Speculating here but it feels like part of Nintendo's beef is the popularity of PC form factors that look like a Nintendo Switch. Most notably the Steam Deck but there are loads of them.
I found it funny that Linus of LMG endorsed this setup not because it is better, but because Yuzu doesn't hold your savegames hostage. If you don't know: you can't backup saves, they get written to NAND, not the SD card. you can however buy cloud backup, but only for games that don't opt out.
Truly a problem of Nintendo's own petty making if even switch owners with a legitimate copy prefer to not run on their hardware.
If you have a hacked console (paperclip with a 1st year console, modchip with later ones), you can back up your saves using a homebrew app (checkpoint) if you remember to do it regularly.
You can also copy the saves off the console (or the emulated NAND you're supposed to create when hacking it) by running a different app (TegraExplorer) right from the bootloader. I had to do this when I messed up an update and my system wouldn't boot, but I hadn't backed up my saves in months.
I do wonder if anyone's attempted to get nintendo to respond to a subject access request in the EU to get their saves from their cloud service.
I didn't want to run CFW, so I have actually written a tool to back up and decrypt all saves in a single click given any vulnerable Switch in RCM Mode. It's been really quite useful.
The savegame situation was part of what made me less interested in my Switch over time - I just didn't want to invest much time in any long-term games where I couldn't actually back up the savegames in any direct way. Now it gets pulled out every now and then when the kids want to play Club House Games or Mario Party.
Note: I am not a lawyer, this is not legal advice.
In the EU, reverse engineering is allowed by law if the reason for doing so is interoperability by the one who owns a license to the product in question.
"The authorisation of the rightholder shall not be required where reproduction of the code and translation of its form within the meaning of points (a) and (b) of Article 4(1) are indispensable to obtain the information necessary to achieve the interoperability of an independently created computer program with other programs, provided that the following conditions are met:
(a) those acts are performed by the licensee or by another person having a right to use a copy of a program, or on their behalf by a person authorised to do so;
(b) the information necessary to achieve interoperability has not previously been readily available to the persons referred to in point (a); and
(c) those acts are confined to the parts of the original program which are necessary in order to achieve interoperability."
Luckily Nintendo (Shadowrun is still some years away, when Ninsonmicro determines what is legal and what isn't) is not the authority to determine if something is illegal or not. But of course they are entitled to their own opinion.
Here in France, as far as I know I have a right to private copy, which I pay for through a specific tax whenever I buy storage. I can rip my DVDs, Blu-rays, or even Nintendo Switch cartridges or hard drive, perfectly legally, even if it means cracking open the thing and circumvent stuff. It's awfully less convenient than downloading the stuff, but it is legal. Or at least it was 20 years ago, but I'm not aware of any change on that front.
Now there should be some ground rule. When you buy something, it's supposed to be yours, and you should be allowed to do what you want with it, especially studying it and sharing the results of your study. Any rule that allows some big corporation to retain power over something that's supposed to be yours is serious overreach and should be shut down.
Now Nintendo does have a big problem here: without the exclusivity of their form factor (which is arguably difficult to improve upon[1]), all they have left is the exclusivity of their game library.
In Sweden it was like that, but after some prodding and patting by "market forces" on the politicians it's no longer legal, but the tax is still there.
TL;DR: it's more complicated than I thought. First, the law was introduced in 2006, so before it, circumventing DRM and publishing how to do it was not a crime. (Of course, publishing copyrighted works with no proper authorisation was already a crime, regardless of DRM.)
Then for a brief time, circumventing DRM was outlawed. But fear of foreign monopolies (most notably Microsoft) and free software lobbying eventually had those articles amended, effectively exempting research and free software from any sanction. The exact limits of the current law are still fuzzy, but it seems pretty clear that using VLC to make copy of a DVD I own is 100% legal in France.
Are they really rare? I have an older switch that is easily hackable and can’t be blocked due to it being a hardware vulnerability but I have never bothered to hack it as I just don’t know if it is worth it. Not sure if you can continue to play online once hacked and I assume once hacked play pirated games as why else hack it. But I haven’t pirated games in a long time I wonder if it is worth it. What the switch really needs is a messaging app maybe hacked switches can do that idk.
The detachable joycon with accelerometer control are a mechanic in some games (eg. Zelda crossbow aim). I would imagine this would be worse experience on steam deck.
Better as in much better framerate with no performance drops. At least that's what I've heard.
Pretty much all the games I have played allowed to disable the motion controls. I think it counts towards accessibility. Personally I really dislike the whole motion control aspect so always turn them off. Zelda included.
I'm sure there are other tradeoffs as well. But would love it see what it's like on an emulator. Or maybe not, it might make running games on the original hardware feel terrible :)
That has not been my experience with switch games on the Steam Deck. Anytime shaders are loaded the FPS seems to stutter which in the newer Mario game is like every few seconds at first and it gets better the longer you play.
I still prefer the switch for switch games myself.
Not in my experience. Definitely performance drops on the Deck. And even when it's running well, shader caches or whatever can make it stutter. Still very cool to be able to have all my games on one device though, even if it doesn't run as well.
By the by, I recently switched to using a Dualsense as my SD external controller and found that the gyro controls make for an excellent desktop and M+K game controller. Surprised I didn’t think to check earlier.
I can confirm a PS4 controller tilt sensor works with yuzu, so fundamentally it's possible, not sure a plugin for parsing the steamdeck tilt sensor exists though
I played BotW on my friend's Switch, and loved it, but didn't really wanna buy another console.
So I went through the tribulations of setting it up on the Deck (pro tip: use EmuDeck, I didn't know about it back then).
I don't know about better, but for me it felt the same as the Switch! The only slight confusion thing was button labeling, but it's quick to get used to.
Yeah, why pay for something, if you can also simply download/steal it? Something which took a lot of work to make?
Reading comments like this I can almost understand Nintendos stance on emulation. Suing the emulator team is certainly not the right thing to do, but come on.
At least pay for the game if you are not paying for the console.
It would be amazing if Valve stepped up with legal funds/protection there. They do get money from people buying SteamDecks for emulation and well... free publicity if they take on Nintendo.
That flies in the face of what Valve did TO Dolphin. It was Valve that proactively reached out to Nintendo before putting Dolphin in Steam. Of course Nintendo responded "please don't", so Dolphin got blocked.
Very important (imo) nitpick, Valve didn't block Dolphin, they took it off their store. Blocked sounds like they made it so to dang run it, but you can install whatever you want on a steam deck and valve isn't going to stop you.
This case isn't just about emulation; the Dolphin devs hard-coded the firmware into the emulator, which is why Nintendo had any standing. See: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=W5bfpS-WYUA
Valve doesn't really benefit that much financially from emulation though. Steam deck profit margins are probably razor thin given the cost of the competition (many of whom are in China on top of it all).
Wine/Proton is not an emulator, it doesn't emulate a console nor architecture. Yuzu does emulate both an architecture (ARM on x86) and the console. It then requires dumped games and and system firmware to run, which are not freely distributable.
Wine/Proton is a community implementation of the Windows APIs for Linux, it uses no Microsoft code nor needs any. It runs binaries that Valve already has permission to distribute (the games).
yes, but their interest is in emulating software distributed by steam
other games are only as much of interest as it might be games which could end up on steam or games which show some issue with the emulation which could be used to improve proton
there is also the thing that proton or wine just barely count as emulation, they are a bit of emulation but mostly just providing compatible OS interfaces adaption
(through Yuzu might but be that much different given how "mainstream" (but old) the switch hardware is)
through given how mainstream the switch hardware is you could argue that Yuzu isn't that different to WINE as you don't need to emulate anything but just provide compatible OS interfaces like WINE.
(if running out on ARM, there is still ARM to x86 emulation but that is just generic ARM to x86 emulation which has not that much to do with Yuzo per se)
I don't think this is likely. There is a convincible future where Nintendo publishes more and more games outside of their hardware platforms, so Valve needs to keep good business relations with Nintendo.
This future seems very unlikely. Nintendo has published like 1 phone game? They are very much a fan of their garden.
It course I would love to see this. I think Nintendo makes some very good games but have no interest in having specific physical hardware do end up not playing them.
There current lineup of mobile games are Mario Kart Tour, Animal Crossing Pocket Camp, Fire Emblem Heroes, Super Mario Run, and Pikmin Bloom. These have brought in over $1B in revenue, mostly from Fire Emblem.
Additionally, Nintendo is heavily involved in The Pokémon Company, so they saw the closed doors numbers of Pokemon Go.
I don't think it's crazy to think Nintendo will have a major presence outside of its own hardware in the future. Nintendo as a company always feels about two bad console cycles away from ruin. This feels doubly true with them putting handheld and console gaming into the same basket with Switch.
I also don't think it's crazy for Nintendo to decide that they can sell more games if they sell them on other platforms. In many ways the whole concept of a console exclusive is legacy thinking when the consoles had major architectural differences and porting was a major process.
On other hand after sale of device emulation does not pay... And selling games is where they earn money. Fight for emulation is useless legal fight for them and they are not org build for litigation.
But if tons of people are partly buying a Steam Deck because it is a great way to play loads of retro games from NES to Switch in the same console they are still likely to buy some games from Steam which is sitting right there.
You can just as easily run pirated games on real hardware as you can a steamdeck, and vice-versa. You're conflating emulation and piracy. Emulation does not mean piracy as it is perfectly legal (and moral) to dump a game that you own so that you can play it on your preferred hardware.
Running pirated games on real hardware requires tracking down a hackable Switch, which is not completely simple. I've seen torrents floating which contain Switch games alongside pre-setup emulators so you can just download and go.
I play my switch games on my PC completely legally. All the games I play are owned by me, and all of them were backed up using my own switch and my own prod.keys.
The majority of HN makes a living from software that by nature can’t be pirated, so they have little sympathy for people who work on software that can be pirated.
Nintendo bring this in themselves with their own policies.
There are so many hardware platforms I can support, and one that hardly ever does sales and refuses to bring their games to other platforms is not that appealing.
I buy games on PC, I buy games on XB, I've even rebought some games between the platforms to play couch co-op with my kid.
Steam and XB have enough sales to make this an option, Nintendo on the other hand is adamant about wringing every last penny from you.
These days I don't have time for Nintendo's nonsense. They want to live in their walled garden, they can have it.
I mean Valve literally had a trailer with a nintendo emulator as an app installed... Valve doesn't need to do RND for its games because they can just use whatever is on steam that is playable on the deck plus a ton of games from nintendo consoles via emulators as a selling point.
Nintendo could do the exact same thing if they made their platforms open like Steam does. That the switch is limited to only Switch games is entirely a choice they made because their whole existence they've been all about proprietary and locked down.
The lockout ship was there to prevent piracy. By the time the console made its way to North America there were known bypasses. Ironically enough if there's an argument to be made about what saved the industry and how quality control was involved it would be the Nintendo seal of quality and then the strong arming that they did to various retailers saying that if they sold any game that didn't have Nintendo's backing they would be blacklisted. At the time being blacklisted by a company like Nintendo where every kid was requesting their product was an impossibility
That's impossible; the lockout chip debuted with the North American version of the console, so there couldn't have been known bypasses beforehand. The Famicom had no CIC.
The lockout chip is what made the "seal of quality" scheme feasible in the first place. If alternative games were widely available, Nintendo wouldn't have had nearly as much leverage to strongarm with.
The minute the device was released in North America the lockout chip was already defeated by passthrough devices that took a "real" game and used that for the CIC bootup process. There were also multiple variants of voltage spike attacks and revisions of the console to guard against those, so it was certainly happening otherwise Nintendo wouldn't have wasted time changing the design.
Also, look at the timeline and the history behind Tengen which was essentially a company created by Atari specifically with the purpose of publishing their games on Nintendo and used essentially corporate espionage to get the underlying MPU used for the CIC logic that was a corporate secret. The actual lawsuits get filed a few years once Nintendo had enough evidence, but it was going on from the start of the lifespan of the console.
The NES was released in North America in late 1985. By 1987 there were commercially available games (from Tengen) that were playable without the permission of Nintendo. Tengen was not the only one or even the only method being used to break that console at that time.
And then there is Game Genie, which effectively can work around all of these problems. Sure, they included some logic to play nice and let the NES check the CIC again, but you can work around that with a game genie code itself! In the early days Game Genie and GameShark devices were well known for being vectors for piracy and they leaned into that.
*EDIT* This doesn't even get into the VAST array of devices that existed to clone cartridges or adapt floppy drives similar to how the Famicom did. At worst those required a stupid dummy cart to sit in them that never gets removed or the manufacturer did that for you and put a CIC in the device. Some used various attacks mentioned earlier to work around even having to do that.
As an aside to this, are there any documentaries or clips or things to read about "retro" console piracy that necessitated something like the lockout chip? I mean at this point I know about flashcarts but I dont know a thing about back when the NES wouldve been new-ish, let alone before then.
Steam isn't open, Windows OS isn't even open. Windows is "semi-open", in that Microsoft can't stop you for developing and publishing whatever they want on the platform, while still not sharing source code.
Microsoft only has (de facto) control of the Microsoft Store.
you seem to be conflating "open" and "open source"
nintendo doesnt have to make the switch open source to make it open, they just have to allow people to make whatever the hell they want for it, but their business model depends on it being locked down (closed)
A bit, but I don't necessarily mean open source either. My main point is that people call Steam "open" but they in fact do not allow you to make whatever the hell you want. They are infamously vague about what they do or don't allow and devs constantly have trouble contacting them when they have issues, be it getting a game on the store, enabling steam features, keys, abusive users, etc.
Given all that this doesn't feel like a plea to let people publish their games. Just a thinly veiled port begging.
The hardware argument makes even less sense though. People in these circles complain so much about native performance, why would they want to install Linux on a Nintendo Switch like the PS3 days?
Even if they could, it wouldn't let them play switch games better. It doesn't solve the clear problem here that is the super technically minded people wanting to play Mario and Zelda in 4k/60.
I was talking about the Steam Deck. When the original is the Switch, the Steam Deck is the most logical comparison. "Steam" is just an app running on top of the Steam Deck, and that app isn't even privileged on the system. The user could remove it if they wanted to.
"Open" doesn't mean "open source" although in the case of the Steam Deck, it is both (not including the Steam application, but as I mentioned you can use the Steam Deck for whatever you want including removing the Steam application, so it's not a requirement or a blocker. I know someone who installed their own Bazzite flavor that has Steam removed and only uses Lutris to install GOG games).
Also Steam Store's requirements are only for games listed in their store. As has been mentioned, this is not a requirement for running on the Steam Deck. This is in sharp contrast to Nintendo.
Steam =/= steam deck. And even then it's not really playing native Linux games if you argue Linux. Its just emulating (in layman's terms, I know what WINE stands for) where most devs actually make their games for.
Microsoft doesn't seem to care (or it's legally dangerous to care). Nintendo does.
What's happening under the hood (Windows translations layer, etc) doesn't really matter for this comparison of Switch to Steam Deck. It only matters what the user is allowed to do/run on the thing. On Nintendo where it's closed, the user is prevented. On Steam Deck where it's open, the user is not.
In 2022 Nintendo starting taking down Youtube videos showing Steam Decks running Switch games: https://www.resetera.com/threads/nintendo-started-blocking-v...
And last year went after Dolphin (GCN/Wii emulator) as soon as they announced plans to be listed on Steam: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36090755 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36100732