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The official Nintendo Museum appears to be emulating SNES games on a Windows PC, which is slightly embarrassing (www.pcgamer.com)

submitted 1 day ago by Agent_Karyo@lemmy.world to c/games@lemmy.world

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[-] vaguerant@fedia.io 21 points 1 day ago

I'm not going to check the whole archive, but going back to at least 2005, Nintendo was asking users to ...

report ROM sites, emulators, Game Copiers, Counterfeit manufacturing, or other illegal activities

https://web.archive.org/web/20051124194318/http://www.nintendo.com/corp/faqs/legal.html

Here's some more quotes from the same page where Nintendo is viciously anti-emulation:

The introduction of video game emulators represents the greatest threat to date to the intellectual property rights of video game developers. As is the case with any business or industry, when its products become available for free, the revenue stream supporting that industry is threatened. Such emulators have the potential to significantly damage a worldwide entertainment software industry which generates over $15 billion annually, and tens of thousands of jobs.

Distribution of a Nintendo emulator trades off of Nintendo's goodwill and the millions of dollars invested in research & development and marketing by Nintendo and its licensees. Substantial damages are caused to Nintendo and its licensees. It is irrelevant whether or not someone profits from the distribution of an emulator. The emulator promotes the play of illegal ROMs , NOT authentic games. Thus, not only does it not lead to more sales, it has the opposite effect and purpose.

Personal Websites and/or Internet Content Providers sites That link to Nintendo ROMs, Nintendo emulators and/or illegal copying devices can be held liable for copyright and trademark violations, regardless of whether the illegal software and/or devices are on their site or whether they are linking to the sites where the illegal items are found.

[-] Chozo@fedia.io 7 points 1 day ago

Nintendo's been openly emulating their own games since about that time. IIRC, the SNES Virtual Console on the Wii had code from SNES9X in it.

The distinction (which seems nobody cares about) is that Nintendo's going after copyright infringers. If your emulator doesn't use any of Nintendo's code, they ain't doing shit about it; they're just gonna steal it, if anything.

[-] vaguerant@fedia.io 26 points 1 day ago

Somebody has fed you or you have invented bad information. Neither Yuzu nor Ryujinx, the two Switch emulators which recently ceased development due to intervention from Nintendo, included Nintendo's code. The Yuzu settlement required those developers to acknowledge that

because our projects can circumvent Nintendo’s technological protection measures and allow users to play games outside of authorized hardware, they have led to extensive piracy.

There was never any mention of them stealing Nintendo code.

Ryujinx, we know even less about, because the agreement went down privately, but there's literally zero indication of any stolen code. We know that Nintendo contacted the developer proposing that they cease offering Ryujinx and they did.

Obviously, Nintendo was bothered in both of these cases because the emulators do facilitate piracy, but that's not the same as them having infringed on Nintendo's copyright by using their code which you are claiming. Both of these emulators were developed open-source; if they were built using stolen Nintendo code there would be receipts all over the place. That was never the problem.

[-] Chozo@fedia.io 4 points 1 day ago

Yuzu supported unreleased games. To do that required using Nintendo's code, and getting that code through unauthorized channels. Nintendo's code may not have been distributed through Yuzu, but it was used in a way that was not permitted in order to engineer a way to circumvent the copy protection of those games. That was how Nintendo was able to go after them.