Honestly, I’m surprised this didn’t happen sooner. Emulating old hardware is one thing, but they have a current vested interest in their most recent console.
Still, Nintendo’s lawyers can rub spurge on their eyes, and I hope the Yuzu devs find a great lawyer (or better yet, are safely hidden behind some kind of digital or geopolitical veil).
safely hidden behind some kind of digital or geopolitical veil
When will people learn that the safest place to develop a Nintendo emulator is Pyongyang?
I guess that depends on your definition of “safe”
Yeah, it has always felt like we had something we couldn’t wish for or expect. And it’s a much better experience than using an actual switch.
Sadly the only surprising thing about this is how long it took for Nintendo to do something, I guess they worked on having as good of a chance as they could.
It would be a waste of time to litigate a case they think they’ll lose, after all. Unfortunately, once the devs included proprietary code in the application, they kind of sealed their fate.
Maybe they got a little too excited over TotK and thought they were under Nintendo’s radar. Maybe they felt like they owed the community an app that could play Nintendo’s highly-anticipated game practically on day one. I dunno. Either way, it was a miscalculated move, and now they’re reaping the consequences.
“Nintendo sues” oh look it’s a day that ends in Y. The only person Nintendo isn’t dead set on suing is Nintendo.
Here’s you 937th remake of Super Mario Bros 2 that you can only rent, have a nice day.
And our online service is absolute trash but you’ll pay anyway to have a legal emulator until we also discontinue that for Super other garbage online service!
Don’t forget that they will hide behind arbitration to avoid paying up for knowing seeking shoddy consoles/controllers.
Oh don’t even get me started. Hall effect has been known since 1879, those JoyCons didn’t use it because it was cheaper to use shitty graphite. They literally went the cheap ass route because they didn’t even care.
That’s not even necessarily the issue. XBox and PS controllers also don’t use Hall effect. I’ve never had an xbox controller drift. You’d have to seriously abuse them for them to break. Nintendo isn’t just cheaping out on the tech but also on the build quality itself. But what do you expect from a company that sells a console that was obsolete when it was released, hardware wise. For the third time.
Xbox controller drift
Really? That’s usually the quickest issue my controllers have with occasionally sticky thumb buttons. I’d gone through so many I just get Blue PowerA controllers now. They’re better than $200 ones for 1/8 the price, and have great warranties.
Stick drift and non optimal buttons are instant killers for any decent platformer.
Both my two 360 controllers and my xone controller are drift free and I’ve had them for a while. And my 360 controllers have been abused by my little brother for a while. They have issues (like the rubber off the sticks getting rubbed away slowly), but drift isn’t one of them. Heck, even my old Wii Nunchucks are drift free and they’ve been abused a lot.
I agree that they definitely also develop drift sooner or later, but I have yet to see a controller drift as fast as joycons do, with the exception of maybe the first batch of dualsenses that were atrocious for some reason
The issue is also rampant with PS5, unfortunately.
Don’t own a PS5 so I sadly/luckily don’t have experience with that
And still charge premium money for the controllers
Their Emulator can’t even run SNES games at a stable framerate.
Don’t know the website, is this bait?
It’s even worse than that. The only way to back up save files for games like Animal Crossing, which can represent a ton of playtime, is to pay for their online service. The save games aren’t saved to the cartridge like they were with 3ds and you can’t back up saves locally on the SD card either.
You know why I played the games on yuzu? It’s because the joycons suck and they are expensive to replace.
I did the stick drift repair on my own, but the L and R buttons are soldiered to the main board so it can’t be repaired.
I bought a right joycon on its own and then the next week the left joycon had the same issue.
I wasn’t going to spend about $90 for an unreliable controller when an entire steamdeck costs $500.
It really paints the picture that the controllers are way over priced how can they alone be 20% the cost of the entire steamdeck.
If Nintendo made decent joycons, then I would not be using Yuzu.
Additionally, I dumped my own games and keys, so they got their money and through some effort, I got a better experience.
I’d like to add that the joycons were not heavily used either.
Joycon drift is the main reason why I stopped playing my switch.
I’ve been eyeing Yuzu to play games like Pokemon Scarlet and Xenoblade 3 since they both run like shit on the switch and a smooth 60 fps at 4k on Yuzu.
I bought both games at release, I just can’t stand playing at 20 fps.
Unfortunately, PS5 controllers have the same issue. Slightly cheaper, but same exact shitty parts for the joystick. Going to try aftermarket (with serviceable parts) for my next one.
Not for you since you’ve exited the Switch, but for anyone else with stick drift: Gulikit makes replacement hall effect joycon sticks that do not drift. Easy to replace and inexpensive.
Just try not to get fakes that are just the normal garbage with drift
Why didn’t you just get a better controller? You would have saved yourself a lot of time, effort, and probably money.
I’m not in the US, so the options I had here were either expensive or didn’t have any reviews.
I’ve been wanting a steamdeck for some time and that is what pushed me to get one.
A lot of modern controllers are really ass tbh. I still use a wired usb xbox 360 controller. Doesn’t work on Switch without modding/hacking/emulating.
I’m also in the “my USB Xbox 360 controller is great” camp and wish that they still made them
You are stuck two decades ago in time. There are plenty of good to great controllers. Shit, there’s multiplatform controllers that work perfectly and have all the bells and whistles and gyros that first party controllers have.
True, I bet there good ones out there, but I have no need to replace it yet.
But you’ll complain about using twenty year old technology anyways, and make up nonsense about current tech. Ok.
I’m complaining about manufacturers cheaping out, not the age of the tech I’m using.
But you are wrong. A lot of modern controllers are not ass. The Switch controllers are. That’s it.
Your situation is not applicable to why the lawsuit exists.
It’s the idiots that pirated and leaked TOTK a week before the release date that gave Nintendo ammunition for this case. As a result, everybody who is using Yuzu legitimately will suffer for it.
Yuzu did not pirate the game. Other people did. What did Yuzu do that was illegal?
Did the movie studies sue dvd player makers because people ran pirated movies on them?
yes
Every hacked switch can do it too, but they aren’t going against Atmosphere.
Oh shit, there’s a working open source switch emulator out there? Thanks Nintendo!
Aaaaaaaand downloaded the source code, Windows Installer, and Linux installer. Thanks again Nintendo, I really can’t express how thankful I am you brought attention to this!
Wanna hear something funny? It works on steam deck
And not just works. It works REALLY WELL. I dumped my switch onto my steam deck and sold it ages ago.
Yup. Steam Deck is literally the Switch 2.0 at this point. Upscaled graphics, better frame rates, modding capability, etc…
I wouldn’t say that’s a universal truth. Some games perform like shit on Yuzu and others that simply aren’t stable. Yuzu is pretty damn good, but I’ve run into plenty of situations where graphics have lots of glitches, I’m crashing every 20-30 minutes due to a memory leak, etc. E.g. SMTV is one I recently opted to just play on my Switch natively because I got tired of random freezes after battles.
Forgot to mention: controls that don’t suck
You can mod on switch, modding isn’t an advantage
That’s why Nintenfux is suing. They have no other way to be competitive in mobile gaming now.
Can you pair 4 joycons to it too?
It works on Switch as well if you install linux then install it. But performance makes that not worth it
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Forks get deleted when and if it comes so far
Not if you “fork” it locally by doing
git clone --mirrorand doinggit push newOrigin --mirror😉And refactor the code a bit to be on the safe side - change the name of the project and remove any references to litigious companies. And use an anonymous handle + VPN/proxy chains so they can’t sue you.
Honestly it boggles my mind that devs contribute to emulators like these using identifiable names and traceable IPs, when everyone knows how these greedy corporations operate. Did no one learn anything from the Sony vs Geohotz case, or all the subsequent takedown against emulators? Why do these devs keep falling into the same trap again and again?
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Not if you fork locally or outside Github.
Surprise! Yes, there’s lots more Git outside Github. As one commenter said, Github is to Git what Pornhub is to porn.
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Same yo. I would have never found it, now I’m downloading a game.
Any good torrent sites for switch games you know of?
There are two that work pretty well. Yuzu and Ryujinx. A while ago some games only worked on one or the other. Thanks to open source they both improved dramatically.
If anyone or anything is facilitating piracy of Nintendo games on an enormous scale, it’s the asinine anti-consumer policies of Nintendo themselves.
Mirrored it just in case something happens
Streisand effect in action. I am never going to buy anything Nintendo, because they’re a dog-shit company. I hadn’t realised a Switch emulator existed. Andddd… My wife would really like to play Pikmin 4.
Yep all you need to do is find a copy of the firmware (you actually can get the latest firmware from the internet archive) and the decryption keys (they’re a little bit more difficult to find, can’t remember where I got them from, but it took a long time for me to find a working download)
For the future and anyone else who reads this:
Thank you!
Or just download a FitGirl repack of any Switch game and you don’t have to worry about any firmware/decryption nonsense. Just install and play.
I’ve wondered about those. Don’t they get outdated as the emulators become more developed? I’m assuming it’s packed with whichever version was the latest stable release at the time.
Yes but you can always just update the emulator yourself. If you’re playing the latest games then you’re usually using a more up-to-date version anyway.
There are tons of sites that host switch firmware and “prod keys” for it as well. You need the keys for playing games on the switch natively as well.
I never figured this out. When I play switch games it’s always a version that bundles the emulator with it and has all the keys and bios crap already configured.
You might also ask nicely for folks to send you theirs. Especially since Nintendo is going after Yuzu, I’m sure there’s plenty of folks that would volunteer keys via DM just to stick it to Nintendo…
The keys I found were on a website linked from a website posted to a Reddit sub. And they were base64 encoded for obscurity
There’s actually two Switch emulators. Ryujinx is the other one. I’ve tried both and they’re both solid options.
I found that yuzu is more stable while Ryujinx is able to calculate uncached shaders a lot faster, which is great for playing Smash Ultimate, since I couldn’t get online shadercaches to work correctly. I overall prefer Ryujinx, but both are very solid.
They are up to 4 already‽ I mean I never really kept up with a game I started at the second entry and wasn’t particularly good at at the time but still…
Are you seriously asking if a popular game series that first came out over twenty years is “up to 4 already”?
What world are you living in?
How’s Half-Life doing?
or Metroid Prime 4 even lol
Original switch version by Bandai Namco was likely cancelled and retro are working on switch 2 version
Damn. I walked right into that one lol
Mirrored it on Codeberg too
How do you do this? Just fork it? I don’t know much about GitHub (and alternatives)
Don’t just fork it, otherwise if they take down the original repo, your fork will also go down.
Download a full copy of the repo and host it yourself (on your GitHub account or GitLab, Bitbucket, etc.).
Imported it from github into my own Forgejo instance
At least you’re from the country where DMCA abuse can’t apply.
https://github.com/pineappleEA/pineapple-src
This is worth mirroring as well.
With today’s announcement, I’m super happy you did this 4 days ago. Time to make a few clones myself.
Kinda happy to have saved it
Sweet
It’s gone… lol
I wonder if they ever realise how much money they could make by releasing PC versions of their games.
Tears of the Kingdom is great, but I can’t help but think how good it would look running in full 4K 60fps on a 55" OLED, with a controller that doesn’t disconnect every five minutes.
As if Nintendo would actually do this. They’d do it like other Japanese developers 15 years ago: windowed 1280x720, no graphics settings, no keyboard support, no quit-to-desktop button.
no quit-to-desktop button.
When Elden Ring released a patch that added quit to desktop I was so happy. Except I never used it, Because I was so used to not having it.
Playing Persona 5 Strikers now and I’ve just gotten into the habit of opening the Steam overlay and hitting Exit Game. Yes, Atlus, very cute and stylish menu animations, but please let me quit your games within 15 seconds.
Well at least Durante will have something to fix in his spare time.
I don’t need to imagine it. I own the game and it looks like crap compared to it running on yuzu on PC. 4K 60fps is the way. Can’t go back.
Any tips for eliminating the stutter, or increasing the smoothness of the emulation? I’ve got an i7-12700k, 4090, and 64GB of ram and it seems to struggle a bit.
I think that’s just the shader caching being rendered isn’t it? I know totk has some caching that can be pre downloaded but I believe it still is cached when you are running the game. I think it stabilizes after a bit but I had trouble getting ryujinx and yuzu working so I opted for the cemu (wii I) route.
Thinking about it, Nintendo is now the only company without PC versions of their games, the only one that thinks they compete with PC.
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On the contrary, I suspect they don’t port their games to PC because they don’t think they compete with PC.
That might change with the prevalence of the Steam Deck and other gaming targeted handheld PCs.
but then nintendo wouldn’t be able to shove tons of 6-7 year old hardware down our throats. (the 1st gen’s processor is even older)
i literally own a switch, but getting that fucking thing to work with my display/audio setup is a pain. just to get 1080p at 30fps.
no thanks, i’d rather play it at 1440p at a more stable framerate, with a controller of my choice, with the ability to load mods.
Going off on a slight tangent, but what display/audio setup do you have that the Switch doesn’t work with? It’s just HDMI, like everything else these days.
i’m using it at my desk where i have one USB-DAC for my speakers and one for my headphones connected to my PC.
that means i have to switch my monitor from DP to HDMI every time i want to play a game (using samsung’s nipple tech), as well as either running my speakers through a splitter cable hooked up the wrong way to get PC and switch audio, or have the switch on my speakers while having the PC on headphones.
way too much hassle, plus i can lose my cursor on the right screen where the switch is, as well as having to blindly drag apps from there as they start. plus i completely miss incoming desktop messages.
and yes, i watch youtube while playing games. that’s why i need PC audio.
They don’t care about that, they want to move their consoles, that’s why they’re completely exclusive.
Chances are you don’t have every other platform and buy games for your Nintendo console.
Anybody can hate on them, but they know business.
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You’re not wrong. Nintendo is a dirtbag, greedy as fuck company. They make some excellent games, but they’re the epitome of financial parasites.
with a controller that doesn’t disconnect every five minutes.
Yeah the joycons are terrible but Ive never had an issue with the pro controller.
Nintendo is a toy company. They sell plastic. For the last thirty-odd years, video games have been their primary means of doing so.
I think they started with cards. Poker and other card games. I remember that they still sell them, at least the hanafuda cards.
There’s a PC port of BOTW with unlocked frame rates, higher render distances (clouds and fog turned off) and 4K textures and it’s GLORIOUS
PC port or emulated using Cemu or Yuzu/Ryujinx?
Yes
That would require effort…which Nintendo is not familiar with
A controller disconnecting every 5 minutes is not Nintendo like. I have never had any issues with wireless Nintendo controllers. Not on my own system or others.
Everything else is true.
Usually I’d agree, but the Joycons are not their finest hour at all.
They’re just unreliable enough for me to be unable to trust them. Connected to the Switch, they’re fine.
Ye. The control sticks issue is beyond stupid. I switched to hall effect sticks on two pairs. Its crazy you have to be able to disassemble and rebuild your joy-cons if you want them for more than 2 years max.
Nintendo made it hell getting them fixed. No way I have the receipt for a consol I bought over the counter 3-4 years ago. Also there is a 5 year guarantee on them where I live, so why would i even need the receipt anyway. Just fix your trash Nintendo.
Gonna be real interesting how this plays out.
IANAL (and am not a lawyer) but the general takeaway of Sony vs Bleem was “emulation fine so long as you aren’t using proprietary code”. Hence why it is generally “find your own BIOS” and all that.
The nonsense about yuzu is facilitating piracy is going to be a mess. But I do wonder if Tears of the Kingdom is not going to be a problem. Because it was not at all hidden as to why Yuzu et al suddenly had a bunch of mysterious compatibility updates a day or two after the leaked roms went online.
Even the argument that the devs who worked on that had totally legit copies they got from Uncle Greg’s Game Store on 2nd street might get into a mess if nintendo argues those weren’t legitimately sold because they broke embargo date. And it is hard to argue those improvements were for people to play their own dumps.
So yeah. Gonna be real interesting (assuming this isn’t just an attempt to legal fee yuzu to death). Because if I were to put on my day job hat: Doing ANYTHING based on pre-release material is a huge no no since they only had access to it because people violated contracts with Nintendo’s distributors.
And… the more I look at this, the more I think the yuzu devs may have fucked it all up for the rest of us and it really depends on if nintendo’s lawyers drill in on that or continue for the broad reaching stuff.
This is a great point and yuzu may get burned for it. Hopefully, it’s not lost on developers of future emulators.
The issue is that it is an incredibly dangerous precedent.
There are already a decent number of emulators where the devs have done a good enough job making plausible deniability but it is still VERY obvious they looked at the “leaks”. But if it is decided that “used a pre-release leak to develop code/support” is a no-no, then everyone knows to not do a 0-day update. But they start getting wary of doing day 1 updates because… it is still pretty obvious that they had that ready to go.
Which… could even be nintendo’s plan. The example I always like to use is Mass Effect PC. For those who were likely born well after that, MEPC was INCREDIBLY anticipated because we were all cool and didn’t need Mass Effect because Bioware were traitors who abandoned PC but… motha fugging Mass Effect. It was one of the early activation model Securom games DRM wise. And the warez groups did a bad crack that broke like two hours in (which meant they already “won” the release and fixing it was low priority). Which led to waves of pirates (self included) rushing Best Buy because we needed it NOW.
So if this makes for “okay, we can’t add support for this game until a week after launch”, that does wonders for sales figures. And, in a uniquely nintendo way, it avoids the ever more popular “So… this runs at like 10 FPS on the switch and 120 FPS on a potato laptop” problem.
I know it’s hard to hear because sometimes we are so passionate about these things, but it’s okay to have to wait for support on an unsupported platform. Having to wait a week is, in fact, incredibly fortunate. Consider how long it takes to get mac or Linux support on many PC games. A week? We’re laughing.
And if the sales figures are bumped in the first week? Let’s try to understand why it’s bad that developers, publishers, and those other middle-men get paid for their work. Not all games are wildly successful. Most aren’t. And evil Nintendo making more money… Well, if they don’t make money you don’t get any games. And consider that this is a platform which for the most part has avoided sinking into shady and unethical loot box practices. You can fault Nintendo for a lot, but from their perspective, free 0-day access to their games is an existential crisis.
I am all for support of devs. But it has increasingly become clear that playing a nintendo game on a nintendo platform is an objectively worse experience because even nintendo first parties have difficulty utilizing the switch. People love to pretend that “piracy is a service issue” but… it kind of is in this case. Was it Metroid Dread that had significant slowdowns on switch AND lots of qtes and parry windows?
But also? Regardless, I have very serious issues with using lawsuits and the legal system to muscle The Little Guy (even if they were idiots) to protect corporate interests.
IANAL (and am not a lawyer)
I too do anal
Can we just take a second to say what utter bullshit it is that “facilitating piracy” is so allowed to be an argument?
How are we in this wacky world where rights holders get to say “what you built allows piracy, we demand total control over you”
I mean, like it or not, piracy is incredibly dark grey (if not outright black) in the eyes of the law. Its one of the reasons there is such a strong focus on “abandonware” and “oh, this is about digital preservation” in the various circles. It doesn’t fool anyone but it is at least a stronger protection than the old “Hey FBI. You aren’t allowed to look at my DC++ share” folder that people had back in the day.
You can argue that Nintendo facilitates piracy by making games that people want to pirate.
TIL: IANAL
Because it was not at all hidden as to why Yuzu et al suddenly had a bunch of mysterious compatibility updates a day or two after the leaked roms went online
No way they were that stupid, Ryujinx always waits for the release date to publish those specific updates.
Streisand effect is currently very active on this one. Thousands of news outlets, many extremely casual and geared towards average joes who never new emulation existed, are now all being told that “this thing called yuzu can play switch games for free”. Nintendo is shooting themselves in the foot. Even if Yuzu dies, it will get forked and people who never knew emulation existed, now do, and look for alternatives.
This is how I’m learning there’s an emulator for Switch games.
Funny thing is Switch was the first Nintendo device I’d even considered buying since GBC, but now that I know I can use my own hardware instead of paying through the nose for a locked-down Pi with a tiny screen and a shitty doll-size controller I’ll probably go that route instead. If I decide their branded shovelware is even worth playing in 2024 that is.
If I decide their branded shovelware is even worth playing in 2024 that is.
And in a single sentence you tanked your entire credibility. Nintendo is pretty much the last publisher/developer of AAA games that still bothers with having high quality and fun experiences.
Yeah hate the business as much as you want but they never stopped making AAA games worth playing. Literally everything else has gone to shit but Mario is still fucking awesome.
“credibility” gtfo that’s hilarious.
hey guys you need credibility to be a random jackoff on a forum with an opinion now.
Believe it or not, normal humans with normal brains tend to not be just a random nerd in a forum. If you want to reduce yourself to a channer, by all means…
Also, what the fuck do you think discussion is?
The new Mario vs Donkey Kong, for $49.99, feels like it was someone’s first swing at Super Mario Maker…
Has it occurred to you that commerce might see advantage in weaponizing the Streisand effect?
Meanwhile Ryujinx
Do they have a patreon? I think part of Nintendo’s extermination policy is “if you try to make money from it, it’s lost revenue, and we will murder you.” For example dolphin has been around forever, but always open source and without a patreon or the like
EDIT:
Answered my own question
RIP
Just speculation, but there must be a reason why they target Yuzu but not Ryujinx. Maybe because Ryujinx is open source and there is nothing illegal in the code?
Edit: A word.
But yuzu is open source as well: https://github.com/yuzu-emu/yuzu
My guess is they are just tackling one thing at a time, and ryujinx is next on their chopping block. It’s entirely possible they’ve already sent cease and desist notices to to ryujinx
If Yuzu is open source why is the public version way behind the patreon one? Legit question, this must be why it’s a prime target since Ryujinx doesn’t do that, there’s only one version.
Because on their argument, that is “paywalled” until it becomes public.
Can the paywalled version be found hosted anywhere? I’m expecting Yuzu to get scrubbed from most of the Internet very soon, so I want to grab the latest stable release.
Yuzu pineapple apparently.
Nintendo’s argument in the filing is that Yuzu is designed primarily for circumventing the Switch’s encryption (a.k.a. copyright protection measures). Their justification is that Yuzu uses
prod.keysto decrypt various things like the ROM filesystems and the system firmware*. Ryujinx also usesprod.keys, so they would be just as legitimate of a target for that argument as Yuzu is.Personally, I think they chose to go after Yuzu first because it’s more popular and runs at playable framerates on modern Android devices. If the lawsuit goes in Nintendo’s favor, I guarantee they’ll immediately use that precident to make the same argument against and swiftly kill Ryujinx.
*This is actually a valid argument that is not affected by past suits like Bleem v. Sony.
Web browsers facilitate piracy too
The electric company is clearly complicit.
The Switch facilitated piracy of Switch games because the games only exist because of the hardware.
I sure hope Nintendo sues those filthy Switch people out of existence!
It is always morally correct to pirate nintendo products.
Or anything by megacorps in general really
It’s impossible to steal from a billionaire.
I’m pretty impressed with The Verge this time around.
They did a very good job quickly explaining the legal stance and argument that Nintendo has with their lawsuit, what needs to happen for it to be successful, and how the precedent set in 1999 around emulators isn’t applicable to this suit.
if it runs better, at a higher resolution, with the option of using a reliable controller, i will emulate it.
Nintendo is basically saying that they are guilty of enabling piracy.
That same argument would paint gun makers as guilty of enabling murder and crime. Nintendo should really be going after rom sharing sites. That’s totally legit, but not the emulation devs.
If they have a fund for legal costs I’ll donate.
That same argument would paint gun makers as guilty of enabling murder and crime.
You’d be correct of the law were logical, but it is not. Check this out: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Illegal_number#Illegal_primes
They made certain fucking numbers against the law?!
“18”
“You’re going to jail, motherfucker”
Nintendo should sue Microsoft for providing an operating system that people use to pirate digital goods. Maybe IBM too for creating the mouse to lower the barrier to piracy?
