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Experimental Nintendo Switch Emulator written in C#

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Re: Experimental Nintendo Switch Emulator written in C#

#71
post #70
post #67

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 b…

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.

Re: Experimental Nintendo Switch Emulator written in C#

#72

Considering this is emulating an ARM processor, I wonder how such software might perform if written specifically for the new M1 macs?

I don't anticipate it would make much real difference. The trick with console emulators is usually making the graphics, audio, and game-specific quirks sing well on commodity hardware rather than the specialised hardware the console has. Getting ARM code to run on Intel isn't the hard bit — so getting ARM code to run on ARM may well be more performant than running it on Intel – but rather the trick is getting all the other precise console-specific hardware to sing with available cross-platform frameworks for audio and video.

Re: Experimental Nintendo Switch Emulator written in C#

#73
post #57
post #54

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

I see what you're saying and I agree. I think this particular argument, is pushing back on the notion that piracy is straightforwardly the same thing as physical theft.

Re: Experimental Nintendo Switch Emulator written in C#

#74
post #71
post #70

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 b…

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.

Re: Experimental Nintendo Switch Emulator written in C#

#75
post #74
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.

That's not a thought experiment! That's using a false, unlikely example that goes against all evidence to scarecrow.

Re: Experimental Nintendo Switch Emulator written in C#

#76

> The CPU emulator, ARMeilleure, emulates an ARMv8 CPU and currently has support for most 64-bit ARMv8 and some of the ARMv7 (and older) instructions, including partial 32-bit support. It translates the ARM code to a custom IR, performs a few optimizations, and turns that into x86 code. Interesting... since .Net is cross-platform and can run on ARM, if it's running on an ARM processor does it just run the instruction…

The current ARMeilleure seems to emit x86 instructions directly and execute them, so never really using the intermediate representation of Jit compiler of the .Net runtime. However the previous cpu emulator apparently emitted .Net byte code and used RyuJIT (the .Net jit) to emit the final native code. > if it's running on an ARM processor does it just run the instructions directly? So maybe? There are some passes in…

> However the previous cpu emulator apparently emitted .Net byte code and used RyuJIT (the .Net jit) to emit the final native code.

This seems like a good use case for using .Net. Why did they move away from it?

Re: Experimental Nintendo Switch Emulator written in C#

#77
post #64

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

I think for most indie developers piracy is free word of mouth advertising, similar to the shareware model. Hopefully when their work is widely pirated developers can turn the attention into sales. I agree it would be very tragic if people lost their jobs due to rampant piracy.

To ask a difficult question though, are there actually any contemporary indie PC games that have been massively pirated to the point where the developer had to fire an intern?

Re: Experimental Nintendo Switch Emulator written in C#

#78

> The CPU emulator, ARMeilleure, emulates an ARMv8 CPU and currently has support for most 64-bit ARMv8 and some of the ARMv7 (and older) instructions, including partial 32-bit support. It translates the ARM code to a custom IR, performs a few optimizations, and turns that into x86 code. Interesting... since .Net is cross-platform and can run on ARM, if it's running on an ARM processor does it just run the instruction…

> 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 virtualization. If the host OS supports it, you should be able to make use of it.

Re: Experimental Nintendo Switch Emulator written in C#

#79
post #52

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…

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.

Thank you for speaking up. I try to make similar points at times, though I'm usually talking about writing and content creation and I'm a woman and a writer and poor, so people feel pretty free to be openly dismissive and disrespectful and act like my expectation that I should somehow be able to support myself if I am doing good work is a laughably stupid expectation and, at the same time, I'm an extremist nutter if I start using phrases like "that amounts to an expectation of slave labor."

I don't know what the solution is. A lot of amazing things get done because someone dreamed it up off the clock without the constraints of an employer or client telling them what to do.

But it is a travesty of justice to act like those things should be given for free and the creator has no right to have that come back to them as financial prosperity. It's not only a travesty of justice, it's an excellent way to make sure all your best and brightest people are trying to figure out how to make a buck, even if it means screwing other people and even it means doing work that is less valuable to humanity than what they might otherwise do.

If you want this to remain a dog eat dog, lord of the flies hellscape, hey, dismissing the idea that people have a right to profit from their labor when their labor is clearly enhancing your life (or you wouldn't be using their stuff for free while sneering at the idea that this is a problem for them) is an excellent way to accomplish that.

Re: Experimental Nintendo Switch Emulator written in C#

#80
post #54

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Yeah I would imagine it's insanely difficult. The bar for genres dominated by indie games like puzzle platformers, metroidvanias, roguelikes seems infinitely high these days. Seems rough for devs, but as a gamer it's amazing.
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