“A tankie wrote this.”
French.
Emulators aren’t illegal if you have a legitimate copy of the game, and either plug it into your computer to play directly, or transfer your copy to your computer yourself (due to stupid DMCA technicalities, it’s not legal to download an identical premade file from the internet). The Switch emulators were shut down not because they were emulators, but because the developers were letting users talk openly about piracy in communities they ran, weakening their we’re only providing this for legitimate users and don’t want to help pirates defence, and, even more critically, they were sharing each other’s dumps of Switch games instead of dumping them themselves, giving Nintendo a we’ll sue you for pirating all these games stick to make shut down the emulator project the carrot they could offer in a settlement.
None of this invalidates the point of the post, though, as there are plenty of games where there were never enough copies in existence to cater to the current demand of players, so even if they were willing to spend extortionate amounts for used cartridges on Ebay, people still wouldn’t be able to play certain games without resorting to piracy.
The emulator is legal in all cases. The ROMS are what you need a ripper and copy of the cart for.
The above only applies to the USA. YMMV
The BIOS as well
Not necessarily… When the emulator includes proprietary pieces -bios/etc- it’s subject to copyright. Without said pieces it’s not much of an emulator… Iirc GBA emus fall into this
That’s why GBA emulators ship the proprietary parts separate. You’re on your own to track that down.
What if those are reverse engineered?
I am pretty sure a number of emulators do have reverse engineered bios that provide very good compatibility. I have some of those retro handhelds that run on ArkOS, and quite a few of the emulators in Retroarch do have that option. It’s not perfect, but works for most of the games I want to play.
Xemu is one of those, there are a few reverse engineered or otherwise nonproprietary bios options available
Emulators for seventh generation consoles aren’t automatically legal like emulators for earlier consoles as that’s when consoles started directly supporting DRM. Under the DMCA (and equivalent laws in other countries, which those countries are required to have to have a trade deal with the USA, which they’re required to have if they want to participate in the global economy), devices that circumvent DRM are illegal, and obviously a seventh-generation-or-later console emulator has to circumvent the game’s DRM to make the game playable on hardware other than what the DRM is attempting to restrict it to. The DMCA also added exceptions to itself when you’re forced to violate copyright in some way to make different computer systems or software compatible with each other, e.g. if you need to reverse engineer something to figure out why it isn’t currently working. While there’s no settled case law yet, it’s widely believed that the interoperability exceptions override the anti-DRM-circumvention-device parts. That still requires that the goal of the emulator is to make legally-owned copies of games compatible with new hardware rather than to circumvent DRM in not-legally-owned copies of games, and it’s much easier to argue the former in court if you’ve not pirated anything and have been hostile to other people pirating things, so emulator developers who bother talking to lawyers are usually careful to make it clear that they don’t support pirates and accumulate huge collections of disks and/or cartridges.
Quite a bit of the world is locked into similar IP law due to various trading partnerships with western nations. A notable recent example is the, now defunct, Trans-Pacific Partnership.
Is that always true? It’s been a few years since I set up a Switch emulator but I recall needing device keys dumped from a physical machine to get it working, similar to ROMs. Would that put the emulator itself in a similar position?
Cryptographic Keys are just long numbers and are not subject to copyright laws.
Copyright law does apply to big numbers - any computer file is effectively just a really big number, and can be copyrighted, and this specific kind of cryptographic key, even if not copyrightable, still (potentially) counts as an illegal DRM circumvention device under the DMCA (and equivalent laws in other countries). Illegal numbers are a legal grey area as there’s no case law demonstrating that they’re legal yet, but it’s expected that if it ever ended up in court, they’d be determined to have been legal all along. Wikipedia lists a whole bunch of them on their illegal number article as they’re sufficiently confident they’re not going to lose a legal dispute. Big publishers benefit more from there being a legal grey area they can threaten people for operating in than they would from the potential gamble of getting lucky and having a court agree with them while risking the court might disagree and set a precedent they don’t like.
Emulators are legal. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bleem!#Sony_lawsuit
Emulators are entirely legal and legitimate, and eveb essential.
Equating piracy with emulators is just nonsense from the publishing industry. If you own a game and a console its perfectly legal to rip the ROM to play on your own device. The games industry don’t like that because they dont want you to own anything and just be paying serfs renting your console and games.
Emulators are used by people who pirate, but the illegal bit is the piracy not the emulator. And its worth remembering that piracy is a civil legal matter not criminal for individuals in most jurisdictions. The games industry (and lots of other IP holders) love to murky the water there too. There are certainly criminal organisations making money out of piracy but the end users are not criminals. And the “cost” is usually imagined and massively inflated - they talk about lost sales but there is no guarentee people who pirate would have spent a penny on the pirated content.
The Nintendo, The.
Now I’m actually curious about the contracts for selling the games back when the consoles were current, like “this game may be sold exclusively for the Gamecube” and whether they had time limits. I know Nintendo had lots of “this game will be exclusive to our system” in the SNES era
Capcom is one of the few companies that comes to mind that always ported some of its most famous older works to newer consoles (Mega Man collections, Street Fighter)
A commie wrote this.
honestly though, most game companies are pretty chill about the existence of emulators. Sure there have been lawsuits about Switch rom sites and Switch emulators - which are about currently-selling consoles, just as the post concedes.
This is half true. Japanese culture even considers mods as piracy, so emulation is radical by comparison.
However, American companies (and US branches of international companies) are full of gaming nerds who emulate games all the time. I knew a guy at a major company who even had one of those keychains with a working emulator on it he’d play during breaks. He ended up at Riot, iirc.
Nintendo of Japan doesn’t file lawsuits against DS emulators either. Sony is a Japanese company; they sued Bleem and lost but that was more than 20 years ago. There are emulators for PS3, PS Vita, and PS4 - all platforms for which Sony still hosts network infrastructure and operates digital storefronts - and AFAIK none of them have been subject to legal threats.
Didn’t Plasticman get sued for distributing old roms?
I’m not familiar with Plasticman, but all the rom site lawsuits that I know about from the past several years involved sites that were either charging money or running ads to make money from pirate downloads. I could be mistaken on that front.
Plasticman.org definitely ran ads. It was one of the biggest sites in the late 1990/early 2000s on the english language parts of the web.
They didn’t even read the post, they just saw how long it was
This isn’t what happened. Emulators for old consoles are still online. Nintendo sued people making Switch emulators. That console and those games were available for sale at the time of the lawsuit.
Yes, but the sites hosting ROMs for ANY system get repeatedly destroyed by Nintendo.
Lotta good those emulators are without ROMs.
I did a quick search and immediately found websites hosting Nintendo ROMs from the original NES to the Wii.
“I found some they haven’t destroyed yet” does not refute what they said.
If you do another quick search, you’ll probably also find Mario fanart that a 12yo put on their fridge.I’m not sure where I was going with that.That doesn’t mean Nintendo doesn’t sue the shit out of ROM sites that get popular enough.
It was a valid point - Nintendo could sue the twelve year old for putting Mario fanart on their fridge, but they’d struggle to show damages, so even if they were only doing it to prove a point about how litiguous and evil they could be, it would be enough of a waste of money that they wouldn’t bother.
A 12 year old putting Mario fanart on their fridge is not copyright infringement. They didn’t distribute it. It’s their house.
It’s a common misconception that distribution is required for infringement. Fanart that’s never shared still copies the likeness of a copyrighted character, and copying copyrighted stuff (outside a few very specific exceptions, e.g. fair use for parody, critique or education, making a single backup in case the copy you bought is damaged etc.) isn’t legal. As there are obviously no damages, no one ever gets in toruble for it, but that doesn’t mean it’s legal.
Nintendo fans are the worst bootlickers.
they sued yuzu not for making the emulator, but passing roms in a back room and using nintendos IP as marketing material for their content.
Ryunjinx was silently paid off behind the scenes.
making the emulator was not the problem, it was the actions surrounding the emulator that did the team in
Well, they are still quite aggressive in take downs of rom distributors. Luckily it usually just makes those specific roms unavailable for some time, rather than full site takedowns (although that has happened.)
Also every fan version of a game, like Metroid 2 fan remake, gets a takedown notice. :/
