Emulation

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Emulation community expresses defiance in wake of Nintendo’s Yuzu lawsuit

Emulation, gaming, lawsuit, Nintendo, ryujinx, yuzu / /
Power (glove) to the people.

Enlarge / Power (glove) to the people.

Aurich Lawson

Nintendo’s recent lawsuit against Switch emulator-maker Yuzu seems written like it was designed to strike fear into the heart of the entire emulation community. But despite legal arguments that sometimes cut at the very idea of emulation itself, members of the emulation development community I talked to didn’t seem very worried about coming under a Yuzu-style legal threat from Nintendo or other console makers. Indeed, those developers told me they’ve long taken numerous precautions against that very outcome and said they feel they have good reasons to believe they can avoid Yuzu’s fate.

Protect yourself

“I can assure [you], experienced emulator developers are very aware of copyright issues,” said Lycoder, who has worked on emulators for consoles ranging from the NES to the Dreamcast. “I’ve personally always maintained strict rules about how I deal with copyrighted content in my projects, and most other people I know from the emulation scene do the same thing.”

“This lawsuit is not introducing any new element that people in the emulation community have not known of for a long time,” said Parsifal, a hobbyist developer who has written emulators for the Apple II, Space Invaders, and the CHIP-8 virtual machine. “Emulation is fine as long as you don’t infringe on copyright and trademarks.”

Other hobbyist emulator makers take more serious precautions to protect themselves legally. “I always had some fear of Nintendo’s lawyers coming after my work, which is part of the reason I still keep it private,” said StrikerX3 of his work on a Nintendo DS emulator. “I’ve only released the emulator’s binaries to a handful of people, and only two others have access to the source code besides me.”

Just a little light console hacking...

Enlarge / Just a little light console hacking…

Aurich Lawson

And others feel operating internationally protects them from the worst of the DMCA and other US copyright laws. “I have written an NES emulator and I am working on a Game Boy emulator… anyway I’m not a US citizen and Nintendo can kiss my ass,” said emulator developer ZJoyKiller, who didn’t provide his specific country of residence.

Stick to the old stuff

Some of those potential legal precautions might seem a little insufficient on further inspection—a lack of copyrighted code in the emulator wasn’t enough to protect Yuzu from Nintendo’s legal sights, after all. Still, other emulator developers pointed out a number of differences in their projects that they felt set them apart.

Chief among those differences is the fact that Yuzu emulates a Switch console that is still actively selling millions of hardware and software units every year. Most current emulator development focuses on older, discontinued consoles that the developers I talked to seemed convinced were much less liable to draw legal fire.

“There is a difference between emulating a 30-year-old system vs. a current one that’s actively making money,” Parsifal said.

In a response on the Yuzu Discord, the development team wrote, “We do not know anything other than the public filing, and we are not able to discuss the matter at this time.” Multiple developers who work on Ryujinx, another prominent Switch emulator, have yet to respond to a request for comment from Ars Technica.

“The consoles I’ve worked on [such as the Nintendo 3DS] don’t really generate much revenue anymore,” one anonymous dev said. “It would be a waste of time to sue like they did Yuzu.”

“There is a difference between emulating a 30-year-old system vs. a current one that’s actively making money.”

Emulator developer Parsifal

Systems from before the turn of the millennium also often fall into something of a different legal category, developers pointed out, if their software and/or hardware was not protected by any encryption. That means emulators for those older systems don’t have to worry about falling afoul of the strict anti-circumvention portions of the Digital Millennium Copyright Act. Developers have also reverse-engineered open source BIOS and BootROM files for some classic systems, eliminating the need to distribute that copyrighted code or even ask users to provide it.

“For most [older] emulators, users don’t have to break copyright [or encryption], at all,” Lycoder pointed out. “A lot of talented people have worked on methods to dump [copyrighted] BootROMs, firmware, etc. out of original hardware, any user that owns an original system should be able to dump these files themselves.”

Legal differences aside, emulator developers also pointed out some major philosophical differences in working on consoles that are no longer being actively marketed. “In my opinion, emulating the Switch at the moment has nothing to do with preservation,” one anonymous developer told me. “The developers might be enthusiasts and passionate but they need to be very naive to think it’ll be used for lawful preservation and use.”

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How strong is Nintendo’s legal case against Switch-emulator Yuzu?

Emulation, gaming, hacks, lawsuit, legal, Nintendo, yuzu / /
The eye of Nintendo's legal department turns slowly towards a new target.

Enlarge / The eye of Nintendo’s legal department turns slowly towards a new target.

Aurich Lawson

Nintendo has filed a lawsuit against Tropic Haze LLC, the makers of the popular Yuzu emulator that the Switch-maker says is “facilitating piracy at a colossal scale.”

The federal lawsuit—filed Monday in the District Court of Rhode Island and first reported by Stephen Totilo—is the company’s most expansive and significant argument yet against emulation technology that it alleges “turns general computing devices into tools for massive intellectual property infringement of Nintendo and others’ copyrighted works.” Nintendo is asking the court to prevent the developers from working on, promoting, or distributing the Yuzu emulator and requesting significant financial damages under the DMCA.

If successful, the arguments in the case could help overturn years of legal precedent that have protected emulator software itself, even as using those emulators for software piracy has remained illegal.

“Nintendo is still basically taking the position that emulation itself is unlawful,” Foundation Law attorney and digital media specialist Jon Loiterman told Ars. “Though that’s not the core legal theory in this case.”

Just follow these (complicated) instructions

The bulk of Nintendo’s legal argument rests on Yuzu’s ability to break the many layers of encryption that protect Switch software from being copied and/or played by unauthorized users. By using so-called “prod.keys” obtained from legitimate Switch hardware, Yuzu can dynamically decrypt an encrypted Switch game ROM at runtime, which Nintendo argues falls afoul of the Digital Millennium Copyright Act’s prohibition against circumvention of software protections.

Crucially, though, the open source Yuzu emulator itself does not contain a copy of those “prod.keys,” which Nintendo’s lawsuit acknowledges that users need to supply themselves. That makes Yuzu different from the Dolphin emulator, which was taken off Steam last year after Nintendo pointed out that the software itself contains a copy of the Wii Common Key used to decrypt game files.

Just a little light console hacking...

Enlarge / Just a little light console hacking…

Aurich Lawson

Absent the inherent ability to break DRM, an emulator would generally be covered by decades of legal precedent establishing the right to emulate one piece of hardware on another using reverse-engineering techniques. But Yuzu’s “bring your own decryption” design is not necessarily a foolproof defense, either.

Nintendo’s lawsuit makes extensive reference to the Quickstart Guide that Yuzu provides on its own distribution site. That guide gives detailed instructions on how to “start playing commercial games” with Yuzu by hacking your (older) Switch to dump decryption keys and/or game files. That guide also includes links to a number of external tools that directly break console and/or game encryption techniques.

“Whether Yuzu can get tagged with [circumvention] simply by providing instructions and guidance and all the rest of it is, I think, the core issue in this case.”

Attorney Jon Loiterman

Through these instructions, Nintendo argues, “the Yuzu developers brazenly acknowledge that using Yuzu necessitates hacking or breaking into a Nintendo Switch.” Nintendo also points to a Yuzu Discord server where emulator developers and users discuss how to get copyrighted games running on the emulator, as well as publicly released telemetry data that shows the developers were aware of widespread use of their emulator for piracy (as the Yuzu devs wrote in June 2023, “Tears of the Kingdom is by far the most played game on Yuzu”).

While Loiterman says that “instructions and guidance are not circumvention,” he added that “the more layers of indirection between Yuzu’s software and activity and distribution of the keys the safer they are. The detailed instructions, the Discord server, and the knowledge of what all this is used for are at least problematic.”

“Whether Yuzu can get tagged with [circumvention] simply by providing instructions and guidance and all the rest of it is, I think, the core issue in this case,” he continued.

How strong is Nintendo’s legal case against Switch-emulator Yuzu? Read More »

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Flurry of firmware updates makes Analogue Pocket an even better retro handheld

analogue, analogue pocket, Emulation, emulator, fpga, Game Boy, Game boy Advance, gaming, Nintendo, openFPGA, retro console, Retro Gaming, Tech / /

super game boy —

Display filters for FPGA cores, custom Game Boy color palettes, and more.

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An Analogue Pocket running <em>Super Mario World</em> on an openFPGA core with the scanline filter enabled.” src=”https://cdn.arstechnica.net/wp-content/uploads/2024/01/IMG_1480-2-800×533.jpeg”></img><figcaption> <p><a data-height=Enlarge / An Analogue Pocket running Super Mario World on an openFPGA core with the scanline filter enabled.

Andrew Cunningham

We’ve got a soft spot for the Analogue Pocket, the premium portable game console that melds 2020s technology with the design of the original Game Boy. Since its release, Analogue has added some new capabilities via firmware updates, most notably when it added support for emulating more consoles via its OpenFPGA platform in the summer of 2022. This allows the FPGA chip inside of the pocket to emulate the hardware of other systems, in addition to the portable systems the Pocket supports natively.

But aside from finalizing and releasing that 1.1 firmware, 2023 was mostly quiet for Pocket firmware updates. That changed in December when the company released not one but two major firmware upgrades for the Pocket that slipped under our radar during the holidays. These updates delivered a combination of fixes and long-promised features to the handheld, which Analogue has been re-releasing in different color palettes now that the original versions are more consistently in stock.

The most significant update for OpenFPGA fans is the ability to use display filters with third-party FPGA cores. Part of the appeal of the Pocket is its 1,600×1,440 screen, which is sharp enough to perfectly re-create the huge chunky pixels of the original Game Boy screens. By default, most FPGA cores now get access to a similarly high-quality CRT screen filter named after the Sony Trinitron TV, adding a touch of retro-blurriness to the sharp edges of 8- and 16-bit games. I’ve seen lots of bad, unconvincing scanline filters in retro game re-releases, and this isn’t one of them.

The basic Trinitron filter is available by default for “suitable” cores, which in our testing tends to mean “home consoles that were meant to be connected to a CRT TV.” FPGA cores for portable systems like the Game Boy or Game Boy Advance, which shipped with old but scanline-less LCD screens, don’t have the filter available. Third-party FPGA core developers will need to add support for additional screen filters themselves, something that most developers still haven’t done as of this writing.

  • A zoomed-in photo of the screen with no filters enabled. It’s sharp and crisp, and even zoomed in with a good mirrorless camera it’s difficult to make out individual pixels on the Pocket’s screen.

    Andrew Cunningham

  • The same scene with the Trinitron CRT filter enabled. Subtle scanlines, visible CRT “pixels,” and just the right amount of blurring makes the picture look more period-accurate.

    Andrew Cunningham

  • Zoomed out, scanlines off.

    Andrew Cunningham

  • Scanlines on, default “integer” scaling used. This is the most accurate aspect ratio, but it leaves a black border of unused pixels around the screen.

    Andrew Cunningham

  • Scanlines on, Integer+ mode used. This eliminates the black border and, to my eyes, looks just fine on the Pocket’s screen and makes the effect of the scanline filter easier to see.

    Andrew Cunningham

The Trinitron filter looks good on the Pocket’s screen, but it’s subtle; you may appreciate the scanline effect more and notice its downside less if you’re playing while connected to a TV with the Analogue Dock. And at least on the NES and SNES cores I tested it with, it has the undesirable side effect of shrinking the game picture down on what is already a fairly small screen. This default setting can be tweaked without visibly degrading the image quality, at least not to my eyes; just switch from the default Integer scaling mode in the display settings to Integer+.

The screen filters are probably the most interesting and requested new feature for the Pocket, but both firmware updates have many other smaller fixes and additions. Firmware version 1.2 fixes numerous issues with sleep/wake and save states for various games, allows FPGA cores to use cartridge adapters, and lets FPGA cores know when the Pocket is in a dock; when docked, it also adds support for additional controllers and fixes issues with others. Version 2.0 adds support for custom color palettes for Game Boy games, allows FPGA cores to switch aspect ratios when docked, and fixes a “video issue with some openFPGA cores and resolutions” when docked.

To update the Pocket’s firmware, connect the device’s microSD card to your computer and drop one of the firmware update .bin files into the root directory (make sure you delete any older firmware files first since the Pocket won’t delete old update files once it’s done with them). Next time you boot the console, it should install the firmware update and reboot. As usual, when performing any software or firmware update, it’s best to ensure the console is fully charged or plugged in before you start the process.

Flurry of firmware updates makes Analogue Pocket an even better retro handheld Read More »

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How to Emulate Old Pokemon Games on Your Android Phone

Android Apps, Emulation, Free Games, gaming, Highlights, Mobile Gaming, Pokémon, Retro Gaming, Role-Playing Games / /

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