• pearsaltchocolatebar@discuss.online
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          1 month ago

          They’re not bogus. The emulator that shut down were selling a product using a proprietary encryption key owned by Nintendo.

          That’s why Dolphin still exists.

          • Sauerkraut@discuss.tchncs.de
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            1 month ago

            I disagree. Sure, companies have a moral right to recoup their R&D costs on a console, but I fully reject the Divine Right of Shareholders. As long as the emulators aren’t sold for profit and no one is hurt, a multibillion dollar company like Nintendo has zero moral ground to tell us that we cannot emulate consoles that we have bought to play games that we also bought.

          • catsup@lemmy.one
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            1 month ago

            Proprietary encryption key

            What if the key was in a book? It would have to be protected by free-speech, which makes it uncensorable.

            What if the key contents were used as hex values to make a flag? Would you censor a flag too?

            No such thing as “proprietary encryption keys” exist.

          • denshi@discuss.tchncs.de
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            1 month ago

            IANAL, but from a EU-centric perspective on copyright (which is the only one I can reliably talk about) the idea of a proprietary encryption key is bogus. A creative work can be copyrighted if it has sufficient originality (or under some other very specific conditions). Smaller parts of such a work are not copyrighted if they don’t meet that criteria on their own. The encryption key (which is very probably randomly generated and definitely not a creative work) thus can’t be copyrighted on it’s own. At least in the EU, there should be no argument against sharing said key (at least in respect to copyright).

            I honestly can’t talk about other jurisdictions (maybe someone else here can) but I imagine it should be similar to this in many other countries.

            • pearsaltchocolatebar@discuss.online
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              1 month ago

              Sharing isn’t the issue. The emulator was profiting from it.

              If I copied your house key and sold it, would that be alright?

              For the record, I support emulation, but I don’t lie to myself that it’s morally defensible.

              • denshi@discuss.tchncs.de
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                1 month ago

                Sharing isn’t the issue. The emulator was profiting from it.

                I wrote about sharing but even profiting from it should be legally permissible.

                If I copied your house key and sold it, would that be alright?

                Of course not. There are laws against that. Laws that are not copyright laws.

                but I don’t lie to myself that it’s morally defensible.

                Oh, sorry, I thought this was about legality. If we want to talk about the morality of evading copyright we should also about the morality of copyright itself, how it historically came to be and whose interests it was supposed to serve (it wasn’t made to support creatives). Actually there is surprisingly little evidence that the introduction of copyright increased the incentives for creatives to publish or made them wealthier (except a select few). I think there is a better case to be made for the morality of sharing creative works unlawfully than for limiting the sharing of those works for a century after their creation.

    • IHeartBadCode@fedia.io
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      1 month ago

      do as I say not as I do

      Nintendo: Money! Fuck everything else.

      All other attributes derive from that.

  • Biskii@lemmy.dbzer0.com
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    1 month ago

    This really isn’t that surprising. They used ROMs for the classic games in Animal Crossing. They even had evidence it was from a release group, and not Nintendo’s own copies

    I really don’t understand why this is embarrassing. I don’t know the exact setup they have going on. Is it like a kiosk where people can play classic games, or is it a monitor just displaying them? They have their own emulator, Canoe, that they used for the SNES Classic. I don’t remember the name of the NES one

    Weren’t at least some of the games in the Super Mario Collection ROMs? I guess I can see why people would expect a direct port from the company that created it, or original hardware running the original games, but it isn’t like Nintendo doesn’t already have a track record for this sort of thing

    • Zorsith@lemmy.blahaj.zone
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      1 month ago

      It’s embarrassing because of how extremely litigious Nintendo is, and that they are themselves profiting using other people’s work (emulators and/or ROMs acquired from the internet), the exact thing they ruin lives over.

      • Grass@sh.itjust.works
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        1 month ago

        I would have thought its embarrasing that they couldnt provide real hardware for an official museum

      • The Octonaut@mander.xyz
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        1 month ago

        Just so we’re clear, are you under the impression that “ROMs acquired from the Internet” represent something other than Nintendo’s work?

        • Zorsith@lemmy.blahaj.zone
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          1 month ago

          Yes, i would generally consider ripping roms as something requiring effort similar to cracking a game

          • The Octonaut@mander.xyz
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            1 month ago

            “Ripping” ROMs, or dumping them, takes almost no effort. If you have the cartridge reader its about as much work as taking photos off an SD card. Certainly nothing at all like cracking a game, which is pretty much software development.

            Please consider informing yourself before forming strong opinions.

              • The Octonaut@mander.xyz
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                1 month ago

                They were observed finding one ROM on the Internet, ever. They do have their own emulator(s).

                Nintendo is a bunch of humans. If my boss asks me to see if I can find the installer for an old version of our software, you can bet I’ll check anywhere before volunteering to go scrape old hard drives.

            • Zorsith@lemmy.blahaj.zone
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              1 month ago

              This is the part where I focus for half a second and realize this is about SNES and everything makes a lot more sense. I would hope newer stuff would have some form of protection 😅

      • Biskii@lemmy.dbzer0.com
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        1 month ago

        I’m not saying they haven’t used others work in the past, but they do have their own emulators and ROMs. They have for a long time. They are still terrible, but this just doesn’t seem like a big deal to me

        Edit: Also, whose lives have they ruined aside from those profiting off of distributing copyrighted material? Taking down a fan game doesn’t sound life ruining

        • TJA!@sh.itjust.works
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          1 month ago

          They are banning emulators but are then using them themselves. They are banning roms but are then using those same roms themselves.

          Sounds like hypocrisy to me

          • Biskii@lemmy.dbzer0.com
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            1 month ago

            Alright. Let me make sure I understand. Since Nintendo protects its IP, it isn’t allowed to use its own IP?

            Like, fuck Nintendo, but that doesn’t even make sense

            • Nima@leminal.space
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              1 month ago

              yes it is. what they’re doing is shitty, not illegal.

              "Hey don’t use emulators to play our games we’re gonna sue you.

              … and then just take that emulator software you made and sell it in our official devices. but still fuck you."

              not illegal. just giant assholes with no sense of self-awareness.

              • Biskii@lemmy.dbzer0.com
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                1 month ago

                They’ve never sued anyone for playing an emulated game. They have (most likely wrongly) threatened emulator developers over circumventing copyright and encryption. I don’t like it anymore than anybody else, but are we actually mad at a company for preserving their games? You can hate them for what they are doing to others while still being ok with their own emulation

                • Cassa@lemmy.blahaj.zone
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                  1 month ago

                  They’ve sued multiple times emulator developers, even when it’s completely legal.

                  (it is 100% legal to emulate, and make emulators.)

                  Due to the fact that a court case is expensive AF, this usually just kills the emulator group.

                  we’re mad at nintendo precisely because they do not, themselves preserve games. While they try to sue emulation and game preservers, they also use their ROMs and emulations to sell games to the consumer.

          • The Octonaut@mander.xyz
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            1 month ago

            They are not “banning” emulators. They take action against two sorts of problems: leaking, and distribution of copyrighted material. Yuzu was taken down because they stupidly started charging for help with playing Tears of the Kingdom before its release. Other emulators have been threatened because they included binary console OS software (rather than actually fully emulating the console itself) or actually distributed game ROMs.

            Dolphin has been around for about 20 years now. Why? Because they don’t distribute copyrighted material, recommend against doing so, and don’t require to include any binaries from the console.

            Here’s all they had to both say and adhere to, to “survive” the supposedly blood-hungry Nintendo for longer than some of the people reading this have been alive:


            Where can I download game ISOs/ROMs?¶

            Short answer: You don’t. Buy games and dump them with a Wii.

            Long answer: Downloading commercial games is illegal and thus strongly frowned upon by the Dolphin developers. To prevent legal issues, this includes gray areas like downloading games which you purchased earlier. You don’t necessarily need to own a gaming console by yourself because you can buy a game disc and dump them with a friend’s console. On the other hand, copying a friend’s game dump is considered illegal again.

            https://dolphin-emu.org/


            Also, lol @ the idea that it’s hypocrisy for them to use their own game files. You understand that’s what a ROM is, right? It isn’t magic. It’s just a binary file.

    • Björn Tantau@swg-empire.de
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      1 month ago

      Their NES and SNES mini consoles were also just off the shelf ARM SBCs running emulators. If I recall correctly people even found signatures of release groups in some of the ROMs.

      • SitD@lemy.lol
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        1 month ago

        technicians just know what’s good. unfortunately every company becomes too big for its own good and inspirationless ghouls take over 😔 the palworld thing also just shows they could be so successful if they take off the shackles and make a good game, but now they want to shackle everyone else so no one can have good games

      • Biskii@lemmy.dbzer0.com
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        1 month ago

        They are at least Nintendo’s own in-house emulators. I don’t recall the situation with the Classic systems ROMs, but Animal Crossing had the release group signatures if I’m not mistaken. They’ve been pulling this garbage for a long time

        • Moonrise2473@feddit.it
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          1 month ago

          The nes roms in animal crossing for N64 had the header for the ines emulator. Now, a few years before Nintendo hired a guy who worked on the audio driver for ines, and that tomohiro is credited with lots of emu projects for Nintendo, so it’s not impossible that they reused that header idea. In the gigaleak there’s a tool that adds the ines header to clean roms.

          This said, it’s also not impossible that they’re taking a peek in other OSS emulators source code, i recall that luigiblood (a guy obsessed in decompiling Nintendo emulators) found traces of 64dd emulator code from pj64 in some Nintendo product, which then was silently removed after he tweeted about that

          • Biskii@lemmy.dbzer0.com
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            1 month ago

            This is very educational, thank you. Just out of curiosity, what has Nintendo done with the 64dd? I thought they had forgotten about it

            • Moonrise2473@feddit.it
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              1 month ago

              They seem to have included support for an unofficial 64dd cartridge adapter used for homebrew/development/piracy which for an official product makes no sense

              • Biskii@lemmy.dbzer0.com
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                1 month ago

                That’s very interesting. I can’t even think of a game worth doing that for. Not trying to say there isn’t, I just don’t have one off the top of my head

  • BonerMan@ani.social
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    1 month ago

    This means you can find the pc and get THEIR OWN EMULATOR, make it open source and fuck them royally.

    • 4am@lemm.ee
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      1 month ago

      You think they wrote their own emulator instead of just taking one of the free ones on the internet (who they will likely sue later). That’s cute.

      • Magiilaro@feddit.org
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        1 month ago

        Well yes, yes they did. It is called Canoe and is for example running inside the SNES Classic Mini. And that is not the only emulator they wrote. Writing an emulator is not some obscure magic, and it is way easier if you own all the schematics and other Information used to build the original hardware.

      • BonerMan@ani.social
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        1 month ago

        Why? You can just say its the official Nintendo emulator.

        Nobody gives a shit if its legal or not, this is a Nintendo bashing club. We hate them and wish them to go bankrupt.

        • Lumu@lemmy.blahaj.zone
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          1 month ago

          Sure but why would the source code be available? It’d be funny if it was but it’s probably a compiled program, right?

    • brax@sh.itjust.works
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      1 month ago

      Implying they have their own emulator and it’s not just running retroarch or something

  • Moonrise2473@feddit.it
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    1 month ago

    It would be interesting to plug an usb rubber duckie to own that station and dump all the disk somewhere

    • Bezier@suppo.fi
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      1 month ago

      I guess people are assuming it runs whatever third party emulator. It was at least how I first imagined it.

      If that’s the case, it’s in my opinion very embarrassing: attempting to profit from stuff made by the community they act extremely hostile towards.

      If not, I guess it’s just mildly embarrassing that they have a poorly concealed windows machine taking away from the immersion.

      • greenacres3233@lemmy.dbzer0.com
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        1 month ago

        I read through the article, only speculation but since the sound is without a doubt the USB being disconnected then it’s pretty obvious an Windows machine running a rom.

      • lowleveldata@programming.dev
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        1 month ago

        It’s a weird assumption. Like I said, emulation for backward compatibility is common. Do they always just wait for some random strangers to implement an emulator for them?

        • Bezier@suppo.fi
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          1 month ago

          It’s a weird assumption. Like I said, emulation for backward compatibility is common.

          Nintendo has some serious emulation experts for building products, but this setup rigged by some museum staff could be anything.

          Do they always just wait for some random strangers to implement an emulator for them?

          Waiting? There is zero chance availability is an issue. There are many ready to go snes emulators for windows out there.

        • Biskii@lemmy.dbzer0.com
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          1 month ago

          They have literally had their own emulators for so long. At least since the SNES Classic released. It is called Canoe

      • lowleveldata@programming.dev
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        1 month ago

        And? I too really hate people using my toothbrush but have no problem using it myself. Is that embarrassing?

          • lowleveldata@programming.dev
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            1 month ago

            Is the implication that they won’t be able to write an in-house emulator? So did they wait for someone to port an SNES emulator to Switch before they can put those old games on their online service?

            • Nima@leminal.space
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              1 month ago

              the “implication?” they’ve literally already sold consoles that have downloaded roms on them.

            • Nima@leminal.space
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              1 month ago

              files they’ve downloaded off the internet. its much easier for them and they only need to do a quick frontend to make it look official.

              ezpz.

                • Nima@leminal.space
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                  1 month ago

                  in the past they have. i should have specified. i have no idea what they’re doing in their museums. but considering their history, I wouldn’t discount it.

  • Cassa@lemmy.blahaj.zone
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    1 month ago

    how did lemmy piracy suddenly turn to defending nintendo…

    nintendo pulls rom sites down, sure - it’s their shit (https://www.pcworld.com/article/402404/nintendo-suit-rom-emulation-game-preservation.html)

    Nintendo is using roms from these sites to sell to consumers within their own “ecosystem” (https://www.eurogamer.net/did-nintendo-download-a-mario-rom-and-sell-it-back-to-us)

    Not even close to all of nintendos titles are avaliable on their online stores, and the mini-snes or whatever did not have even close to all their titles.

    point is. Nintendo is NOT preserving their own games. And they sue anyone doing anything like preserving it for the public.