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Experimental Nintendo Switch Emulator written in C#

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Re: Experimental Nintendo Switch Emulator written in C#

#61

Post by caslon »

bscphil wrote: post #52
ddevault wrote: post #25

Earlier 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…

https://www.engadget.com/2017-09-22-eu-suppressed-study-pira...

"In 2013, the European Commission ordered a €360,000 ($430,000) study on how piracy affects sales of music, books, movies and games in the EU. However, it never ended up showing it to the public except for one cherry-picked section. That's possibly because the study concluded that there was no evidence that piracy affects copyrighted sales, and in the case of video games, might actually help them."

Re: Experimental Nintendo Switch Emulator written in C#

#62

Post by Cyph0n »

perardi wrote: post #47
mappu wrote: post #28

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Emulators are legal (see Sony v Bleem). Copyright infringement is a civil offense, but there's none here.

And from that era: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Connectix_Virtual_Game_Station Courts also decided in favor of Connectix, which made a PlayStation emulator that ran games on the Mac at nearly full speed. Mainly bringing that up because: it was kind of wild to be able to run current PlayStation games on your iMac. It was just cool.

There is a great video I watched recently on this: https://youtu.be/fcD420hP3YM

Re: Experimental Nintendo Switch Emulator written in C#

#63

Post by brundolf »

meibo wrote: post #49
brundolf wrote: post #13

I 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

Unfortunately, Nintendo has not made any friends within the emulation/homebrew community especially as of late(or ever), so the common consensus seems to be "we don't care, as long as you don't do illegal things on our front porch". This is purely an observation, however these things have tradition within the Nintendo hacking community and most members of the community are very passionate about their projects - the W…

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 steered clear of.

Re: Experimental Nintendo Switch Emulator written in C#

#64

Post by bscphil »

matthewrobertso wrote: post #58
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…

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 exclusivi…

> It is much easier to release a game on PC.

That's true. By giving a console example I was just trying to talk about piracy in a way relevant to the emulator topic. You could make exactly the same point about piracy of PC games, though. Many indie PC games don't have DRM.

Re: Experimental Nintendo Switch Emulator written in C#

#65

Post by bscphil »

caslon wrote: post #61
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…

https://www.engadget.com/2017-09-22-eu-suppressed-study-pira... "In 2013, the European Commission ordered a €360,000 ($430,000) study on how piracy affects sales of music, books, movies and games in the EU. However, it never ended up showing it to the public except for one cherry-picked section. That's possibly because the study concluded that there was no evidence that piracy affects copyrighted sales, and in the ca…

Seems like I'm getting a torrent (hah) of comments saying that "piracy isn't that bad actually", when I explicitly said in the comment that I wasn't interested in advocating for or against piracy, and do in fact pirate things myself.

Re: Experimental Nintendo Switch Emulator written in C#

#66

Post by brundolf »

witherk wrote: post #53
MaximumYComb wrote: post #22

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 commu…

It's unfortunate that the devs are financially lumped together with Nintendo's scummy legal/business people, but at the end of the day that's the reality. Pirating games means not paying the devs for their work.

Re: Experimental Nintendo Switch Emulator written in C#

#67

Post by caslon »

bscphil wrote: post #65
caslon wrote: post #61

Earlier quoted context omitted.

https://www.engadget.com/2017-09-22-eu-suppressed-study-pira... "In 2013, the European Commission ordered a €360,000 ($430,000) study on how piracy affects sales of music, books, movies and games in the EU. However, it never ended up showing it to the public except for one cherry-picked section. That's possibly because the study concluded that there was no evidence that piracy affects copyrighted sales, and in the ca…

Seems like I'm getting a torrent (hah) of comments saying that "piracy isn't that bad actually", when I explicitly said in the comment that I wasn't interested in advocating for or against piracy, and do in fact pirate things myself.

Your argument was, literally, that piracy decreases sales. But all of the evidence points toward piracy increasing game sales. Therefore, the indie dev in your example would make more money.

I'm not saying that piracy is good or bad; I really don't care. I'm simply stating that your argument was wrong.

Re: Experimental Nintendo Switch Emulator written in C#

#68

Post by zapzupnz »

edoceo wrote: post #30

Why wouldn't one create and emulator for this using QEMU? Couldn't that be possible? Doesn't a bunch of hardware faking have to be rebuilt in C# that QEMU already does (well¿)? Or is it too hard to introduce custom hardware/firmware (like this audio stuff) into QEMU?

For emulators that intend to run games at full speed, the sorts of shortcuts and tricks needed to achieve high level emulation (which can sometimes fall short of emulation in a strict sense) are often incompatible with writing a plugin or extension to an emulation framework that focuses on accuracy.

In the case of the Switch, it's not necessary to emulate the whole device or even processor, especially if the intention is to run Switch games on a computer. Rather, high level emulation is more than sufficient — anticipate what the software depends on the actual hardware to do and redirect it to do the same using what the computer has available.

Re: Experimental Nintendo Switch Emulator written in C#

#69

Post by bitexploder »

tester756 wrote: post #50
edflsafoiewq wrote: post #40

What made C# a good choice for this?

Sometimes people just pick the languages they're most proficent in so they can move fast maybe that's the case here

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.

Re: Experimental Nintendo Switch Emulator written in C#

#70

Post by bscphil »

caslon wrote: post #67
bscphil wrote: post #65

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Seems like I'm getting a torrent (hah) of comments saying that "piracy isn't that bad actually", when I explicitly said in the comment that I wasn't interested in advocating for or against piracy, and do in fact pirate things myself.

Your argument was, literally, that piracy decreases sales. But all of the evidence points toward piracy increasing game sales. Therefore, the indie dev in your example would make more money. I'm not saying that piracy is good or bad; I really don't care. I'm simply stating that your argument was wrong.

That was quite literally not my argument. I gave an example in which piracy decreases sales, to respond to an a priori defense of piracy.

Edit: There is a world of difference between debating a point on deontological ethical grounds and consequential ethical grounds. My point is not about what the consequences are, it's about the fact that a specific a priori ethical defense of piracy like that ddevault gives can't be used to argue that piracy doesn't have bad consequences.

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