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I've always thought that a project like this, enabling piracy while being financed via Patreon, would eventually meet its doom once some bee's nest is struck. I
by Levitz 5y ago
I've always thought that a project like this, enabling piracy while being financed via Patreon, would eventually meet its doom once some bee's nest is struck. I'd like to hear thoughts on the matter.
- skymt 5y agoBleem successfully defended their commercial PlayStation emulator against a lawsuit from Sony, setting a solid precedent in US law even though the legal costs ended the company. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bleem!#Sony_lawsuit https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bleem!#Sony_lawsuit
- farmerbb 5y agoEmulators absolutely do not enable piracy. One could argue that their existence implicitly encourages it, but they certainly don't "enable" it by any means. There are many different ways to legally obtain games to run on emulators, Switch included.
- lvass 5y agoEmulators do enable piracy. But so do computers, and it's not a valid argument against them by any means. It's perfectly legal and moral/ethical to use an emulator to play games in many circumstances.
- sjroot 5y agoThese sort of arguments are really tiresome. I’m absolutely a fan of engineering feats like these being made more accessible for educational purposes. Even in college, I built a NES emulator on an FPGA. But to argue that it’s primary motive is not to facilitate (and potentially profit from) piracy is not grounded in reality.
- lvass 5y agoI see no one arguing this here at all. Much on the contrary, I'd say piracy is a console emulators most common use. But it's still fine. All that matters is there's a possibility they're being used for good things. If someone does something bad he's responsible for it, not the creator of the tools he used. Even if you don't like what most people use something for, just the possibility of one person doing it right is much more than enough reason for it to built. We call this individual freedom, and it's much more important than (game publisher's financial) security.
- powerapple 5y agomost people using emulators are those who grew up owning consoles anyway. About piracy, when I think about it, piracy is big part of my computer childhood, otherwise, I wouldn't afford to do anything with computers.
- libertine 5y agoHonestly that's my take on it: piracy is a matter of accessibility. As a marketer, I can even see the benefits of "free distribution of content" to people that wouldn't buy it anyway, and you're still building your brand on those people - they will, eventually down the line, buy your IP if they had good experiences with it. I became a GTA fan thanks to it, and to modding, when started to be able to afford games I bought into the series. If I haven't developed the emotional relationship with the game, nowadays I wouldn't care less about it.
- boondaburrah 5y agoThis is why I like using emulators with full debug tools. At that point it's quite obviously about research and development. Emulators that just have a game window and hacks on hacks to get your game "backups" to run aren't as fun.
- juliosueiras 5y agoNo, emulator primary motive is enabling longevity for the target system, since hardware get damaged over the years, CD/DVD/Cart get corrupt over the years, without it, there will be literally no way to preserve a console games and ecosystem, for example I own 805 switch physical games, but because I know Yuzu exist I don’t have to worry about if one day the cart get damaged or something
- syspec 5y agoOut of curiosity how many of those have you played all the way through, or beat? Or are you more into collecting them as a hobby
- juliosueiras 5y agoplayed maybe around 5% of it, I am mostly collecting them as modern gaming is rapidly becoming too unbearable for me(MTX, Lootboxes, the recent NFTs, etc), and I am most likely plan to just play the collection(which I collect with criteria of at least 1% of interest of playing ,so no baby games like Racing with Ryan etc) when I stop buying modern games
- Firehawke 5y agoAbsolutely not. MAME's primary purpose is to document the hardware and ROM revisions, and to preserve as much accurate data about the machines as possible. You can use MAME sets to actually replace damaged ROMs, and the tools that come with MAME (romcmp) can help you identify an unknown board if you pull chip data off of it.
- kcb 5y agoNo. My primary motive, especially with these more modern emulators, is to have a better experience playing games I own. To play 3D games at higher resolution and more stable framerates. Also, so I don't have to breakout old consoles anytime I want to play those games.
- izacus 5y agoThe court has already decided in history that you're wrong with your assertion and I don't know why do you so heartly want to overturn that by defending corporations against the users who legitimately want to play their games on other systems.
- abdulmuhaimin 5y agoYour example only explain one thing, that it enables another way to run legally bought games. Does it also enables(or make it much easier) way to play pirated games? yes. And only that defines whether it enables piracy or not.
- Gigachad 5y agoThese projects tend to intentionally make using them harder than other methods of piracy. Last I checked, to get this running, you had to dump the keys out of a hacked switch before the emulator will work. But to dump the keys from a hacked switch, you had to already have a hacked switch which you could have just loaded the games on to which would run better than emulating it. So right now, there is little reason to use this project other than curiosity but in 10 years it will be the easiest way to play switch games when hacked consoles become too rare and nintendo doesn't care anymore.
- poyu 5y agoThroes files aren’t exactly hard to find on the internet…
- roastedpeacock 5y agoIANAL, but in the act of distributing the emulator not including any decryption keys and/or otherwise copyrighted content by the console vendor gives a valid defense against copyright infringement
- deleted 5y ago[deleted]
- Firehawke 5y agoIt's not strictly intentional; it's a consequence of the strict DRM on modern consoles. Decryption keys are needed for content to be loadable and in some cases you need the actual OS the console is running, too.
- Gigachad 5y agoIt all feels like such a small obstacle compared to the effort of building an emulator. So they are able to emulate all these complicated apis and hardware, but couldn't create a little tool to dump the rom decrypted so it can be loaded without keys. I can only assume they intentionally leave this last hurdle up so the general public are locked out until the development is done and the console is commercially obsolete.