Emulators have been legal in the past I thought. Sure, there’s something to be said about common sense and developing emulators for current generation platforms.
IIRC, they’re legal as long as they don’t explicitly distribute any of the copyright owner’s own code or files. That’s why, for example, PCSX2 requires you to dump “your own” PS2 BIOS and doesn’t provide any itself. Because PCSX2 doesn’t distribute the PS2 BIOS and because its way of talking to the BIOS doesn’t copy the source code, that emulator is in the clear.
Some modern emulators (ex. Ryujinx) don’t even need BIOS files (or whatever they’re called on Switch) to be able to run games. But they also don’t use Nintendo’s original code to run the game.
Take all this with a grain of salt. I’m saying it from memory.
Yes, I wasn’t trying to refute that. But Nintendo can still ruin your life fighting a losing battle if they wanted to. To me it’s just not worth the risk of putting your name on it.
doesn’t matter if they don’t know who you are, Nintendo can still offer you a ton of money to delete it. it wasn’t necessarily legal threats or I assume they would have sent the cease and desist to GitHub and gotten the repo removed first
Imagine not developing a controversial emulator anonymously…
I’ve always wondered that. Why not just throw a git repo behind I2P or onto IPFS? It’s like they want to be attacked.
Attention and recognition.
Emulators have been legal in the past I thought. Sure, there’s something to be said about common sense and developing emulators for current generation platforms.
IIRC, they’re legal as long as they don’t explicitly distribute any of the copyright owner’s own code or files. That’s why, for example, PCSX2 requires you to dump “your own” PS2 BIOS and doesn’t provide any itself. Because PCSX2 doesn’t distribute the PS2 BIOS and because its way of talking to the BIOS doesn’t copy the source code, that emulator is in the clear.
Some modern emulators (ex. Ryujinx) don’t even need BIOS files (or whatever they’re called on Switch) to be able to run games. But they also don’t use Nintendo’s original code to run the game.
Take all this with a grain of salt. I’m saying it from memory.
Yes, I wasn’t trying to refute that. But Nintendo can still ruin your life fighting a losing battle if they wanted to. To me it’s just not worth the risk of putting your name on it.
doesn’t matter if they don’t know who you are, Nintendo can still offer you a ton of money to delete it. it wasn’t necessarily legal threats or I assume they would have sent the cease and desist to GitHub and gotten the repo removed first