Comment by shirro | Hacker News Reader

Comment by shirro | Hacker News Reader

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Nintendo have the right to protect their IP and revenue. They have made some iconic games and characters that I would argue are as culturely significant as anything made by Disney. I would like them to be able to keep funding creative people.

However their revenues almost entirely comes from the new and not the old. Games don't go into syndication and get tv reruns. They are kept alive by the emulation community and I would argue it builds support for Nintendo's IP rather than do them damage. I have a kid whose first exposure to Metroid was Metroid Dread which he loved. We have a Wii but it is struggling a bit and he is playing through the Prime trilogy on Dolphin. No question he is going to go nuts when Nintendo release Prime 4. Cheap marketing.

I have been tempted to rip our Switch games to run on Yuzu but to be honest the Switch (we have 3 in the house) is just an ideal platform for these games and playing on a PC is going to be a worse experience in almost every way. The story is very different with older platforms. These will be history soon without emulation.

> However their revenues almost entirely comes from the new and not the old. Games don't go into syndication and get tv reruns. They are kept alive by the emulation community and I would argue it builds support for Nintendo's IP rather than do them damage.

Note that in this case, we're talking about a Switch emulator.

> Playing on a PC is going to be a worse experience in almost every way.

I mean, not necessarily. I would argue that Breath of the Wild is already a better experience on a powerful PC (not necessarily a Steam Deck), once everything is set up. You can play in 4K and 60 fps with a long draw distance.

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I wish there was an easy, accessible way to rip legitimate cartridges for emulation. The problem is that no reasonable person is ever going to buy a game to play it in an emulator, because it requires an order of magnitude more work than downloading the game for free.

(The only exception I can think of is the PS2; PCSX2 can play PS2 games directly from a standard optical drive, and was released in an era when such drives were standard.)

> The only exception I can think of is the PS2; PCSX2 can play PS2 games directly from a standard optical drive

I'm not sure of anything else directly as easy, but both the PSP and Wii could be made to rip their own disks, with the appropriate firmware installed, and some PC DVD drives were apparently Wii-disc compatible, but not all.

As you say though, it's extra work even then. I think I would probably buy the game and then download from an internet source, if I wanted to emulate but stay honest.

DVD drives that can read Wii discs are super rare, but here's an interesting one—BluRay drives that can PS3 discs are quite common!

Unfortunately, ripping them still isn't an easy process. Last time I did this I needed three different programs: A generic ISO creator followed by "PS3 ISO Patcher" and then finally "3k3y ISO Tools".

This is an area where I'm actually a bit disappointed in emulator developers—RPCS3 ought to automate this process. I realize they're working for free in their spare time, but... if you're going to say that your software is intended to be used legally, I think you have some responsibility to make that the legal path accessible.

> I think I would probably buy the game and then download from an internet source, if I wanted to emulate but stay honest.

Sure, and I've done this to, but there's basically zero chance of anyone doing that at a larger scale. What we want is for the level of friction required to acquire and play a legitimate copy of a game in an emulator to be at least somewhat comparable to the effort required to find and download a pirated copy.

People who play on real hardware are much more likely than emulator users to track down actual games. I suspect that's because—even though piracy is readily available and quite easy on these consoles—using a real disc can feel a lot more straight forward.

> What we want is for the level of friction required to acquire and play a legitimate copy of a game in an emulator to be at least semi comparable to the effort required to find and download a pirated rip.

Yeah, unfortunately that seems pretty darn unlikely, especially where Nintendo wants to control the experience and make sure people are getting it exactly the way they design it. I can see why they wouldn't - the moment they start selling it like that it's a support nightmare and their perceived quality would probably plummet.

Okay, here's another example a la PS3 discs—it so happens that people have figured out how to download Wii U games directly from Nintendo's eShop servers. As in, any game on the eShop. You just need to track down a somewhat-sketchy Java app.

What if this capability was built into the official version of Cemu, but (!) with some sort of basic ownership check included? I'd imagine that if it's possible to pull games directly off of Nintendo's servers, there's a good chance it's also possible to query which games an account owns.

As far as I know, nobody ever looked into this. There's no interest.

If emulator developers want people to use their emulators legally, I think there are some more creative avenues that could be explored. Not in all cases, but at least in some of them.

Emulator devs don't want to be sued by Nintendo, adding code to acquire games from their servers would be an incredibly risky move even if they were able to check what's owned on an account.

Is this substantially different from e.g. Dolphin downloading Virtual Console and WiiWare games? (In Dolphin's case, this works because Dolphin can emulate the Wii Shop channel. You used to be able to make purchases directly in Dolphin, and you can still redownload previously-purchased software.)

Yes because Dolphin is not distributing the rom/code for the Wii Shop channel. Users who decide to emulate it need that + various other things to make it work:

"Wii Shop Channel has functionalities that requires proper network certificates extracted from an IOS to work."

"Keys from a real Wii are required."

"a proper NAND is required."

https://wiki.dolphin-emu.org/index.php?title=Wii_Shop_Channe...

If Dolphin was distributing any of that they'd be getting a letter from Nintendo.

Nintendo doesn't - or at least shouldn't - have the right to use the threat of legal action to shut down public discussions they dislike. This is the exact purpose of anti-SLAPP statutes. "Protect their IP", sure, but that means taking action against people who violate their authoritative copyright on the programs themselves, not threatening action against those who merely use brief gameplay footage clips in a highly transformative way.

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