Nintendo

how-to-port-any-n64-game-to-the-pc-in-record-time

How to port any N64 game to the PC in record time

Enlarge / “N-tel (64) Inside”

Aurich Lawson | Getty Images

In recent years, we’ve reported on multiple efforts to reverse-engineer Nintendo 64 games into fully decompiled, human-readable C code that can then become the basis for full-fledged PC ports. While the results can be impressive, the decompilation process can take years of painstaking manual effort, meaning only the most popular N64 games are likely to get the requisite attention from reverse engineers.

Now, a newly released tool promises to vastly reduce the amount of human effort needed to get basic PC ports of most (if not all) N64 games. The N64 Recompiled project uses a process known as static recompilation to automate huge swaths of the labor-intensive process of drawing C code out of N64 binaries.

While human coding work is still needed to smooth out the edges, project lead Mr-Wiseguy told Ars that his recompilation tool is “the difference between weeks of work and years of work” when it comes to making a PC version of a classic N64 title. And parallel work on a powerful N64 graphic renderer means PC-enabled upgrades like smoother frame rates, resolution upscaling, and widescreen aspect ratios can be added with little effort.

Inspiration hits

Mr-Wiseguy told Ars he got his start in the N64 coding space working on various mod projects around 2020. In 2022, he started contributing to the then-new RT64 renderer project, which grew out of work on a ray-traced Super Mario 64 port into a more generalized effort to clean up the notoriously tricky process of recreating N64 graphics accurately. While working on that project, Mr-Wiseguy said he stumbled across an existing project that automates the disassembly of NES games and another that emulates an old SGI compiler to aid in the decompilation of N64 titles.

YouTuber Nerrel lays out some of the benefits of Mr-Wiseguy’s N64 recompilation tool.

“I realized it would be really easy to hook up the RT64 renderer to a game if it could be run through a similar static recompilation process,” Mr-Wiseguy told Ars. “So I put together a proof of concept to run a really simple game and then the project grew from there until it could run some of the more complex games.”

A basic proof of concept for Mr-Wiseguy’s idea took only “a couple of weeks at most” to get up and running, he said, and was ready as far back as November of 2022. Since then, months of off-and-on work have gone into rounding out the conversion code and getting a recompiled version of The Legend of Zelda: Majora’s Mask ready for public consumption.

Trust the process

At its most basic level, the N64 recompilation tool takes a raw game binary (provided by the user) and reprocesses every single instruction directly and literally into corresponding C code. The N64’s MIPS instruction set has been pretty well-documented over years of emulation work, so figuring out how to translate each individual opcode to its C equivalent isn’t too much of a hassle.

Wave Race 64.” height=”360″ src=”https://cdn.arstechnica.net/wp-content/uploads/2024/05/recomprt2-640×360.png” width=”640″>

Enlarge / An early beta of the RT64 renderer shows how ray-tracing shadows and reflections might look in a port of Wave Race 64.

The main difficulty, Mr-Wiseguy said, can be figuring out where to point the tool. “The contents of the [N64] ROM can be laid out however the developer chose to do so, which means you have to find where code is in the ROM before you can even start the static recompilation process,” he explained. And while N64 emulators automatically handle games that load and unload code throughout memory at runtime, handling those cases in a pre-compiled binary can add extra layers of complexity.

How to port any N64 game to the PC in record time Read More »

nintendo-pre-announces-a-switch-2-announcement-is-coming…-eventually

Nintendo pre-announces a Switch 2 announcement is coming… eventually

We’ll tell you later —

More info promised sometime before the end of March 2025.

Nintendo will eventually gift us Switch 2 information, hopefully in time for Christmas.

Enlarge / Nintendo will eventually gift us Switch 2 information, hopefully in time for Christmas.

Aurich Lawson

While the past few months have included plenty of informed speculation about the so-called Switch 2, Nintendo hasn’t given even a bare hint that the system is in the works. That changed at least somewhat last night, as Nintendo President Shinto Furukawa shared on social media that “we will make an announcement about the successor to Nintendo Switch within this fiscal year,” which ends on March 31, 2025.

In his pre-announcement announcement, Furukawa warned that an upcoming Nintendo Direct presentation planned for June would include “no mention of the Nintendo Switch successor,” suggesting more information may be coming closer to the end of the fiscal year than the beginning.

Furukawa notes that the eventual announcement will come over nine years after Nintendo first alluded to the Switch’s existence with the March 2015 announcement of a console then called “Project NX.” Nintendo didn’t show that hardware publicly until 19 months later, with a three-minute preview trailer that dropped in October 2016. Hands-on press previews for the Switch came three months after that, and we then had to wait almost two more months for the console to finally hit store shelves in March of 2017.

We probably won’t have to wait two years between the formal announcement and retail launch of the Switch 2, though; multiple reports have suggested that Nintendo is aiming for an early 2025 release for the updated hardware. The nearly eight-year gap between the launch of the Switch and its successors would mark a historically long wait for Nintendo home console hardware, which tends to see a refresh every five to six years. But Nintendo did wait nine years before following the original (and best-selling) Game Boy with the Game Boy Color.

Reports have suggested that select third-party developers have had access to the Switch 2 since the middle of last year and that Nintendo is holding off on the release to prepare a stronger launch lineup of first-party software. On that score, we’d like to point out that it has now been nearly seven years since the original announcement of Metroid Prime 4 (and over five years since Nintendo restarted development with a new studio).

The Switch 2 pre-announcement comes alongside the release of Nintendo’s latest financial results, in which Nintendo said it sold 15.7 million Nintendo Switch units in the 12-month period ending in March. That’s down quite a bit from the system’s peak sales in the 2020–2021 fiscal year, but it’s still a substantial sales performance for an aging system that has now passed 141 million total units sold since 2017. The overall numbers are closing in on the record currently held by the PS2 (155 million sales) and the Nintendo DS (154 million).

Nintendo pre-announces a Switch 2 announcement is coming… eventually Read More »

switch-2-reportedly-replaces-slide-in-joy-cons-with-magnetic-attachment

Switch 2 reportedly replaces slide-in Joy-Cons with magnetic attachment

Switch-ing magnets, how do they work? —

Design choice may have implications for current Joy-Con compatibility.

The slide-on Joy-Con connection point shown in the center of the image may be a thing of the past on the Switch 2

Enlarge / The slide-on Joy-Con connection point shown in the center of the image may be a thing of the past on the Switch 2

The iconic slide-in “click” of the Switch Joy-Cons may be replaced with a magnetic attachment mechanism in the Switch 2, according to a report from Spanish-language gaming news site Vandal.

The site notes that this new design could make direct Switch 2 backward compatibility with existing Switch Joy-Cons “difficult.” Even so, we can envision some sort of optional magnetic shim that could make older Joy-Cons attachable with the new system’s magnetic connection points. Current Switch Pro Controllers, which do not physically attach to the Switch, should be fully compatible with the Switch 2, according to the report.

Vandal cites several unnamed accessory and peripheral makers who reportedly got to touch the new console inside of an opaque box, which was used to balance design secrecy with the need to provide general knowledge of the unit’s dimensions. According to those sources, the Switch 2 will be “larger than the Switch, although without reaching the size of the Steam Deck.”

In 2021, Vandal accurately reported some early details of the Switch OLED design shortly before the upgraded console’s launch, lending some credence to new Switch 2 reports from the same outlet.

Pick a controller and stick with it

Nintendo has a spotty history with forward-compatibility of controllers on its recent consoles. The company went out of its way to ensure that GameCube controllers worked on the Wii (and the Wii U, to a limited extent), while the Wii U was largely built around compatibility with existing Wii Remotes and control accessories. For the Switch, on the other hand, Nintendo has released a number of limited-edition retro-styled controllers specifically for use with classic Nintendo Switch Online games.

Microsoft has made a point of highlighting that the Xbox Series S/X works with all standard Xbox One controllers (not you, Kinect). PS4 owners, meanwhile, had to purchase new DualSense controllers to use on the PS5.

Regarding software, Nintendo has offered only vague answers on whether the upcoming Switch 2 will be compatible with the thousands of games designed for the current Switch generation. However, some reports suggest that developers are already testing this kind of backward compatibility on Nintendo’s upcoming hardware.

In February, numerous reports suggested that Nintendo was targeting an early 2025 launch for the Switch 2 to give developers more time to create a strong software launch for the unannounced console. Earlier reports suggested the new hybrid console will sport a larger 8-inch screen and could support DLSS upscaling on Ampere-based Nvidia processors.

Switch 2 reportedly replaces slide-in Joy-Cons with magnetic attachment Read More »

putting-microsoft’s-cratering-xbox-console-sales-in-context

Putting Microsoft’s cratering Xbox console sales in context

Down but not out —

Why declining quarterly numbers might not be awful news for Microsoft’s gaming business.

Scale is important, especially when talking about relative console sales.

Enlarge / Scale is important, especially when talking about relative console sales.

Aurich Lawson | Getty Images

Yesterday, Microsoft announced that it made 31 percent less off Xbox hardware in the first quarter of 2024 (ending in March) than it had the year before, a decrease it says was “driven by lower volume of consoles sold.” And that’s not because the console sold particularly well a year ago, either; Xbox hardware revenue for the first calendar quarter of 2023 was already down 30 percent from the previous year.

Those two data points speak to a console that is struggling to substantially increase its player base during a period that should, historically, be its strongest sales period. But getting wider context on those numbers is a bit difficult because of how Microsoft reports its Xbox sales numbers (i.e., only in terms of quarterly changes in total console hardware revenue). Comparing those annual shifts to the unit sales numbers that Nintendo and Sony report every quarter is not exactly simple.

Context clues

Significant declines in Xbox hardware revenue for four of the last five quarters stand out relative to competitors' unit sales.

Enlarge / Significant declines in Xbox hardware revenue for four of the last five quarters stand out relative to competitors’ unit sales.

Kyle Orland

To attempt some direct contextual comparison, we took unit sales numbers for some recent successful Sony and Nintendo consoles and converted them to Microsoft-style year-over-year percentage changes (aligned with the launch date for each console). For this analysis, we skipped over each console’s launch quarter, which contains less than three months of total sales (and often includes a lot of pent-up early adopter demand). We also skipped the first four quarters of a console’s life cycle, which don’t have a year-over-year comparison point from 12 months prior.

This still isn’t a perfect comparison. Unit sales don’t map directly to total hardware revenue due to things like inflation, remainder sales of Xbox One hardware, and price cuts/discounts (though the Xbox Series S/X, PS5, and Switch still have yet to see official price drops). It also doesn’t take into account the baseline sales levels from each console’s first year of sales, making total lifetime sales performance on the Xbox side hard to gauge (though recent data from a Take-Two investment call suggests the Xbox Series S/X has been heavily outsold by the PS5, at this point).

Even with all those caveats, the comparative data trends are pretty clear. At the start of their fourth full year on the market, recent successful consoles have been enjoying a general upswing in their year-over-year sales. Microsoft stands out as a major outlier, making less revenue from Xbox hardware in four of the last five quarters on a year-over-year basis.

Falling like dominoes.

Enlarge / Falling like dominoes.

Aurich Lawson

Those numbers suggest that the hardware sales rate for the Xbox Series S/X may have already peaked in the last year or two. That would be historically early for a console of this type; previous Ars analyses have shown PlayStation consoles generally see their sales peaks in their fourth or fifth year of life, and Nintendo portables have shown a similar sales trend, historically. The Xbox Series S/X progression, on the other hand, looks more similar to that of the Wii U, which was already deep in a “death spiral” at a similar point in its commercial life.

This is not the end

In the past, console sales trends like these would have been the sign of a hardware maker’s wider struggles to stay afloat in the gaming business. However, in today’s gaming market, Microsoft is in a place where console sales are not strictly required for overall success.

For instance, Microsoft’s total gaming revenue for the latest reported quarter was up 51 percent, thanks in large part to the “net impact from the Activision Blizzard acquisition.” Even before that (very expensive) merger was completed, Microsoft’s total gaming revenue was often partially buoyed by “growth in Game Pass” and strong “software content” sales across PC and other platforms.

Owning Call of Duty means being one of the biggest PS5 game publishers almost by definition.

Enlarge / Owning Call of Duty means being one of the biggest PS5 game publishers almost by definition.

Activision

Perhaps it’s no surprise that Microsoft has shown increasing willingness to take some former Xbox console exclusives to other platforms in recent months. In fact, following the Activision/Blizzard merger, Microsoft is now publishing more top-sellers on the PS5 than Sony. And let’s not forget the PC market, where Microsoft continues to sell millions of games above and beyond its PC Game Pass subscription business.

So, while the commercial future of Xbox hardware may look a bit uncertain, the future of Microsoft’s overall gaming business is in much less dire straits. That would be true even if Microsoft’s Xbox hardware revenue fell by 100 percent.

Putting Microsoft’s cratering Xbox console sales in context Read More »

modder-packs-an-entire-nintendo-wii-into-a-box-the-size-of-a-pack-of-cards

Modder packs an entire Nintendo Wii into a box the size of a pack of cards

wii micro —

There’s no disc drive, but there are still ports for GameCube controllers.

Its creator calls the

Enlarge / Its creator calls the “Short Stack” the world’s smallest scale model replica of the Nintendo Wii (bottom).

The miniaturization of retro tech has always been a major obsession for modders, from the person who fit an original NES into a Game Boy-sized portable to the person who made a mini-er version of Apple’s Mac mini.

One mod in this storied genre that caught our eye this week is the “Short Stack,” a scale model of the Nintendo Wii that packs the 2006 console’s internal hardware into a 3D-printed enclosure roughly the size of a deck of playing cards.

“You could fit 13.5 of these inside an original Wii,” writes James Smith (aka loopj), the person behind the project. All the design details, custom boards, and other information about recreating the mod are available on GitHub.

Like many space-saving console mods, the Short Stack requires a cut-down version of the original Wii’s PCB, retaining (and occasionally relocating) the original console’s CPU, GPU, RAM, and NAND flash chip. Power delivery, USB, the Wi-Fi and Bluetooth chips, and GameCube controller ports were all relocated to separate custom PCBs, which also allowed Smith to add HDMI output and a microSD card slot (the original Wii used a full-size SD card and didn’t support digital video output).

  • The Short Stack cleverly hides its GameCube controller ports behind a sliding panel on the side.

  • A headphone jack-to-GameCube dongle preserves GameCube controller compatibility while saving space in the console itself.

  • The cut-down Wii PCB, featuring the original console’s CPU, GPU, RAM, and NAND flash.

  • The Short Stack next to a deck of cards.

Some sacrifices were made in the name of miniaturization. The console’s disc drive is gone, so any games will need to be loaded from a microSD card instead. And the four GameCube controller ports are actually headphone jacks that work over a special adapter. Smith made these headphone-to-GameCube dongles pin-compatible with an earlier mod called the GC Nano, a project that did for the GameCube what the Short Stack does for the Wii.

Smith also designed custom front and rear PCBs for the console to handle things like the power button and the glowing blue light around the Short Stack’s (aesthetic, non-functional) DVD slot. A custom heatsink (Smith uses aluminum, though it can also be made with copper to improve heat transfer at the expense of weight) and a tiny fan keep the console cool.

Nintendo released its own Wii Mini toward the end of the Wii’s life in 2012, but it came with significant compromises: no online connectivity, no GameCube controller ports or game compatibility, and no SD card slot. The Short Stack loses the optical drive for space-saving reasons but otherwise retains all of the features of the original Wii.

Smith says that the Short Stack could probably be as much as 20 to 30 percent smaller without giving up features. But one of the goals of the Short Stack project was to make a scale model of the original Wii, and further shrinkage would make the project “tricky to assemble.”

Modder packs an entire Nintendo Wii into a box the size of a pack of cards Read More »

after-decades-of-mario,-how-do-developers-bridge-a-widening-generation-gap?

After decades of Mario, how do developers bridge a widening generation gap?

A prototype wonder effect—featuring Mario's head turned into blocks that could be eaten by enemies—didn't make it into the final game.

Enlarge / A prototype wonder effect—featuring Mario’s head turned into blocks that could be eaten by enemies—didn’t make it into the final game.

Nintendo

In a game industry that seems to engage in periodic layoffs as a matter of course, it’s often hard for even popular game franchises to maintain continuity in their underlying creative teams from sequel to sequel. Then there’s the Mario series, where every person credited with the creation of the original Super Mario Bros. in the 1980s ended up having a role in the making of Super Mario Bros. Wonder just last year.

In a recent interview with Ars Technica, Wonder producer Takashi Tezuka said it wasn’t that tough to get that kind of creative continuity at Nintendo. “The secret to having a long-tenured staff is that people don’t quit,” he said. “For folks who have been there together for such a long time, it’s easy for us to talk to each other.”

That said, Tezuka added that just getting a bunch of industry veterans together to make a game runs the risk of not “keeping up with the times. Really, for me, I have a great interest in how our newer staff members play, what they play, what they think, and what is appealing to them. I think it’s very interesting the things we can come up with when these two disparate groups influence each other to create something.”

Young and old

For Super Mario Bros. Wonder, the development team solicited literally thousands of ideas for potential game-changing Wonder Effects and badges from across Nintendo. In doing so, the game was able to incorporate the viewpoints of people with a wide variety of histories and memories of the series, Tezuka told Ars.

  • Super Mario Bros. Wonder Producer Takashi Tezuka.

    Nintendo

  • Super Mario Bros. Wonder Director Shiro Mouri.

    Nintendo

“Among our staff, there are folks who actually maybe haven’t played some of the [older] game titles we’re talking about,” he said. “So I think there was some familiarization for those folks with some of those titles. And maybe there was some inspiration drawn from those titles that I’m not aware of.”

For a series as long-running as Mario, though, even some of the relatively “younger” development cohort can have a deep history with the series. Super Mario Bros. Wonder Director Shiro Mouri, who joined Nintendo in 1997, recalled playing the original Super Mario Bros. back in elementary school, and being “so moved and awed by the secrets and mysteries I discovered in that game.” The Wonder Effects in Wonder were an explicit attempt to recapture that feeling of being young and discovering new things for the first time, which can be difficult in such an established series.

Mouri also drew some parallels between Yoshi’s Island—where Yoshi could sometimes turn into a vehicle—and Wonder transformation effects that could turn the player into slime or a spiky ball, for instance. “That’s not to say that we drew [direct] inspiration from [Yoshi’s Island] or anything, but I think… providing surprises has always been a theme throughout our philosophy,” he said.

After decades of Mario, how do developers bridge a widening generation gap? Read More »

nintendo-targets-switch-emulation-chat-servers,-decryption-tools-with-dmca

Nintendo targets Switch-emulation chat servers, decryption tools with DMCA

Tightening the clamps —

Legal fallout continues following Yuzu lawsuit.

Is a name like

Enlarge / Is a name like “Suyu” ironic enough to avoid facing a lawsuit?

Suyu

Nintendo continues to use DMCA requests to halt projects it says aid in the piracy of Switch content. Discord has shut down the discussion servers associated with two prominent Yuzu forks—Suyu and Sudachi—while GitHub has removed a couple of projects related to the decryption of Switch software for use with emulators or hacked consoles.

The takedowns are the latest aftershocks from Nintendo’s federal lawsuit against Switch emulator Yuzu, which led to a $2.4 million settlement weeks later. Yuzu voluntarily shut down its GitHub page and Discord server as part of that settlement, though archived discussions from Discord are still accessible.

That settlement includes a section prohibiting the makers of Yuzu from “acting in active concert and participation” with third parties in the distribution or promotion of Yuzu or any clones that make use of its code. But there’s no evidence that anyone enjoined by that settlement is actively working with Suyu or Sudachi on their projects.

“Discord responds to and complies with all legal and valid Digital Millennium Copyright Act requests,” a company spokesperson told The Verge. “In this instance, there was also a court-ordered injunction for the takedown of these materials, and we took action in a manner consistent with the court order.”

On GitHub, Nintendo’s latest DMCA requests focus on two tools: Sigpatch Updater, which the company says “allow[s] users to bypass the signature verification” in Switch games, and Lockpick, which allows “unauthorized access to, extraction of, and decryption of all the cryptographic keys, including product keys, contained in the Nintendo Switch” on modded consoles, Nintendo says.

You can run…

Last month, one of the moderators behind the Suyu project told Ars Technica that Suyu had taken pains to avoid the legal pitfalls that tripped up Yuzu before it. That includes Discord server rules that strictly prohibited any discussion of piracy, including “asking for system files, ROMs, encryption keys, shader caches, and discussion of leaked games etc.”

Discord’s “Copyright & IP policy” requires complaints to include “a description of where the material you think is infringing is located on our services.” Both Suyu and Sudachi host their core emulation files on services separate from Discord.

Suyu began hosting its Git files locally after a takedown request on its GitLab repository was served late last month. Following the Discord takedown, the project now also hosts its own chat service via its website. Sudachi’s emulator files, meanwhile, remain available on GitHub as of press time.

The Discord server for Ryujinx—a separate Switch emulator that doesn’t share any code with Yuzu—remains active as of press time. “Nothing is happening to Ryujinx,” reads an automated message on that server. “We know nothing more than you do. No dooming.”

Nintendo targets Switch-emulation chat servers, decryption tools with DMCA Read More »

switch-emulator-suyu-hit-by-gitlab-dmca,-project-lives-on-through-self-hosting

Switch emulator Suyu hit by GitLab DMCA, project lives on through self-hosting

They can run… —

Developer says there’s “no way to confirm” if Nintendo was involved in takedown.

Is a name like

Enlarge / Is a name like “Suyu” ironic enough to avoid facing a lawsuit?

Suyu

Switch emulator Suyu—a fork of the Nintendo-targeted and now-defunct emulation project Yuzu—has been taken down from GitLab following a DMCA request Thursday. But the emulation project’s open source files remain available on a self-hosted git repo on the Suyu website, and recent compiled binaries remain available on an extant GitLab repo.

While the DMCA takedown request has not yet appeared on GitLab’s public repository of such requests, a GitLab spokesperson confirmed to The Verge that the project was taken down after the site received notice “from a representative of the rightsholder.” GitLab has not specified who made the request or how they represented themselves; a representative for Nintendo was not immediately available to respond to a request for comment.

An email to Suyu contributors being shared on the project’s Discord server includes the following cited justification in the DMCA request:

Suyu is based off of Yuzu code, which violates Section 1201 of the DMCA. Suyu, like yuzu, is primarily designed to circumvent Nintendo’s technical protection measures, namely Suyu unlawfully uses unauthorized copies of cryptographic keys to decrypt unauthorized copies of Nintendo Switch games, or ROMs, at or immediately before runtime without Nintendo’s authorization. Therefore, the distribution of Suyu also constitutes unlawful trafficking of a circumvention technology.

A Suyu Discord moderator going by the handle Princess Twilight Sparkle shared a message Thursday evening citing the project’s “legal team” in reporting that Suyu will have to use the self-hosted Git repo “in the foreseeable future. Getting our GitLab back most likely needs us to go through a lawsuit, which is going to be very difficult… Thanks for your understanding.”

Troy, listed as a “Core Suyu Developer” in the Discord server, wrote Thursday afternoon that the DMCA request came from an “unknown source” and that there is “no way to confirm” if Nintendo was involved. “There is also a possibility that the person who sent this DMCA is a copyright troll, like on YouTube, based on the wording of the DMCA reason that was sent to GitLab,” Troy wrote.

Suyu Discord moderator and contributor Sharpie told Ars Technica that “we don’t have any more information than you at this time.”

Earlier this month, Sharpie outlined to Ars many steps the project’s developers were taking to avoid potential legal consequences, including avoiding “any monetization” and taking a hardline stance on any discussion of piracy. Despite those precautions, Sharpie admitted to Ars that “Suyu currently exists in a legal gray area we are trying to work our way out of.”

Switch emulator Suyu hit by GitLab DMCA, project lives on through self-hosting Read More »

here’s-how-the-makers-of-the-“suyu”-switch-emulator-plan-to-avoid-getting-sued

Here’s how the makers of the “Suyu” Switch emulator plan to avoid getting sued

Is a name like

Enlarge / Is a name like “Suyu” ironic enough to avoid facing a lawsuit?

Suyu

Last week, the developers behind the popular Switch emulator Yuzu took down their GitHub and web presence in the face of a major lawsuit from Nintendo. Now, a new project built from the Yuzu source code, cheekily named Suyu, has arisen as “the continuation of the world’s most popular, open-source Nintendo Switch emulator, Yuzu.”

Despite the name—which the project’s GitHub page notes is “pronounced ‘sue-you’ (wink, wink)”—the developers behind Suyu are going out of their way to try to avoid a lawsuit like the one that took down Yuzu.

“Suyu currently exists in a legal gray area we are trying to work our way out of,” contributor and Discord moderator Sharpie told Ars in a recent interview. “There are multiple plans and possibilities for what to do next. Things are still being organized and planned.”

Doing things differently

The Suyu project arose out of “a passion for Switch emulation” and a desire not to see “years of impressive work by the Yuzu team go to waste,” Sharpie said. But that passion is being tempered by a cautious approach designed to avoid the legal fate that befell the project’s predecessor.

After consulting with an unnamed “someone with legal experience” (Sharpie would only say “they claimed three years of law school”), the Suyu development team has decided to avoid “any monetization,” Sharpie said. The project’s GitHub page clearly states that “we do not intend to make money or profit from this project,” an important declaration after Nintendo cited Yuzu’s profitability a few times in its recent lawsuit. Other emulator makers also told Ars that Yuzu’s Patreon opened the project up to a set of pesky consumer demands and expectations.

The Suyu devs have also been warned against “providing step-by-step guides” like the ones that Yuzu offered for how to play copyrighted games on their emulator. Those guides were a major focus of Nintendo’s lawsuit, as were some examples of developer conversations in the Yuzu Discord that seemed to acknowledge and condone piracy.

Xenoblade Chronicles the day before its release.” height=”626″ src=”https://cdn.arstechnica.net/wp-content/uploads/2024/03/yuzuleak-640×626.png” width=”640″>

Enlarge / In a blog post cited in Nintendo’s lawsuit, the Yuzu developers discuss compatibility with a leaked copy of Xenoblade Chronicles the day before its release.

Suyu, by contrast, is taking an extremely hard line against even the hint of any discussion of potential piracy on its platforms. The Suyu GitHub page is upfront that the developers “do not support or condone piracy in any form,” a message that didn’t appear on Yuzu’s GitHub page or website.

The No. 1 rule listed on the Suyu Discord is that “piracy is prohibited.” That includes any talk about downloading games or “asking for system files, ROMs, encryption keys, shader caches, and discussion of leaked games etc.” Even a mention of the word piracy with regard to legal questions is enough to earn a warning on the Discord, according to those rules.

Here’s how the makers of the “Suyu” Switch emulator plan to avoid getting sued Read More »

what-a-potential-post-xbox-future-could-mean-for-sony-and-nintendo

What a potential post-Xbox future could mean for Sony and Nintendo

shifting landscape —

“All signs point to the hardware becoming less and less important to Microsoft.”

What a potential post-Xbox future could mean for Sony and Nintendo

Aurich Lawson

Microsoft’s decision to ease off its 23-year competition with Sony and Nintendo over supremacy in games hardware has opened a path for Japan’s return as the world’s undisputed home of the console.

The prospect of a new, less internationalized era of console wars has raised hopes of happier times for the Japanese survivors but has also caused analysts and investors to revisit the question of how much longer the whole genre of dedicated games machines will continue to exist.

Microsoft head of gaming Phil Spencer last month revealed plans to release what would previously have been exclusively Xbox games for use on rival platforms, as part of a new focus on cloud-based gaming.

While the US technology giant has said it is still working on a new generation of more powerful consoles, analysts think its long-term direction is clear.

“All signs point to the hardware becoming less and less important to Microsoft, so there is that possibility that we could go back to a point like we were in the 1990s where the viable choices of console were all Japanese,” said Serkan Toto, head of the games consultancy Kantan Games.

Giving up the console fight to concentrate on software could be taken as a huge victory for Japan. To many, the birthplace of Super Mario, Sonic the Hedgehog, Final Fantasy, and Pokémon is the spiritual home of the console and has featured the industry’s fiercest “golden age” 1980s and 1990s clashes of Nintendo vs Sega, and later, Nintendo vs Sony.

“It may not happen immediately because the technology of cloud gaming is clearly not ready yet, but from what Microsoft is indicating, there is a possibility that we go back to an all-Japan console industry with Sony and Nintendo each dominating their part of that market in their different, unique ways,” said David Gibson, an analyst at MST Financial.

But the return to a Japan-only industry for dedicated games hardware could more clearly define the console as a commercial cul-de-sac.

That issue, said independent games analyst Pelham Smithers, could be particularly acute for Sony, which last week announced plans to cut 900 staff from its games unit.

“It was tough enough for Sony arguing the need to investors for a PS5—and a lot of people at the time were saying that the PS5 could be the end of the line—but Microsoft’s commitment to console gaming helped,” said Smithers.

Nintendo, meanwhile, faces an issue of timing. Its Switch machine, released in 2017 and now significantly underpowered even when compared with some mobile phones, is to be replaced with a next-generation successor. But the Kyoto-based company has yet to say precisely when and what it will look like.

Analysts said Nintendo is still traumatized by the experience in 2012 when it launched a poorly conceived successor to the global blockbuster Wii console.

Sales of the existing Switch are respectable, said Toto, but more or less everyone who wanted the console has bought one by now. The market, he said, will be waiting for Nintendo’s successor and may hold back on buying games for the Switch ahead of a new machine being released.

Gibson said Sony’s problems are very different: its PS5 machine, now four years old, is popular, but its games business is now guided by “accountants,” rather than people primed to manage a creative business.

Previous generations of the PlayStation had been launched with an expectation that the machine would initially be sold at a loss, before the price of components quickly fell, allowing the company to break even and, in time, allow price cuts for customers.

By its fifth year of release the PS4 had two price cuts totaling $100. The PS5 has had none. “With the accountants in charge, Sony is not prepared to cut prices by $100 to stimulate demand because that would cost $2 billion in profits,” Gibson said.

Microsoft, which has spent huge sums on acquisitions of game studios such as the $75 billion purchase of Activision, is facing similar issues with its hardware economics. Analysts said the US company may have greater motivation than Sony to become an all-platform king.

“The state of the console market right now may not be an advertisement per se for Japan getting its mojo back. It feels more like these three very idiosyncratic businesses are doing well or not for idiosyncratic reasons,” said Robin Zhu, games analyst at Bernstein.

There is a chance that Microsoft’s new direction is a “win, win, win situation,” according to Atul Goyal at Jefferies, because of the different situation each company finds itself in.

Microsoft, he said, could pump up returns by offering its games across different platforms, while Nintendo and Sony would face “less intense competition” and benefit from having a wider choice of titles for customers.

But, as Zhu said, one factor that might keep Microsoft from killing off the Xbox entirely is the same thing that will keep Sony and Nintendo in the market—the fierce loyalty of gamers.

“The concern [Microsoft] will have is that you’ve already convinced your customers to buy the hardware; by telling them that Xbox games will be on every other platform, you risk upsetting your highest engagement and most dogmatic customers,” he said.

© 2024 The Financial Times Ltd. All rights reserved Not to be redistributed, copied, or modified in any way.

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emulation-community-expresses-defiance-in-wake-of-nintendo’s-yuzu-lawsuit

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

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?

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