4 ms·

The key bit: > Unlike Yuzu, the Suyu team does things differently in regards to Nintendo Switch emulation than their predecessors. Whereas Yuzu only required p

by speps 3y ago

The key bit: > Unlike Yuzu, the Suyu team does things differently in regards to Nintendo Switch emulation than their predecessors. Whereas Yuzu only required prod.keys, Suyu will also require you to dump your title.keys and firmware from a hacked Switch to run games. The devs also clarified that they are doing this for nonprofit (there's no Patreon) and do not condone piracy. We'll see how long it lasts...

tempoponet 3y ago
One argument I heard for the Yuzu settlement was to avoid discovery. There's speculation that Nintendo had the goods on them, and that discovery would expose them to more than the civil penalties they were facing. Nintendo has never been friendly to emulation, or most fan content in general, but there are protections for fair-use and this team appears to be building their work behind those, rather than playing fast and loose with them.
- LelouBil 3y ago
  Yeahw if they used leaked games to optimize the emulator for release day, they would have much more to fear.
- klausa 3y ago
  My understanding was that they were offering a specially-patched version of Yuzu to their Patreon supporters, that included improvements for games that _weren't released yet_. *Making money* by helping people run Zelda _before it came out_ was begging for trouble. Nintendo's approach to fan projects and emulators is ridiculous, don't get me wrong — but Yuzu authors were definitely playing with fire and overstepping what's generally accepted in the community.
  - gjsman-1000 3y ago
    This was a widely spread myth, now generally considered incorrect. Yuzu did not offer improvements before launch day. There were badly patched unofficial versions that were trying. Nintendo does allege though that Yuzu was doing research to develop the patches before launch day.
    - klausa 3y ago
      Thank you for the correction!
- testudovictoria 3y ago
  There are fair-use protections, but it costs money to defend. Part of why so many Smash tournaments folded in 2022 was because of Nintendo telling people they weren't allowed to host tourneys using their IP. Granted I'm not a lawyer, but people gathering to play a multiplayer game and then streaming the matches doesn't inherently constitute any infringement on Nintendo's rights or ability to make money. Many TOs (tournament organizers) left the scene or stopped featuring Smash as a title over the C&D notice. No one wanted to take on Nintendo in court. Kind of. Some TOs are calling Nintendo's bluff. Nintendo released a set of guidelines[0] on what kinds of tournaments can be hosted. However, Collision 2024 just happened with attendees and a prize pool surpassing the guidelines. [0]: https://en-americas-support.nintendo.com/app/answers/detail/a_id/63433/~/community-tournament-guidelines https://en-americas-support.nintendo.com/app/answers/detail/...
  - gjsman-1000 3y ago
    Not really. Fair use does not really legally exist. It exists primarily as a defense after you’ve already been sued - which is also why there is no official codification of what fair use actually is. Also, as Nintendo can argue, imagine this was a movie. Imagine it was a movie being shown on screen for two hours. That would be case closed. Now imagine it was a movie recutting competition. Again, case closed. So what makes a tourney special? In the eyes of the law, a judge might say, absolutely nothing. You might argue, “well, there’s skill being applied, whereas a movie is passive.” No dice there - just because you put effort into your copyright violation is meaningless. You might argue a movie is a full work when a video game only displays a subset - but do you think you could publicly perform 30 minutes of The Lord of the Rings and be OK? Of course not.
    - testudovictoria 3y ago
      Interesting way to put it, but I'm still not sure that quite applies. The game is a multiplayer game intended to be played with other people. Commercial endeavors change with movie viewing. It's implied that single entity can own a single copy while charging admission to profit from their single copy of the movie. Meanwhile, movie companies (mostly) don't care if I play _The Lord of the Rings_ in a private setting to a small audience of known people. I would argue that the competitive nature of tournaments implies that the entrants all have a copy of the game along with hardware to run the game (emulation withstanding). The only thing is streaming the event. Even then, what would be the difference between streaming a tournament and streaming myself or a small group of friends playing? It doesn't seem like that would infringe upon the core purpose of the game.
- kotaKat 3y ago
  Beyond speculation. Nintendo is known to not fuck around, thanks to its leaks. In one of the various Nintendo leaks in the past few years was a bunch of documentation of "Operation Belgian Waffle", their attempt to "Knock and Talk" with a private investigator, law enforcement, and Nintendo Legal visiting a fairly well-known hacker in the scene. All of this was being spearheaded and commanded by Nintendo of Japan towards the subsidiaries in other countries. https://torrentfreak.com/nintendo-conducted-invasive-surveillance-operation-against-homebrew-hacker-201223/ https://torrentfreak.com/nintendo-conducted-invasive-surveil... Nintendo was already operating inside the Discord as per screenshots of evidence in the case, so they really had some leverage here.
- junon 3y ago
  Notably, Japan has no fair use laws.
- jrockway 3y ago
  How come Satoshi Nakamoto can remain anonymous in spite of his worth in the billions of dollars, but emulator developers, worth almost nothing, can't hide from Nintendo? Opsec mistakes, or just no opsec at all?
  - exitb 3y ago
    There are tons of people involved in piracy that stay anonymous. It seems like they chose not to.
  - k12sosse 3y ago
    .. because emulator developers are real?
- brendoelfrendo 3y ago
  My impression of the Yuzu team is that they didn't keep a very clean house. While the project didn't officially condone piracy, some members of the team were absolutely willing to help people run pirated games. Add to that the fact that they were emulating a current system, and that they ran a very successful Patreon to pay their team, and I think they eroded their plausible deniability down to nothing. Consider that Nintendo leaves Dolphin more-or-less alone. I think Nintendo understands where emulation sits legally, and they went after Yuzu because of what was happening around the emulator, and not because of the emulator itself.
KingOfCoders 3y ago
I might be wrong, but buy a game, dump the keys, sell game?
- pierat 3y ago
  [flagged]
  - cultureswitch 3y ago
    Been gaming on PC (and a little bit with consoles) for 20 years and the hubbub about Nintendo closing Yuzu made me want to try it to see what's this all about. And yes it's unbelievable how much better these games are on emulator, even if you only judge based on the games themselves. I've been thoroughly captivated by TOTK and the worst I've had to ensure was mild microstutters which I didn't even bother to try and fix yet. Even that could have an easy solution.
- jdiff 3y ago
  The keys are in the console, not the games.
  - extraduder_ire 3y ago
    Also, every single switch related thing has a unique ID associated with it that's sent back to nintendo when you access the internet. e.g. consoles, controllers, docks, game carts, etc... I haven't heard of them banning a game cart yet, but it's entirely possible.
bassiek 3y ago
I'm having 50,- on the fact they won't get to May before Nintendo Legal starts cutting up their loved ones.
- ryandrake 3y ago
  Yea, I wish them the best, but I would not take the other side of that bet. It’s sad that we all know it will happen and have relatively no political power to change it, despite most of us living under democratically representative governments.
arghwhat 3y ago
Note that emulators for all(?) other Nintendo consoles remain available, and were available while the consoles were relevant. There is little Nintendo can do as long as the authors actively steer clear of guiding/condoning piracy or guiding/condoning certain types of DRM-bypass. It was to my knowledge Yuzu's stance on this particular matter that cost them the project, with Nintendo lawyers striking once they saw the hole in the homebrew armor.
- gjsman-1000 3y ago
  Legally, there's actually quite a bit Nintendo can do, there's just always the risk of setting an undesirable precedent due to how few cases there are. Yuzu's actions just elevated the likelihood of success to near 100% instead of 80-90%.
exitb 3y ago
> Suyu will also require you to dump your title.keys and firmware from a hacked Switch to run games It seems misleading to imply that you NEED to dump them from a real device? Can't you just provide the files found on the internet?
- antiframe 3y ago
  Well, that would be piracy. The Suyu team condemns that behavior. Edited: condones -> condemns
  - Hendrikto 3y ago
    > The Suyu team condones that behavior. You mean it does not?
  - tentacleuno 3y ago
    They don't condone piracy, you mean.
    - account42 3y ago
      Wink wink nudge nudge.
  - danShumway 3y ago
    I assume you mean condemns that behavior.
  - b3lvedere 3y ago
    Must be nice for some people to legally hide behind words. "Yes, your honor. We did build this thing that some may define as a bomb capable of destroying the entire planet, but our intention was just to build a big power source. We are very much against illegal use."
    - pjerem 3y ago
      Well, looks like that's based on a true story ;)
0xcde4c3db 3y ago
Has the team explained their reasoning anywhere? Yuzu ostensibly already "required" dumping keys from a Switch console, and I don't understand how more involvement of Nintendo firmware and keys lowers the risk. If anything I'd have expected a "safe" fork to go the other direction, position itself as a homebrew development tool, and remove explicit support for commercial games altogether (requiring e.g. a third-party tool to decrypt and unpack commercial game formats into some quasi-homebrew format).

by speps 3y ago

tempoponet 3y ago

One argument I heard for the Yuzu settlement was to avoid discovery. There's speculation that Nintendo had the goods on them, and that discovery would expose them to more than the civil penalties they were facing. Nintendo has never been friendly to emulation, or most fan content in general, but there are protections for fair-use and this team appears to be building their work behind those, rather than playing fast and loose with them.

LelouBil 3y ago
Yeahw if they used leaked games to optimize the emulator for release day, they would have much more to fear.
klausa 3y ago
My understanding was that they were offering a specially-patched version of Yuzu to their Patreon supporters, that included improvements for games that _weren't released yet_. *Making money* by helping people run Zelda _before it came out_ was begging for trouble. Nintendo's approach to fan projects and emulators is ridiculous, don't get me wrong — but Yuzu authors were definitely playing with fire and overstepping what's generally accepted in the community.
- gjsman-1000 3y ago
  This was a widely spread myth, now generally considered incorrect. Yuzu did not offer improvements before launch day. There were badly patched unofficial versions that were trying. Nintendo does allege though that Yuzu was doing research to develop the patches before launch day.
  - klausa 3y ago
    Thank you for the correction!
testudovictoria 3y ago
There are fair-use protections, but it costs money to defend. Part of why so many Smash tournaments folded in 2022 was because of Nintendo telling people they weren't allowed to host tourneys using their IP. Granted I'm not a lawyer, but people gathering to play a multiplayer game and then streaming the matches doesn't inherently constitute any infringement on Nintendo's rights or ability to make money. Many TOs (tournament organizers) left the scene or stopped featuring Smash as a title over the C&D notice. No one wanted to take on Nintendo in court. Kind of. Some TOs are calling Nintendo's bluff. Nintendo released a set of guidelines[0] on what kinds of tournaments can be hosted. However, Collision 2024 just happened with attendees and a prize pool surpassing the guidelines. [0]: https://en-americas-support.nintendo.com/app/answers/detail/a_id/63433/~/community-tournament-guidelines https://en-americas-support.nintendo.com/app/answers/detail/...
- gjsman-1000 3y ago
  Not really. Fair use does not really legally exist. It exists primarily as a defense after you’ve already been sued - which is also why there is no official codification of what fair use actually is. Also, as Nintendo can argue, imagine this was a movie. Imagine it was a movie being shown on screen for two hours. That would be case closed. Now imagine it was a movie recutting competition. Again, case closed. So what makes a tourney special? In the eyes of the law, a judge might say, absolutely nothing. You might argue, “well, there’s skill being applied, whereas a movie is passive.” No dice there - just because you put effort into your copyright violation is meaningless. You might argue a movie is a full work when a video game only displays a subset - but do you think you could publicly perform 30 minutes of The Lord of the Rings and be OK? Of course not.
  - testudovictoria 3y ago
    Interesting way to put it, but I'm still not sure that quite applies. The game is a multiplayer game intended to be played with other people. Commercial endeavors change with movie viewing. It's implied that single entity can own a single copy while charging admission to profit from their single copy of the movie. Meanwhile, movie companies (mostly) don't care if I play _The Lord of the Rings_ in a private setting to a small audience of known people. I would argue that the competitive nature of tournaments implies that the entrants all have a copy of the game along with hardware to run the game (emulation withstanding). The only thing is streaming the event. Even then, what would be the difference between streaming a tournament and streaming myself or a small group of friends playing? It doesn't seem like that would infringe upon the core purpose of the game.
kotaKat 3y ago
Beyond speculation. Nintendo is known to not fuck around, thanks to its leaks. In one of the various Nintendo leaks in the past few years was a bunch of documentation of "Operation Belgian Waffle", their attempt to "Knock and Talk" with a private investigator, law enforcement, and Nintendo Legal visiting a fairly well-known hacker in the scene. All of this was being spearheaded and commanded by Nintendo of Japan towards the subsidiaries in other countries. https://torrentfreak.com/nintendo-conducted-invasive-surveillance-operation-against-homebrew-hacker-201223/ https://torrentfreak.com/nintendo-conducted-invasive-surveil... Nintendo was already operating inside the Discord as per screenshots of evidence in the case, so they really had some leverage here.
junon 3y ago
Notably, Japan has no fair use laws.
jrockway 3y ago
How come Satoshi Nakamoto can remain anonymous in spite of his worth in the billions of dollars, but emulator developers, worth almost nothing, can't hide from Nintendo? Opsec mistakes, or just no opsec at all?
- exitb 3y ago
  There are tons of people involved in piracy that stay anonymous. It seems like they chose not to.
- k12sosse 3y ago
  .. because emulator developers are real?
brendoelfrendo 3y ago
My impression of the Yuzu team is that they didn't keep a very clean house. While the project didn't officially condone piracy, some members of the team were absolutely willing to help people run pirated games. Add to that the fact that they were emulating a current system, and that they ran a very successful Patreon to pay their team, and I think they eroded their plausible deniability down to nothing. Consider that Nintendo leaves Dolphin more-or-less alone. I think Nintendo understands where emulation sits legally, and they went after Yuzu because of what was happening around the emulator, and not because of the emulator itself.

KingOfCoders 3y ago

I might be wrong, but buy a game, dump the keys, sell game?

pierat 3y ago
[flagged]
- cultureswitch 3y ago
  Been gaming on PC (and a little bit with consoles) for 20 years and the hubbub about Nintendo closing Yuzu made me want to try it to see what's this all about. And yes it's unbelievable how much better these games are on emulator, even if you only judge based on the games themselves. I've been thoroughly captivated by TOTK and the worst I've had to ensure was mild microstutters which I didn't even bother to try and fix yet. Even that could have an easy solution.
jdiff 3y ago
The keys are in the console, not the games.
- extraduder_ire 3y ago
  Also, every single switch related thing has a unique ID associated with it that's sent back to nintendo when you access the internet. e.g. consoles, controllers, docks, game carts, etc... I haven't heard of them banning a game cart yet, but it's entirely possible.

bassiek 3y ago

I'm having 50,- on the fact they won't get to May before Nintendo Legal starts cutting up their loved ones.

ryandrake 3y ago
Yea, I wish them the best, but I would not take the other side of that bet. It’s sad that we all know it will happen and have relatively no political power to change it, despite most of us living under democratically representative governments.

arghwhat 3y ago

Note that emulators for all(?) other Nintendo consoles remain available, and were available while the consoles were relevant. There is little Nintendo can do as long as the authors actively steer clear of guiding/condoning piracy or guiding/condoning certain types of DRM-bypass. It was to my knowledge Yuzu's stance on this particular matter that cost them the project, with Nintendo lawyers striking once they saw the hole in the homebrew armor.

gjsman-1000 3y ago
Legally, there's actually quite a bit Nintendo can do, there's just always the risk of setting an undesirable precedent due to how few cases there are. Yuzu's actions just elevated the likelihood of success to near 100% instead of 80-90%.

exitb 3y ago

> Suyu will also require you to dump your title.keys and firmware from a hacked Switch to run games It seems misleading to imply that you NEED to dump them from a real device? Can't you just provide the files found on the internet?

antiframe 3y ago
Well, that would be piracy. The Suyu team condemns that behavior. Edited: condones -> condemns
- Hendrikto 3y ago
  > The Suyu team condones that behavior. You mean it does not?
- tentacleuno 3y ago
  They don't condone piracy, you mean.
  - account42 3y ago
    Wink wink nudge nudge.
- danShumway 3y ago
  I assume you mean condemns that behavior.
- b3lvedere 3y ago
  Must be nice for some people to legally hide behind words. "Yes, your honor. We did build this thing that some may define as a bomb capable of destroying the entire planet, but our intention was just to build a big power source. We are very much against illegal use."
  - pjerem 3y ago
    Well, looks like that's based on a true story ;)

0xcde4c3db 3y ago

Has the team explained their reasoning anywhere? Yuzu ostensibly already "required" dumping keys from a Switch console, and I don't understand how more involvement of Nintendo firmware and keys lowers the risk. If anything I'd have expected a "safe" fork to go the other direction, position itself as a homebrew development tool, and remove explicit support for commercial games altogether (requiring e.g. a third-party tool to decrypt and unpack commercial game formats into some quasi-homebrew format).