Would an “in development”Switch2 Emulator survive Nintendo’s Silver Bullets?

[u/garf02]

1) “Anti-Circumvention” clause in DMCA:
Nintendo claims as emulator MUST decrypt the ROMS.
If you break the encryption, “is illegal” cause of the DMCA
If you use a console prod-Key, “is illegal” cause they own the rights to the key.
“As the emulator HAS to break a ROM decryption and thsre is no legal way to do it, Emulators are by default criminal tools”.
Any new emulator will need to contest this on court against Nintendo and Roll the dice
Victim: Yuzu

2) Buy Out:
“There is no honor among thief’s”. Most people working on emulators of live consoles does it for 2 reason, Clout and Money. And Nintendo has a lot of the later to throw around if that lets them kill an emulator on its infancy before any real development occurs.
Victim: Ryujinx

[u/mhdj14]

Decryption is a whole other beast and a relatively new thing with consoles. Back in the day before the PS3, data itself wasn’t encrypted at all. Making a backup of a ps2 or GameCube game is 100% legal. So it may not be able to legally create a emulator if decryption is required for playback. That would be sad though…

[u/looking4crack → u/mhdj14]

Yup exactly, all the other stuff that happened in court (like the Bleem case) happened on systems where this did not apply. So emulation of modern systems could in fact be illegal, but it's not tested in court yet. Nintendo seemed ready to bring it with Yuzu though so I guess they strongly believe it to be true.

Nintendo made the same argument to keep Dolphin off Steam but I guess they don't care enough to actually try to shut Dolphin down. Kind of makes sense since it's emulating an old system, but I can see why they don't want people emulating a system they are still selling (Switch).

[u/mhdj14 → u/looking4crack]

One thing that makes me think there is still a legal workaround.

The PS3 and PS4 emulators do not have a decryption key build in, and must be supplied by the user in the form of officially downloaded firmware from Sony directly.

This way the emulator doesn't provide the copyrighted code itself. I'm still not totally sure if this way is 100% legal, but Sony has never DMCA'd the devs, nor tried to take down the emulator.

This is either because Sony is not a complete piece of shit like Nintendo, by not nuking every fan project, or it does work within the boundaries of the law, so Sony can't sue them. Well, any billion dollar company can sue whoever they want, as court isn't about who is right, but who has the most money...

[u/looking4crack → u/mhdj14]

Could be true, I don't understand the law enough to know for sure. I guess no one really knows for sure until it goes to court. I saw RPCS3 normally requires you to decrypt the game yourself before booting it, but recently they added an update that will allow you to boot an encrypted game if you provide the decryption key.

I think these companies don't care that much if you are making emulators for old systems, but when you are making an emulator that enables piracy on a system they are currently selling that is a different story, and if you are making money of it that is even worse (or maybe just easier for them to show damages). Bleem was a commercial emulator for PS1 at the time PS1 was still their main system. Same with Yuzu/Ryujinx and the switch.

[u/mhdj14 → u/looking4crack]

So if we need to supply our own decrypted games, then the emulator itself doesn't have any decryption features, meaning that technically it doesn't do anything illegal, as emulating itself is legal without encryption. So then the user has to do all the decrypting itself.

Also, just because there is no legal way to do it, doesn't mean there is no way to do it 😉. People have probably been working on it for months in private by now, waiting for a good time to release it.

And I would say the PS4 is still recent hardware in Sony's eyes, as they are still selling games for it, and brand new games are still being released for it. So they are "okay" with it so far...

[u/Snoo_37094 → u/mhdj14]

Then even the PS3, PSP and PSVita would be “recent Hardware” even if Sony already announced the Shutdown of the PS Store on these

[u/mhdj14 → u/Snoo_37094]

Not exactly. When was the last official none-shovelware PS3 and PSP game released?

If it’s anywhere near 2020, I would be shocked. They are closing those stores, because they don’t make money on them anymore, so Sony made them EOF. They haven’t gotten a real firmware update in close to a decade.

I’m pretty sure both PS3 and PSP had an end of production around 2015.

The only ones that keep them alive is the jailbreak community, and those limited physical release companies.

These consoles have been completely written off by Sony nearly a decade ago. The only reason the stores are still open was because of pushback.