could find the keys elsewhere, but if you dumped your own it wouldn’t really be considered subverting. Especially with the jig you put the switch into a state built into the switch hardware. It’s not even a exploit like jailbreak usually are. The recovery boot mode is an intended service feature.
The only illegal thing would be getting copies of games and keys from other people.
So what’s the current state of emulation on Linux? I still have both Yuzu and Ryujinx installed, but has either been superseded by a fork?
I guess this is what you are searching for https://citron-emu.org/
What I don’t get is why emulator devs don’t develop completely anonymously, you can’t shut them down if you don’t know who they are
Okay but they still need to distribute it if they want others to use it. And you don’t reach a lot of people through sneakernet alone. Nintendo will just shut down every place the software gets distributed. Then no legitimate site wants to touch that with a ten yard stick.
What percentage of the gamers that you know would just be able to find and download an emulator from a git repo hosted on .onion or .i2p?
For me, that’s just me. None of my gamer buddies would put in that effort, they’d just buy a product or play a game from steam.
I think we’re still a long way from privacy focused protocols being mainstream in the way the web has become in the last 15 years.
Emulators are for Nintendo what loud chewing is for most people, not exactly illegal but if you do it you’re gonna get decked.
yeah, if it were illegal they wouldn’t be able to emulate their own games
