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After shutting down several popular emulators, Nintendo admits emulation is legal
(www.androidauthority.com)
this post was submitted on 16 Jan 2025
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Not really. It sounds like they haven't gone after them for emulation, but instead for emulation-adjacent things: copying ROMs, circumventing digital locks, etc.
They explicitly mention (one of?) the developers of Yuzu sharing ROMs in the article.
In other words, the emulator itself isn't illegal, but in order to use the emulator the way most people want, you have to do illegal things, and that's what they go after you for.
Logical conclusion takedown of the ROM's and not the emulator. ROM's can be obtained without problems, I don't regularly read that sites are taken down or people are taken up. That's just a convenient excuse. Nintendo just knows that their only argument is exclusive titles. Who would still want a Wii if you could use it better on the steam deck with yuzu?
I also remember that I often read that you have to organize such and such files yourself. Where then reference was made to original hardware/data carriers and not to Rom pages etc. I had problems with Zelda in particular.
Even vimm's has been scorched of most Nintendo properties. So they definitely take down ROM sites.
I don't want to contradict that at all. I'm not up to date and only read articles on "IT" sites, but these mostly refer to the fight against F/OSS which is then directed against the emulators. They hardly ever mention action against ROM sites.
Right, emulators aren't illegal but a bunch of adjacent things can be - for example system BIOS/FW/encryption keys/ROMs if you don't dump them yourself from your own personal hardware.
What got Yuzu in the crosshairs was announcing support for Tears of the Kingdom before it released, meaning they were testing their emulator on an unreleased game and the odds that every dev and tester had legitimately gotten a copy of the game before official release is so low that they weren't about to fight it and go through discovery (which might have identified significant additional piracy on their part). It was easier to fold and settle, and probably saved them from an immense amount of fines for piracy used for testing.
I remember that Valve also caused trouble there. https://youtu.be/aRnZrSBK3R4 Since you saw the Yuzu surface briefly.