this post was submitted on 01 Oct 2024
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Steam Deck
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Imagine not developing a controversial emulator anonymously...
doesn't matter if they don't know who you are, Nintendo can still offer you a ton of money to delete it. it wasn't necessarily legal threats or I assume they would have sent the cease and desist to GitHub and gotten the repo removed first
You're not wrong. I just think that if you believe there is a good chance of having legal problems for your project (I don't see why they wouldn't have thought that), then it makes the most sense to do it anonymously from the beginning to avoid getting sued. Yes they can still possibly offer you money, but it might not be worth revealing your identity at that point either, as any continued development could be assumed to be you, and then you must defend yourself in court if they sue, even if it was never you.
Emulators have been legal in the past I thought. Sure, there's something to be said about common sense and developing emulators for current generation platforms.
IIRC, they're legal as long as they don't explicitly distribute any of the copyright owner's own code or files. That's why, for example, PCSX2 requires you to dump "your own" PS2 BIOS and doesn't provide any itself. Because PCSX2 doesn't distribute the PS2 BIOS and because its way of talking to the BIOS doesn't copy the source code, that emulator is in the clear.
Some modern emulators (ex. Ryujinx) don't even need BIOS files (or whatever they're called on Switch) to be able to run games. But they also don't use Nintendo's original code to run the game.
Take all this with a grain of salt. I'm saying it from memory.
You wouldn't download the PS2 BIOS 🎸🎸🎸
Yes, I wasn't trying to refute that. But Nintendo can still ruin your life fighting a losing battle if they wanted to. To me it's just not worth the risk of putting your name on it.
Whole reimplementations have survived. IBM BIOS was the only original BIOS for PCs. Phoenix Technologies had a team read the source code for IBM BIOS (it was published in the user manual for troubleshooting) and wrote a specification for it which a different team wrote software from, making IBM compatible machines possible
I don't know what law an emulator could be killed under, unless a license holder breached the user license as part of the development
I've always wondered that. Why not just throw a git repo behind I2P or onto IPFS? It's like they want to be attacked.
Attention and recognition.