Adding on with a wall of text diving into the specific differences in projects that either have or haven't attracted Nintendo's legal attention (tl;dr: it's a l

Adding on with a wall of text diving into the specific differences in projects that either have or haven't attracted Nintendo's legal attention (tl;dr: it's a lot more than just visibility/popularity). While it's always possible Nintendo will just decide to go after these one day (right or wrong in doing so) that they didn't even attempt to touch this particular type of Mario romhacking scene when Mario Maker came out ~10 years ago makes me think these particular types of projects (patchsets on old games without copyright protection) won't receive much trouble. Doubly so for these types of projects which don't (in and of themselves) make the game playable on unofficial systems. Nintendo seems largely focused on direct redistribution, non-patchset based remakes, "cracking" of modern game DRM/security to allow modification/unauthorized playing, and distribution of gameplay content on media which have stricter takedown requirements than the law strictly requires (e.g. YouTube). This makes some sense as Nintendo has either previously demonstrated these types of cases in court or has previously signalled they believe they could easily do so if challenged. While Nintendo, right or wrong in a specific instance, could definitely get away with a decent amount of "legal bullying" of individuals not interested in fighting a legal battle with a large company over their hobby website they aren't necessarily going to be interested in picking tons of such battles if they aren't relatively sure they'd win should one actually result in a real court battle. Setting precedent in court that something is explicitly okay (like 3rd party games, emulation, personal game backups) can sometimes be worse than just letting it ride as an "underground" thing. Particularly if they are defending their property elsewhere and it'd be hard for someone to argue in court these romhacks existing is counter to that. Anyways, this wall of text is to say: sure, nobody knows what Nintendo is going to do tomorrow, but 20 years of romhacks later they've never hinted at going after this particular type of project, despite going after many nearly identical but slightly differently implemented projects, so the same "get it before Nintendo DMCAs it" comment that one would expect from those threads doesn't necessarily hold the same weight. Not that it's an absolute possibility, anything is possible, but if this type of project were the only one then people wouldn't have the "it'll be DMCA'd by tomorrow" notion. But do back it up anyways... a great deal many more early efforts have been lost to the sands of time than Nintendo's lawyers.