• pearsaltchocolatebar@discuss.online
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          1 month ago

          They’re not bogus. The emulator that shut down were selling a product using a proprietary encryption key owned by Nintendo.

          That’s why Dolphin still exists.

          • Sauerkraut@discuss.tchncs.de
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            1 month ago

            I disagree. Sure, companies have a moral right to recoup their R&D costs on a console, but I fully reject the Divine Right of Shareholders. As long as the emulators aren’t sold for profit and no one is hurt, a multibillion dollar company like Nintendo has zero moral ground to tell us that we cannot emulate consoles that we have bought to play games that we also bought.

          • catsup@lemmy.one
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            1 month ago

            Proprietary encryption key

            What if the key was in a book? It would have to be protected by free-speech, which makes it uncensorable.

            What if the key contents were used as hex values to make a flag? Would you censor a flag too?

            No such thing as “proprietary encryption keys” exist.

          • denshi@discuss.tchncs.de
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            1 month ago

            IANAL, but from a EU-centric perspective on copyright (which is the only one I can reliably talk about) the idea of a proprietary encryption key is bogus. A creative work can be copyrighted if it has sufficient originality (or under some other very specific conditions). Smaller parts of such a work are not copyrighted if they don’t meet that criteria on their own. The encryption key (which is very probably randomly generated and definitely not a creative work) thus can’t be copyrighted on it’s own. At least in the EU, there should be no argument against sharing said key (at least in respect to copyright).

            I honestly can’t talk about other jurisdictions (maybe someone else here can) but I imagine it should be similar to this in many other countries.

            • pearsaltchocolatebar@discuss.online
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              1 month ago

              Sharing isn’t the issue. The emulator was profiting from it.

              If I copied your house key and sold it, would that be alright?

              For the record, I support emulation, but I don’t lie to myself that it’s morally defensible.

              • denshi@discuss.tchncs.de
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                1 month ago

                Sharing isn’t the issue. The emulator was profiting from it.

                I wrote about sharing but even profiting from it should be legally permissible.

                If I copied your house key and sold it, would that be alright?

                Of course not. There are laws against that. Laws that are not copyright laws.

                but I don’t lie to myself that it’s morally defensible.

                Oh, sorry, I thought this was about legality. If we want to talk about the morality of evading copyright we should also about the morality of copyright itself, how it historically came to be and whose interests it was supposed to serve (it wasn’t made to support creatives). Actually there is surprisingly little evidence that the introduction of copyright increased the incentives for creatives to publish or made them wealthier (except a select few). I think there is a better case to be made for the morality of sharing creative works unlawfully than for limiting the sharing of those works for a century after their creation.

            • celsiustimeline@lemmy.dbzer0.com
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              1 month ago

              Imagine not knowing the law or thinking that it doesn’t apply to you. There’s a reason why emulation has been around for so long but Yuzu got shut down pretty damn quickly.

    • IHeartBadCode@fedia.io
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      1 month ago

      do as I say not as I do

      Nintendo: Money! Fuck everything else.

      All other attributes derive from that.

  • Biskii@lemmy.dbzer0.com
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    1 month ago

    This really isn’t that surprising. They used ROMs for the classic games in Animal Crossing. They even had evidence it was from a release group, and not Nintendo’s own copies

    I really don’t understand why this is embarrassing. I don’t know the exact setup they have going on. Is it like a kiosk where people can play classic games, or is it a monitor just displaying them? They have their own emulator, Canoe, that they used for the SNES Classic. I don’t remember the name of the NES one

    Weren’t at least some of the games in the Super Mario Collection ROMs? I guess I can see why people would expect a direct port from the company that created it, or original hardware running the original games, but it isn’t like Nintendo doesn’t already have a track record for this sort of thing

    • Björn Tantau@swg-empire.de
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      1 month ago

      Their NES and SNES mini consoles were also just off the shelf ARM SBCs running emulators. If I recall correctly people even found signatures of release groups in some of the ROMs.

      • SitD@lemy.lol
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        1 month ago

        technicians just know what’s good. unfortunately every company becomes too big for its own good and inspirationless ghouls take over 😔 the palworld thing also just shows they could be so successful if they take off the shackles and make a good game, but now they want to shackle everyone else so no one can have good games

      • Biskii@lemmy.dbzer0.com
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        1 month ago

        They are at least Nintendo’s own in-house emulators. I don’t recall the situation with the Classic systems ROMs, but Animal Crossing had the release group signatures if I’m not mistaken. They’ve been pulling this garbage for a long time

        • Moonrise2473@feddit.it
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          1 month ago

          The nes roms in animal crossing for N64 had the header for the ines emulator. Now, a few years before Nintendo hired a guy who worked on the audio driver for ines, and that tomohiro is credited with lots of emu projects for Nintendo, so it’s not impossible that they reused that header idea. In the gigaleak there’s a tool that adds the ines header to clean roms.

          This said, it’s also not impossible that they’re taking a peek in other OSS emulators source code, i recall that luigiblood (a guy obsessed in decompiling Nintendo emulators) found traces of 64dd emulator code from pj64 in some Nintendo product, which then was silently removed after he tweeted about that

          • Biskii@lemmy.dbzer0.com
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            1 month ago

            This is very educational, thank you. Just out of curiosity, what has Nintendo done with the 64dd? I thought they had forgotten about it

            • Moonrise2473@feddit.it
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              1 month ago

              They seem to have included support for an unofficial 64dd cartridge adapter used for homebrew/development/piracy which for an official product makes no sense

              • Biskii@lemmy.dbzer0.com
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                1 month ago

                That’s very interesting. I can’t even think of a game worth doing that for. Not trying to say there isn’t, I just don’t have one off the top of my head

  • Moonrise2473@feddit.it
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    1 month ago

    It would be interesting to plug an usb rubber duckie to own that station and dump all the disk somewhere

    • Bezier@suppo.fi
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      1 month ago

      I guess people are assuming it runs whatever third party emulator. It was at least how I first imagined it.

      If that’s the case, it’s in my opinion very embarrassing: attempting to profit from stuff made by the community they act extremely hostile towards.

      If not, I guess it’s just mildly embarrassing that they have a poorly concealed windows machine taking away from the immersion.

      • greenacres3233@lemmy.dbzer0.com
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        1 month ago

        I read through the article, only speculation but since the sound is without a doubt the USB being disconnected then it’s pretty obvious an Windows machine running a rom.

      • lowleveldata@programming.dev
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        1 month ago

        It’s a weird assumption. Like I said, emulation for backward compatibility is common. Do they always just wait for some random strangers to implement an emulator for them?

        • Bezier@suppo.fi
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          1 month ago

          It’s a weird assumption. Like I said, emulation for backward compatibility is common.

          Nintendo has some serious emulation experts for building products, but this setup rigged by some museum staff could be anything.

          Do they always just wait for some random strangers to implement an emulator for them?

          Waiting? There is zero chance availability is an issue. There are many ready to go snes emulators for windows out there.

        • Biskii@lemmy.dbzer0.com
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          1 month ago

          They have literally had their own emulators for so long. At least since the SNES Classic released. It is called Canoe

      • lowleveldata@programming.dev
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        1 month ago

        And? I too really hate people using my toothbrush but have no problem using it myself. Is that embarrassing?

          • lowleveldata@programming.dev
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            1 month ago

            Is the implication that they won’t be able to write an in-house emulator? So did they wait for someone to port an SNES emulator to Switch before they can put those old games on their online service?

            • Nima@leminal.space
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              1 month ago

              the “implication?” they’ve literally already sold consoles that have downloaded roms on them.

            • Nima@leminal.space
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              1 month ago

              files they’ve downloaded off the internet. its much easier for them and they only need to do a quick frontend to make it look official.

              ezpz.

                • Nima@leminal.space
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                  1 month ago

                  in the past they have. i should have specified. i have no idea what they’re doing in their museums. but considering their history, I wouldn’t discount it.

    • celsiustimeline@lemmy.dbzer0.com
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      1 month ago

      It’s a museum. And the company that has the most amount of untouched Super Nintendos out of anyone wasn’t able to source a working Super Nintendo to showcase Super Nintendo games at the Nintendo Museum.

  • BonerMan@ani.social
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    1 month ago

    This means you can find the pc and get THEIR OWN EMULATOR, make it open source and fuck them royally.

    • 4am@lemm.ee
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      1 month ago

      You think they wrote their own emulator instead of just taking one of the free ones on the internet (who they will likely sue later). That’s cute.

      • Magiilaro@feddit.org
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        1 month ago

        Well yes, yes they did. It is called Canoe and is for example running inside the SNES Classic Mini. And that is not the only emulator they wrote. Writing an emulator is not some obscure magic, and it is way easier if you own all the schematics and other Information used to build the original hardware.

      • BonerMan@ani.social
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        1 month ago

        Why? You can just say its the official Nintendo emulator.

        Nobody gives a shit if its legal or not, this is a Nintendo bashing club. We hate them and wish them to go bankrupt.

    • brax@sh.itjust.works
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      1 month ago

      Implying they have their own emulator and it’s not just running retroarch or something