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- cross-posted to:
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The list of reasons why I refuse to buy Nintendo products is getting pretty hefty at this point.
Damn, I modded my Switch JUST in time! Thanks for giving me the motivation, Nintendo!
The team behind Yuzu is different from ReSwitched and Atmosphere, so you were fine either way.
This just means Yuzu agrees to delete their copies of the tools they used and send Nintendo their hacked Switch consoles (probably to be destroyed).
Although the fact that these programs were named means that Nintendo’s Eye of Sauron is on them - the extra attention makes me nervous. I definitely would have modded it this weekend if I hadn’t already decided to last weekend.
There is no world where these tools exists and Nintendo does not know them. It’s not some deep darknet secret lore hidden behind seven-VPN. Anything that happens online about emulation, all the company knows it exists and how it works. The threat never goes away.
I know, but there’s a difference between “knows they exist” and “is naming them in legal documentation”.
Good point.
Of these, I would only really be concerned about nxDumpTool, nxDumpFuse, and Lockpick_RCM as possible to come after using the same strategy, though. And even then, Lockpick_RCM was already taken down and mass redistributed.
It’s not illegal to modify the hardware you own, and the rest of those aren’t directly interacting with Nintendo’s DRM-protected software. The only one that they could arguably go after is Atmosphère, but SciresM has held a very strong public pro-homebrew and anti-piracy stance which makes it extremely hard for Nintendo to argue that it’s primary purpose is DRM circumvention.
I plan on making offline archives of Hekate and Atmosphère at some point, in either case.
Wait Yuzu were behind all the other tools?? Surely that was other people?
Pretty sure they’re all by other people. Maybe they were hosting copies on their own server or something? Possibly they were just using them for Yuzu development.
I did not… 😭
I imagine you’ll still be able to do so for a while, if not forever. But probably worth doing it sooner rather than later if you’re interested, just in case! Modding it has nothing to do with Yuzu, so I’m not sure why these other programs are involved.
Yuzu fucked up. This is about more than the decryption. Yuzu’s actions (copypasta from a fine redditor):
- Massive patreon, to the point it has an LLC set to manage the money flow
- Early access releases are effectively SOLD, they fucked around with manifest/build files, abused GPL to go after some forks back when they were Citra, attacked other forks/emulators then benefitted from their work and even replicated their practices (like CEMU’s patreon), etc
- Actively targets Switch competitors (Steam Deck, Android), to the point Valve once included it in a marketing reel
- Its presence on the OFFICIAL Android play store rather than an apk competes with Nintendo’s own Android games (undermining both those and the Switch)
- Unauthorized use of Nintendo imagery
- Extensive telemetry, itself juicy data that could be sold for advertisers, on top of Nintendo’s own built-in telemetry that’s also sent
- Patreon marketing is heavily focused on games that broke street day release date, and even when they show some “restraint” it’s just a release day post how much better the game runs on a platform that’s not the Nintendo Switch, in the same launch period where most sales happen
- Progress reports timed suspiciously close to major Nintendo first-party releases
- ATTEMPTED to make a competitor to the Switch Online service, using files from an external preservation group, and it would have been a PAID service, and the subscription MORE EXPENSIVE than Nintendo’s actual service (it was $60 something) despite smaller compatibility, for games still online, as a CLOSED-SOURCE FORK of a GPL PROJECT so that players don’t actually set up their own custom servers to avoid paying Yuzu’s pittance. When there was backlash, they REMOVED all traces of online emulation after they couldn’t profit off it.
Yeah their problem was to make it a commercial operation. At that point it’s trivial for Nintendo to show they’ve enriched themselves on the back of ripped ROMs by enabling them.
Whereas if you do everything for free and don’t even accept donations, they’d have a big problem showing that you have any commercial interest and hence can be sued for damages.
The problem is that this shit is a lot of work that we all benefit from… So how do we compensate the devs?
We don’t, that’s kinda the point. If you want to compensate the developers, you should buy their games.
Early access releases are effectively SOLD, they fucked around with manifest/build files, abused GPL to go after some forks back when they were Citra, attacked other forks/emulators then benefitted from their work and even replicated their practices (like CEMU’s patreon), etc
Source on this?
Also saying that EA was being sold is false, they were shipping precompiled binaries with the EA branches for the patrons, they were actually using the people that paid them for testing lol.
If you used linux there was even an Aur package that built yuzu ea for you, which I quickly stopped using because EA was just the equivalent of the testing repo of archlinux, if you ever read their updates on their main discord, half the time the next EA release just removed a PR that broke something after release.
Progress reports timed suspiciously close to major Nintendo first-party releases
They only made progress reports once a month lol, and iirc the progress report for totk was several weeks after release even.
Its presence on the OFFICIAL Android play store rather than an apk competes with Nintendo’s own Android games (undermining both those and the Switch)
Nothing wrong here, even dolphin has a official apk on the playstore, and yuzu actually even released a non playstore apk for people like me with an ungoogled phone lol.
Extensive telemetry, itself juicy data that could be sold for advertisers, on top of Nintendo’s own built-in telemetry that’s also sent
Bullshit, their logs only contain info about the hardware, which is something you need to debug lol, Ryu logs are the same.
ATTEMPTED to make a competitor to the Switch Online service, using files from an external preservation group, and it would have been a PAID service, and the subscription MORE EXPENSIVE than Nintendo’s actual service (it was $60 something) despite smaller compatibility, for games still online, as a CLOSED-SOURCE FORK of a GPL PROJECT so that players don’t actually set up their own custom servers to avoid paying Yuzu’s pittance. When there was backlash, they REMOVED all traces of online emulation after they couldn’t profit off it.
I also want a source on this.
Here ist the latest mainline Windows build: https://archive.org/details/yuzu-windows-msvc-20240227-120358cf6
You, sir/madam, are amazing.
Thx!! :) have a nice day!
I’m more than a little miffed that Nintendo has my Patreon dollars.
Teaches you not to donate to commercial companies like Yuzu, they can run their own show. Or couldn’t, I suppose. 😅
Here is the latest stable build of Yuzu that I’ve got from 24 hours ago for anyone who wasn’t able to download it in time.
You wanna believe I downloaded it as soon as this was announced. Been playing some Metroid Dread on a 32 inch monitor with a controller that doesn’t cramp up my hands the past couple of days. Thanks for giving me the push I needed Nintendo! I might have just been happy with my Steam library instead.
Can you share the repo?
A user named kadu was offering it up to all in the earlier thread. He said it’d be available as long as he was around. Just DM him for the link.
Is there any way to turn off Yuzu auto-update? I don’t want my computer connecting to a website that Nintendo now owns every time I boot up Yuzu.
Edit the computer hosts file to resolve yuzu-emu.org to 0.0.0.0 or 127.0.0.1? That will stop it from connecting, at least.
Assuming you’re using Windows: https://www.howtogeek.com/784196/how-to-edit-the-hosts-file-on-windows-10-or-11/
Point its domain at 127.0.0.1.
You can do the same on Linux by editing
/etc/hosts
I got all the latest builds of Yuzu, which will I will soon upload to Mega, but it didn’t occur to me to download the tools.
Ok, so I’m not gonna buy anything from Nintendo anymore. Got it.
That’s nuts.
No, it’s a citrus fruit.
Uh…
Welp. I guess it’s time to pirate double that in Nintendo IP.
Ryujinx is still around, also fuck Nintendo even thought I had bought all the games I play on Yuzu from here on out if I ever buy a Nintendo console it will be only if there is a method to pirate games on that shit. They don’t deserve my money cause their hardware is shit it was 5 years outdated when the switch came out. I want to play my games at 60 FPS and without my eyes bleeding due to the shit resolution and anti-aliasing. So if they want my money they need to pull a Sony and release their games on pc!
Now that yuzu is gone they’re going to be rolling in theoretical money.
I’m sure something else will eventually come along. The only way to stop emulators from existing is to not have a system at all. I.e., if Nintendo were to stop making video game hardware, then there would be no new emulators except for ones developed for previous/existing hardware.
Removed by mod
It probably will soon. They have a Patreon and also use
prod.keysto decrypt games, and now Nintendo knows they can succeed on forcing settlements over this.Their problem is - as always with this - the fact that they accept money for it. Granted in Ryujinx’s case Nintendo has a far far far bigger barrier to climb as they weren’t idiots who created a whole bloody LLC for it, which trivially proved commercial interest.
You have to use prod.keys, don’t you? There shouldn’t be anything illegal about using prod.keys as long as you don’t distribute the file.
Decrypting the ROM ahead of time and requiring that to be used would be the safe alternative.
It would require a separate tool to do that first, but decoupling the steps would prevent Nintendo from going after the much-harder-to-develop emulator using the argument they used here. If they kill the decryption tool, another one pops up.
I don’t know if this would ‘satisfy’ them (I know it wouldn’t, I’m referring strictly to the legal stuff). From what I’ve heard, the point Nintendo was making wrt the encryption is that aquiring
prod.keysin any way, shape or form is illegal. Of course, creating an emulator for a system that only runs games that contain encryption which can only be undone withprod.keysrequires the developers to have this file. Since they’ve successfully made an emulator, this implies that the Yuzu team has in fact obtained a copy of this file and done something naughty.The problem is that, regardless of whether or not the decryption happens in Yuzu or in another completely separate program, modern Nintendo games do not come unencrypted. This means that someone at some point has to decrypt the files, and thus has to use
prod.keysto do so. According to Nintendo, using and creating any emulator for a modern system requires someone to do something illegal at one point in the chain, and therefore emulation (by parties not explicitly authorized by Nintendo) cannot legally exist.I say that Nintendo should piss off after I’ve bought something from them and that I should be allowed to do with my property as I please, but even the most legally and morally correct way to emulate is not okay with them.
This raises the following question: if Nintendo does not respect in the slightest our property rights by pulling such stunts, why should we as end users respect their intellectual property rights? Why go through all the effort of clean room reverse engineering a console instead of blatantly copying as much of the official code base as possible if the legal system punishes you all the same? Why limit yourself to only emulating games you personally ripped from your own cartridges if the act of ripping has already placed your actions into the “illegal” category?
The emulator itself doesn’t necessarily have to exist only to run retail games. It could be used to develop or debug homebrew and marketed as such. They wouldn’t even need to have decrypted the operating system to understand it, as Atmosphère is a complete reimplementation untainted by Nintendo code.
If it ran retail games as a consequence of being accurate to real hardware, that would just be a happy accident. And as long as the developers don’t acknowledge running retail games and don’t directly assist in fixing them, they have plausible deniability.
This raises the following question: if Nintendo does not respect in the slightest our property rights by pulling such stunts, why should we as end users respect their intellectual property rights?
I’m a big fan of the “buy a game and crack it right after” philosophy. Respect property rights until something is in one’s legitimate possession, and then remove any encumbrances preventing it from being used in the way the purchaser wanted.
Ryujinx still exists…though probably not for long.
