Irrelevant. Yuzu is admitting their program fosters piracy. It's not about the TOTK situation. It's not about Yuzu being pirates (They aren't. Yuzu hopes all piracy comes to an end). Nintendo tried Yuzu for being guilty by association/facilitation.
Yuzu will pay $2.4 million in damages to Nintendo to settle their lawsuit [Yuzu and Citra Emulators to be shut down]
- Thread starter Kawngi
- Start date
I don't think it's important in a colloquial sense, only in an academic one. If consumers are talking about preservation in a casual setting access is part of it.
I don't think discerning between the two serves anything when everyone know what's being discussed.
I get that you are angry so are making up nonsense, but that's not what the lawsuit was about, and Nintendo gets to decide which devices are and are not allowed to use the keys to play their copyrighted software.
It's a microkernel, the amount of attackable surface area is very limited and Nintendo has ironed out kinks over time (largely in nVidia's various services).
But because of the bootloader compromise, homebrew devs have had full access to the OS for years and they have been looking for software issues for years. No one's found anything that can be leveraged for ACE.
We also talk about "nVidia's fuck-up" and "lol paperclip" but in actuality the finding of that zero-day was years of research in the making on the Tegra chip and not just something that popped up out of the grass one day for free. A lot of work and research in the bootloader files, which were openly available, were needed to actually leverage the original zero-day into anything useful... let alone even finding it in the first place.
Even if nVidia were to screw up colossally again, it would likely take years of work to just find it because there'd not be any open book public information on the bootloader at all!
Yuzu devs were doing that? Pretty shady practice if they were and they were probably just counting the days.
I mean a corporation is stealing from another one here just because one does shit that you like doesn't mean that they're worth defending.
That's your opinion. It's also Nintendo's opinion. It hasn't been tested in court, and not being able to extract MY keys from MY switch and transfer them to MY computer would go against the idea of private property and ownership. I wouldn't be 100% surprised it the courts agreed that people in the US don't own their Switches, but I'm 100% sure the EU would back me up if it came to that (not that nintendo would sue me for backing up my prod.keys lol). So I'm chilling over here, worst case scenario emulator development will mostly happen in Europe.
I disagree, because the way people talk about Nintendo being bad about preservation is coded in a way that their stuff is at a risk of being lost if it isn't available for people to play.
It reminds me of a how there was a point a few years back before Dracula X Chronicles and the TG16 Mini got released where people were talking about Dracula X being a lost game when the Wii version stopped being sold....when it was actually still very much available on PSP and Vita, just not in a way that people found ideal (which is hilariously similar to how people talk about Switch stuff now)
They settled out of court. And they only agreed the Yuzu team can't distribute or develop it anymore, that doesn't mean people can't use it. Even if that were the case, it's not like you have to necessarily show what emulator you're currently using if you plan to stream it.
Nothing was deemed "unauthorized" about Yuzu and Citra themselves, just some of the things the owners did so they decided to pay Nintendo and abandon those projects.
Ohhhh I didn't know they were the same. Thanks for the info. Much appreciated.
How is Yuzu admitting their program fosters piracy by collecting analytics from users in order to improve how their software performs like every other single piece of software in existence does?
Damn, the movie industry better go after VLC. And hell, every industry should go after all of the torrenting software out there for fostering piracy.
That's why there was the freak out about the Switch flash cart. People were concerned that someone would buy a game, rip it, trade it in, someone would buy it used, both would be online, Nintendo sees that unique ID in 2 places, ban both.
https://www.resetera.com/threads/"pandora's-box-is-opened"-mig-switch-flash-cart-is-a-worse-r4-could-lead-to-used-game-buyers-getting-banned-fake-carts.807501/
Incorrect. They settled. Settling means "I'm not fighting this regardless of who is in the wrong". It doesn't mean "I'm in the wrong". There has been no court decision that proves either party was in the wrong. The legality of emulators has not changed. If you believed they were illegal, you're free to keep believing so. If you were aware they were legal, you can continue to be aware of that.
This seems like a very legally gray line to be walking for content creators. The only way to play a Ocarina of Time 3D randomizer is via Citra or your own hacked console.
Nintendo's entire spiel here was that Yuzu was facilitating piracy via an unauthorized emulator/platform. And that hacking/obtaining keys from your own console was also unauthorized.
I guess you are arguing that since they just settled, the case did not develop towards a new definition and the arguments they were making had no decisions made on them...??? However, I believe it is heavily implied. And individuals that still openly use Citra on public platforms in obvious ways are walking a fine line.
This is only the beginning.
I'll research the ID thing, whether they end up on the dumps or not. But regardless of that, this makes no sense, because IF those IDs really end up in the dump, nothing has changed?
Some of the pirated copies on the internet come from the eshop, and some copies come from cartridges. Some people are dumb and play pirated games on pirated Switches while online. IF those IDs really end up on the dumps, then I'm already at risk of buying a cartridge that has been dumped and getting banned. This flashcart wouldn't change that.
I don't think anyone has ever gotten banned for buying a second hand switch cartridge.
Two of the golden rules of emulation being "allowed" to exist, as an outside observer, is the argument that there are uses for it that do not involve piracy, and that folks aren't profiting from it. I remember the Bleemcast guys getting sued out of existence for trying to sell their PS emulator on Dreamcast. It often made me uncomfortable when I'd hear about the Yuzu folks pulling in more monthly money than my first full time annual salary, and the TotK prerelease kerfuffle had me convinced there would be consequences. Very worried for how this will impact the emulation scene, while also feeling Yuzu could have run a tighter ship.
Between this thread and the last thread, I am now pretty sure that Yuzu's most unforgivable sin for Era was not making an emulator, but making one for a current gen system that could be used to let other people play games before you.
Though wanting to throw the baby out with the bath water is also an Era tradition. Well as long as tossing out the baby serves some favored corporation.
Though wanting to throw the baby out with the bath water is also an Era tradition. Well as long as tossing out the baby serves some favored corporation.
Yes but you won't be able to easily share it since Github and others will now comply with Nintendo's takedown requests and obviously Nintendo will go after you if try to run a business out of it like Yuzu did. Any improvements on it from this point forward will be very slow and much harder to find.
The repositories are gone, so you would have to have a copy of the code (I am sure a ton of people do)
GitHub - yuzu-emu/yuzu: Nintendo Switch emulator
Nintendo Switch emulator. Contribute to yuzu-emu/yuzu development by creating an account on GitHub.
github.com
Right now ripping your own copies is fairly limited and the flash cart isn't widely available. Just because something hasn't been an issue yet doesn't mean it won't spread like wild fire once those flash carts become widely available. Emulation isn't piracy, but you're lying to yourself if you don't think most switch piracy was being done through Yuzu.
When Nintendo inevitably ends their online store's service for the Switch, shuts off the servers which serve update downloads, and otherwise EoLs support for the system emulators like Yuzu are going to be the only way for people to still access their Switch games in the distant future once the hardware becomes increasingly scarce. It's particularly problematic for Switch because only the first run of models are fully hackable and these are the only ones that can make use of any real longterm preservation solutions for digital content like backing your stuff up to an external storage device - the supply for them will become increasingly rare, and its just not feasible to ensure you always have one on hand you can hack and transfer your games onto if your current one breaks.
So, take this hypothetical; you bought Fire Emblem: Shadow Dragon and the Blade of Light before it got delisted, and you have a hackable Switch. 10 years from now Nintendo still haven't made it otherwise available for purchase on other platforms again, and they shut down the eShop for the Switch so you can't download it again if you ever need to. You can hack your Switch and make a backup, but there's still the possibility in another 10yrs your Switch is dead and no amount of amateur technician tutorials online can help you revive it - and finding another hackable Switch? Probably difficult by then, and possibly prohibitively expensive. So you just download your Switch emulator of choice and can dump your backup so you never have to worry about losing access to it again.
In the case of MP games the possibility of people figuring out how to get custom servers running and letting people dump their copies to play them is going to be the only hope they have of being preserved in any meaningful sense that doesn't rely on the benevolence of Nintendo randomly deciding to restore it one day after the official servers are closed, too.
I feel like some things are getting confused in this thread.
No, Yuzu nor Citra does not facilitate the distribution of pirated games, it's a silly argument that Yuzu is the reason for one million pirate copies of ToTK being supposedly distributed when Yuzu is not the only piece of hardware of software capable of playing it.
The developers of Yuzu did not lose the case or had any guilt proven, they chose to settle the case likely to avoid being financially ruined by the legal fees if they had to defend themselves in court. This is sadly very common and favors large companies like Nintendo that are rich in cash, there's no indication who would have won this case if it had gone to court.
I have no special empathy towards the developers of Yuzu, they had questionable practices and went hard on monetizing their work, but they also delivered the best way to play games that are stuck on underpowered mobile hardware.
This is at the end of the day a huge loss for game emulation and only encourages the limited view companies like Nintendo have, there's very legitimate reasons for tools like these to exist for platforms that can be considered modern. I would have liked to have seen the case tried at court to establish precedent, but for now Nintendo can just sue and few are likely to have the resources to fight back.
No, Yuzu nor Citra does not facilitate the distribution of pirated games, it's a silly argument that Yuzu is the reason for one million pirate copies of ToTK being supposedly distributed when Yuzu is not the only piece of hardware of software capable of playing it.
The developers of Yuzu did not lose the case or had any guilt proven, they chose to settle the case likely to avoid being financially ruined by the legal fees if they had to defend themselves in court. This is sadly very common and favors large companies like Nintendo that are rich in cash, there's no indication who would have won this case if it had gone to court.
I have no special empathy towards the developers of Yuzu, they had questionable practices and went hard on monetizing their work, but they also delivered the best way to play games that are stuck on underpowered mobile hardware.
This is at the end of the day a huge loss for game emulation and only encourages the limited view companies like Nintendo have, there's very legitimate reasons for tools like these to exist for platforms that can be considered modern. I would have liked to have seen the case tried at court to establish precedent, but for now Nintendo can just sue and few are likely to have the resources to fight back.
I'm not arguing that the problem wouldn't become bigger with the flashcart. What I'm arguing is that as far as I know there have been zero cases of people getting banned over second hard cartridges. And I mean zero, there are no reports about this ever happening, nothing, nada. If people could get banned over this there would be a few very isolated cases already at the very least. But there's nothing
We at least know 1 million copies were pirated in the timeframe described on whatever site they were tracking. I definitely wouldn't translate that as 1 million people actually playing it before launch, though, no matter the method.
The flashcart is a complete scam.
The Switch OS can track cart inserts/cycles and can easily be patched via software to reject it and/or crash the console. The cart certificate file can also be checked and rejected, and we don't even know what Nintendo can or cannot do in the Lotus to just brick the thing outright from working without it needing to be physically entirely remade. There is no leverage of the cart slot over the OS, anything the cart tries to do to be clever will simply be patched out.
There's a bunch of other glaring issues with it but it's a dumb product and anyone buying it is getting scammed.
You're probably right, I don't care about the flashcart at all.
This isn't a DS with no cart execution security and an open sandbox. The cart in this case has no actual 'hack' and is at the mercy of the Switch OS to do anything. It's junk trying to make a quick buck off people thinking its another R4.
The thing cannot run anything other than base cart images and cannot have updates/DLC without having to connect to Nintendo's services which will promptly get you kicked off of Nintendo's services, making it impossible to update any game ever again.
The Yuzu people were passing pirated games in their discord; this is been discussed several times with a bigass screencap and has been discussed plenty on the various emulation subreddits. Their hands weren't clean.
Everyone who downloaded the emulator has a copy of the source code on their computer unless they deleted it.The repositories are gone, so you would have to have a copy of the code (I am sure a ton of people do)
but yeah nothing to stop people from continuing on, it will be wackamole with Nintendo I imagine though.
GitHub - yuzu-emu/yuzu: Nintendo Switch emulator
Nintendo Switch emulator. Contribute to yuzu-emu/yuzu development by creating an account on GitHub.
Unless they download prepatched game files and put those on the cart and continue playing.
It cannot use anything not already packaged by Nintendo, aka anything not on a print-run. It is all encrypted, and the Switch OS will simply reject anything that isn't properly signed. It cannot run NSO files either as those are not encrypted in a way the cart-to-OS handshake would accept.
You cannot 'pre-patch it' to do anything because the signage would be broken.
No, that's not how that works. The compiled releases do not include the source code, that would be dumb and would just bloat the download size.
That being said, enough people have archived the source code that it doesn't matter. I have it. There are mirrors on github. The chances of the source code being lost are zero.
I see now. if you need a full copy of the cartridge including the identifier and everything instead of a proper dump with just the ROM I see why people are worried about getting banned by purchasing second hand cartridges. I still think it won't happen though, like you said Nintendo will be able to patch this out of existence very quickly.
The permanent injunction included a clause where derivatives of the source code must also be destroyed. That means, any forks (parent forks like Citra, descendant forks, etc.) are to be deleted / pulled down / cease distribution.
Yeah, I am sure pretty much everyone who wanted the source code got a copy when this lawsuit first came to light. I thought about it but realized I didn't care enough to do so.
This is super smart. I'm sure Sony and Microsoft love their games to be downloaded millions of times before launch for the sake of "game preservation".
And you can still get it right now. Very easily. I'd post it here if I got confirmation by the mods that it's ok to do so. It will never get lost.
View: https://twitter.com/Aftermath_site/status/1764790348583145901
Fucking sucks.
Exactly.
Yuzu isn't the point, arguing over the specifics of what Yuzu did or didn't do is missing the point, the point is what this means in the grander scheme of things for emulation as a whole.
It's bad.
Yes.
That's a huge fucking problem. Guilt by association is considered a logical fallacy for a reason.
While that's technically correct, it's not at all like what you're implying.
Sony lost every court case they had against Connectix regarding Bleem! and Bleemcast!
But Sony had way bigger pockets, so they just kept suing (and threatening their retail partners) until Connectix ran out of money.
Which is not unlike what Nintendo has done here. These big companies don't need to win a single damn court case to crush emulation. They can in fact lose every court case they ever bring, because they can bring enough of them to ruin anyone poorer than them.
I agree actually that current-gen emulation is a bit morally sticky. A large number of people will use it as intended and play their backups with the goal of higher resolution, framerate or mods, but more will just pirate.
But any console that's no longer being produced / games not being sold for it is fair game for emulation in my eyes.
But any console that's no longer being produced / games not being sold for it is fair game for emulation in my eyes.
That was the other reason I didn't bother. I figured if I ever wanted it I could find it. I am sure many people have made it part of their mission as a fuck you to Nintendo at this point.
I stand corrected, it was the Pineapple builds that compiled the early access without Patreon that came with the source code.
In case anyone needed confirmation that the good Switch emulator made by actually smart people will continue.
Based.
They will probably be way more aggressive in banning any unwanted discussion and also tell Polygon to fuck-off should an idiot decide to write another "play Metroid Dread on PC prior to its release date" articles again.
AFAIK pirates software was being used to develop Yuzu, that's the point I'm getting at
There's definitely going to be forks, and there's probably going to be a fork that a lot of former yuzu contributors are going to latch onto much like how the contributors to Tachiyomi (a manga/manwha reader that was shut down by a legal threat by Kakao, in a situation pretty similar to this one) are now working on a fork called Mihon that is basically the same app but with anything legally questionable stripped out.
Citra and Yuzu will live on, this isn't the end of 3DS/Switch emulation like some people are saying. But it's definitely going to set back development by 6 months or something while the 3DS/Switch emulation community picks up the pieces and figures out the best way to keep things going while preventing a situation like this from happening again.
At the end of the day, Yuzu played with fire and got burned. It's absolutely possible to create a successor with far less risk of getting sued as long as the devs don't do shit like linking to illegal content on a discord.
Aye - Just saw a thread on another forum where the mods put up a big red "Do not post or DM links to backups of the Yuzu or Citra source code or installer on this forum" notice on the Yuzu Lawsuit thread. The source code itself hasn't been deemed illegal, but it's managed to develop a "stink" that has everyone scared shitless of being Collateral Damage.
I don't doubt both will be "back" but they're absolutely Going To Ground and it'll be under a new name with new aliases attached to any definitely not returning maintainers.
So you think all emulators of any system available on Nintendo Online to be shut down too, yes?
NES, SNES, Game Boy, GBA, N64, Genesis... those are all active commercial platforms for Nintendo.
If you think Emulating the Switch is "morally sticky" and shouldn't be "fair game", then that goes for all of those too. That's where Nintendo's logic, and squad of expensive lawyers, leads.
someone will continue on with it, we've been through this before.
They will take the source code, change the name, and get a fresh start.
They will take the source code, change the name, and get a fresh start.