New documents filed Monday, February 26 reveal that videogame giant Nintendo is taking action against the creators of the popular emulator tool Yuzu.

The copyright infringement filing, from Nintendo of America, states that the Yuzu tool (from developer Tropic Haze LLC) illegally circumvents the software encryption and copyright protection systems of Nintendo Switch titles, and thus facilitates piracy and infringes copyright under the Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA).

Nintendo alleges that Tropic Haze’s free Yuzu emulator tool unlawfully allows pirated Switch games to be played on PCs and other devices, bypassing Nintendo’s protection measures.

The official Yuzu website suggests that the tool is to be used with software you yourself own: “You are legally required to dump your games from your Nintendo Switch” — but it’s common knowledge, that this is not how these tools are primarily used.

    •  520   ( @520@kbin.social ) 
      4•7 months ago

      So what purpose does an emulator server legally speaking?

      They provide compatibility for software made to run on one platform to work on another.

      Providing compatibility is one of the most protected use cases of reverse engineering in US law.

      And I don’t think anyone uses their car for accidents.

      Lots of terrorist groups do.

    •  monotremata   ( @monotremata@kbin.social ) 
      2•7 months ago

      In addition to “format shifting,” which is a well-recognized use case, and game preservation, which is a huge and under-recognized public interest in emulator development, emulators are also used for the development of homebrew software. E.g., there’s a port of Moonlight for the Switch, which lets you play Steam games streamed from a PC using your Switch, letting it serve many of the purposes of a Steam Deck. That’s huge! It would be way less practical to develop this kind of software if you could only test on real hardware. Testing on real hardware is also essential, of course, but testing on an emulator is vastly faster for rapid iteration.

    •  blindsight   ( @blindsight@beehaw.org ) English
      1•7 months ago

      I don’t see anyone else bringing up that, in the case of the Switch, emulation actually plays better than on original hardware. Higher framerate, resolution, and graphics settings. And no broken JoyCons.

      Emulation also opens up save states, speed up/slow mo, romhacks, widescreen mods, ultra widescreen mods, save file editing, cheats, and lots of other legitimate uses. Speed runners often use emulation to practice the hardest sections using save states before doing their line run on OG hardware.

      Some of those use cases are also possible on flash carts (romhacks, save file editing, and some forms of cheats), but a lot really on emulation.