Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Experimental Nintendo Switch Emulator written in C#

github.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

151–160 of 172 posts

Re: Experimental Nintendo Switch Emulator written in C#

#151

Post by utbabya »

bscphil wrote: post #74
caslon wrote: post #71

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I gave an example in which piracy decreases sales Which isn't something that would have happened in the real world, since piracy increases sales.

Thought experiments do not have to be things that would have happened in the real world.

This is not thought experiment, it is straw man.

Here's my thought experiment, they told you studies shows that vaccination is safe, you point out there happened to be a case after injecting a person died. In some places people categorize it as FUD.

Just to be clear I don't have a side in this race, I haven't priated anything for a long time, don't find the need.

Re: Experimental Nintendo Switch Emulator written in C#

#152

Post by Jasper_ »

ripdog wrote: post #118
brundolf wrote: post #63

Earlier quoted context omitted.

My point is exactly about the emulation/homebrew community, though. They only continue to have the moral high road against Nintendo as long as they don't condone piracy. If they get in bed with those who want to do genuine piracy, Nintendo is no longer the bad guy for taking legal action. Not that a Switch emulator completely falls into the latter category, but it lies in a grey area that legacy emulators have mostly…

There's no grey area here, though. Emulator devs explicitly disavow using their software for piracy, and ban anyone on official forums for mentioning or linking to pirated games. That's all they have to do, really. (assuming the emulator is clean-room, of course).

It's pretty well established that the market for Yuzu is playing commercial games. Just look at their home page: https://yuzu-emu.org/ Maybe not direct piracy, but clearly adjacent to it. We aren't running homebrew software here.

Re: Experimental Nintendo Switch Emulator written in C#

#153

Post by Jasper_ »

brundolf wrote: post #110
foobar33333 wrote: post #107

Earlier quoted context omitted.

These emulators are usually useless for piracy until after the console has reached its end of life. People start working on them as soon as possible but they don't work well for years. The switch is almost at the end now and there still isn't an emulator which works very well. When the competition for emulators is buying a hackable switch and running dumped games natively with 0 bugs or slowdowns. I doubt switch emul…

You may be right about the ramp-up time, though the Switch is only at like 50% of its lifetime and I wouldn't be surprised if the next console is a "Switch 2" or something with backwards-compatibility, given what the other console makers have done

The typical lifetime of a Nintendo console is 5 years (N64 was 1996, GameCube was 2001, Wii was 2006, Wii U was 2012 because the Wii was such a smash success, Switch was 2017). The release cycles have been slowing as of recent but we're far more than 50% in.

Re: Experimental Nintendo Switch Emulator written in C#

#154

Post by bitexploder »

david-cako wrote: post #88
bitexploder wrote: post #69

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Or as a “Look, you can do X in language Y, a lot of people assumed this was not possible.” Situation. Seen that a few times.

true, the first thing I thought was "wow, I didn't realize you could do this with C#"

That’s how more than a few of my projects have started. It really helps you learn the performance mechanics of a language and it’s runtime doing something like, implementing an emulator then optimizing it. Maybe not something as ambitious as a switch emulator though. I like 16 bit processors like the MSP430 :)

Re: Experimental Nintendo Switch Emulator written in C#

#155

Post by Jasper_ »

ddevault wrote: post #95
bscphil wrote: post #52

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> No one has lost anything when a game is copied. Suppose an indie developer working alone hires an intern. They release a game developed together for a console. Suddenly the console becomes possible to emulate, and most of the people who would have bought the game play a cracked and pirated version on an emulator instead. Because of the unexpected lack of sales, the developer has to fire the intern. The intern no lo…

No one has a right to a viable business model. There are other ways to make money. I also oppose companies like Nestle monopolizing water supplies to sell back to communities at a premium. If they're not allowed to do that, then their employees will have to find something else to do, or they won't be able to feed their family and their children will go hungry. Naturally, we'll not speak of any of the benefits which m…

The expectation here is fair trade. They are providing a good for sale with a price. If you do not pay the price, you do not get to enjoy the good, regardless of if the distribution model inherently enforces its trade value through scarcity or not.

The last several thousands of years of society and economics are based on this principle. Capitalism depends on it. You can be against capitalism and work towards achieving that end. But until we get there, we need to make sure that those in a society built around capitalism obey these fair trade rules.

If you don't want to pay for your software, don't use software that's offered for pay. There's a whole market of free software out there.

Re: Experimental Nintendo Switch Emulator written in C#

#156

Post by DC1350 »

barbazoo wrote: post #24
DC1350 wrote: post #9

This is great to see. It would be nice to play switch games on something at least as powerful as a modern phone

Are you implying that the Switch hardware isn't good enough for its games? I have yet to play a game that doesn't run well. Maybe I should try Witcher 3.

Yes. A lot of the games only run at 720p and all of the ports are either really old games or significantly downgraded compared to any other platform.

Re: Experimental Nintendo Switch Emulator written in C#

#157

Post by spapas82 »

Jasper_ wrote: post #152
ripdog wrote: post #118

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There's no grey area here, though. Emulator devs explicitly disavow using their software for piracy, and ban anyone on official forums for mentioning or linking to pirated games. That's all they have to do, really. (assuming the emulator is clean-room, of course).

It's pretty well established that the market for Yuzu is playing commercial games. Just look at their home page: https://yuzu-emu.org/ Maybe not direct piracy, but clearly adjacent to it. We aren't running homebrew software here.

Yes but you must own and rip these games yourself before playing them: https://yuzu-emu.org/help/quickstart/

Re: Experimental Nintendo Switch Emulator written in C#

#158

Post by brundolf »

Jasper_ wrote: post #153
brundolf wrote: post #110

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You may be right about the ramp-up time, though the Switch is only at like 50% of its lifetime and I wouldn't be surprised if the next console is a "Switch 2" or something with backwards-compatibility, given what the other console makers have done

The typical lifetime of a Nintendo console is 5 years (N64 was 1996, GameCube was 2001, Wii was 2006, Wii U was 2012 because the Wii was such a smash success, Switch was 2017). The release cycles have been slowing as of recent but we're far more than 50% in.

They've already announced an enhanced "Switch Pro" and said they hope it "extends the life cycle of the Switch platform for many more years": https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2021-03-04/nintendo-...

Re: Experimental Nintendo Switch Emulator written in C#

#159

Post by grishka »

jyrkesh wrote: post #99
grishka wrote: post #78

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> if it's running on an ARM processor does it just run the instructions directly? You can't just run random instructions like that. That code is compiled with the assumption that there's the Switch's OS and hardware underneath, which means it will do all kinds of things, like calling directly into the kernel and assuming a particular address space layout, that would crash it under a different OS. ARM has hardware vir…

I think it does beg the question though, of whether it might be possible to dump the Switch OS and firmware and run it on some alternative ARM hardware (with some modifications for redirecting weird custom chips). IIRC the Switch is running an overclocked Tegra (X1?) IANAL, but in the US at least, I think every person would need to buy their own Switch and dump the software themselves for it to be even remotely legal…

As I understand it, there are two ways to approach emulating a console that has a firmware, whether it's a BIOS or a full-fledged OS:

- You could emulate the hardware only, on its lowest level, and make the user provide the firmware dump. This makes the emulation more faithful, but sourcing the firmware isn't always easy.

- You could instead go up a layer emulate the firmware interface that games see. This might get you performance benefits, because you now have the freedom to optimize the low-level implementation details for your particular host platform, but that would mean the emulation itself would not be 100% accurate.

Re: Experimental Nintendo Switch Emulator written in C#

#160

Post by hawthornio »

brundolf wrote: post #110
foobar33333 wrote: post #107

Earlier quoted context omitted.

These emulators are usually useless for piracy until after the console has reached its end of life. People start working on them as soon as possible but they don't work well for years. The switch is almost at the end now and there still isn't an emulator which works very well. When the competition for emulators is buying a hackable switch and running dumped games natively with 0 bugs or slowdowns. I doubt switch emul…

You may be right about the ramp-up time, though the Switch is only at like 50% of its lifetime and I wouldn't be surprised if the next console is a "Switch 2" or something with backwards-compatibility, given what the other console makers have done

A switch with increased pixel density and some other improvements seems almost certain to me.
Post reply on HN