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Experimental Nintendo Switch Emulator written in C#
51–60 of 172 posts
Re: Experimental Nintendo Switch Emulator written in C#
#52I have mixed feelings about emulating current-gen consoles. I think there's a very strong ethical case for emulating consoles whose games are no longer made (despite Nintendo's best efforts to shut that down too). But emulating something whose games can still be bought new would tend to encourage piracy, I expect. Edit: "cracking" -> "piracy", for clarity
There are many reasons to use an emulator. You could play your own games on a new platform, or without having to pay for the hardware (a gaming PC which can run an current-gen emulator is expensive enough!). You could use it to play or develop homebrew software, or to research commercial software. You can use it to bypass region locks, which I would argue are quite unethical in their own right. Even with all of that…
> 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 longer has enough money to feed their family, and their children go hungry that month. The intern has lost something.
My comment isn't intended to be positive or negative on the whole towards piracy (I do sometimes pirate things). What's it's critical of is the blithe way in which people dismiss concerns with statements like "no one has lost anything". Sure, maybe the developer doesn't have an abstract right against copying the game, and it is true that they have not lost copies of the game when it is copied. But people do lose things.
If you oppose intellectual property rights, it's important to work productively towards creating a world without it in which developers can work on a piece of software as their job and still have a livelihood, not joke about them not standing to lose anything through piracy. I'm not saying you don't do this, I'm well aware of your contributions to open source, for example.
Re: Experimental Nintendo Switch Emulator written in C#
#53Earlier quoted context omitted.
If people who wouldn’t have bought a Switch end up playing those games on PC who has lost out here?
It's ignorant at best to argue that this is only going to be used by those who wouldn't have purchased a Switch. Once something is free then a lot of people won't spend hundreds of dollars on it.
As someone who uses yuzu to play games at 4k, I have bought 2 switches and purchased the grand majority of the games that I have played on emulator. While I think it's true that devs lose some customers this way, most people who are playing BOTW on their pc (requiring a pretty good computer) pay more money into the nintendo ecosystem than many people imagine.
If anything the way nintendo treats it's competitive communities makes me feel bad for giving them too much money. But on the other hand they are one of the only devs who consistently ships quality finished games, so that should be rewarded.
Re: Experimental Nintendo Switch Emulator written in C#
#54Earlier quoted context omitted.
There are many reasons to use an emulator. You could play your own games on a new platform, or without having to pay for the hardware (a gaming PC which can run an current-gen emulator is expensive enough!). You could use it to play or develop homebrew software, or to research commercial software. You can use it to bypass region locks, which I would argue are quite unethical in their own right. Even with all of that…
> 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…
Piracy surely does do damage. But I feel as if it's probably a net positive for the gaming industry overall. Maybe I'm wrong but Indie games currently seem to be in a sort of golden age, despite piracy being as alive as ever. As someone who grew up on blizzard and gamecube games almost every game I purchase these days is an indie game, similar patterns amongst my friends.
Re: Experimental Nintendo Switch Emulator written in C#
#55The other popular Switch emulator, Yuzu, recently released their progress report for February in case you are interested in how far along the state of Switch emulation is these days. Yuzu is C++ and roughly comparable to Ryujinx, feature-wise.
Re: Experimental Nintendo Switch Emulator written in C#
#56Impressive! Is this the first modern console emulator written in a GCed language, or even a language other than C++?
The problems with GC'd languages are very exaggerated. I'm not surprised at all that this is performant in C#.
It's mainly the horrible "enterprise" culture around them, which leads to ridiculous abstraction bloat and the associated increase in resource consumption.
Re: Experimental Nintendo Switch Emulator written in C#
#57Earlier 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…
Piracy surely does do damage. But I feel as if it's probably a net positive for the gaming industry overall. Maybe I'm wrong but Indie games currently seem to be in a sort of golden age, despite piracy being as alive as ever. As someone who grew up on blizzard and gamecube games almost every game I purchase these days is an indie game, similar patterns amongst my friends.
That's quite possibly true. Again, I do pirate things sometimes, and I'm not trying to rule one way or another on piracy.
What I'm trying to get at is that saying on the basis of a priori arguments about what "property rights" a person has that they don't stand to "lose anything" through piracy is incorrect reasoning, and maybe even hurtful to the people who do stand to lose something.
You might as well pursue a long theoretical argument with the conclusion that the Department of Homeland Security has no right to exist, then claim that a janitor who works there has "nothing to lose" from calls to abolish it. Even if you're right about the DHS, it's a complete non sequitur, and a rather callous one at that.
Re: Experimental Nintendo Switch Emulator written in C#
#58Earlier quoted context omitted.
There are many reasons to use an emulator. You could play your own games on a new platform, or without having to pay for the hardware (a gaming PC which can run an current-gen emulator is expensive enough!). You could use it to play or develop homebrew software, or to research commercial software. You can use it to bypass region locks, which I would argue are quite unethical in their own right. Even with all of that…
> 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…
Releasing a game on a console is an involved process with many steps and hoops to jump through. It is much easier to release a game on PC. I haven't looked into the statistics but it is my understanding that the large majority indie games release first on PC before being ported to consoles due to the barrier to entry.
Emulators might hurt developers who treat being console exclusive as a form of DRM or have exclusivity agreements with console manufacturers if their work becomes wildly pirated. I don't track what is pirated or how frequently, nor do I track game developers closely, are there examples of this happening to developers who have shut down?
Re: Experimental Nintendo Switch Emulator written in C#
#59Impressive! Is this the first modern console emulator written in a GCed language, or even a language other than C++?
The problems with GC'd languages are very exaggerated. I'm not surprised at all that this is performant in C#.
For game dev (and emulators!), the non-deterministic behavior of GCs can cause a lot of trouble, mainly because you have a fixed frame budget. That’s why it’s usually easier to just use a language where you can finely control when and where allocations take place.
I’m sure there are techniques to work around this, but you’d then usually have to leave behind the “idiomatic” area of the language you’re using.
Re: Experimental Nintendo Switch Emulator written in C#
#60Earlier 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…
Piracy surely does do damage. But I feel as if it's probably a net positive for the gaming industry overall. Maybe I'm wrong but Indie games currently seem to be in a sort of golden age, despite piracy being as alive as ever. As someone who grew up on blizzard and gamecube games almost every game I purchase these days is an indie game, similar patterns amongst my friends.
There are also more games than ever right now -- it's extremely competitive, even relative to just 5 years ago. Source: Am founder of a small indie 'studio', recently released our second title.