People think emulator protections in the law are stronger than they really are. Sony vs Connectix made emulation legal, but it wasn’t heard by the supreme court. PS1 games weren’t encrypted and relied on other methods like disc wobble to prevent piracy…so without proactively violating any measures you could just not include that check in your competing emulator and play retail discs without breaking any laws.
In steps the DMCA anti-circumvention laws for bypassing video game / console encryption measures, which is an even bigger untested minefield without precedent in favor of emulation. And since games are default encrypted on new consoles and arguably not subject to exemption (at least while still supported) it really might be a disaster to fight it.
Nintendo is a dick but it’s not in our interest or theirs to really push the boundary on the status quo. The get to slap suit whatever they want taken down, we get to play the emulation hydra game where it’s still legally grey.
Personally I don’t give a flying Fuck what the law says, breaking copyright is the only thing preventing the world from being more of a dystopian nightmare with subscription mice and trains that break down if you take them to a mechanic and I can’t wait for someone in china or India to take the Open source code and make a better emulator.
If they had an actual plan or history of preserving games I’d not care about emulator development. But with the industry track record being so poor we need emulators if for nothing else for preservation.
So much culturally interesting data has already been lost to time which I bet future historians would absolutely love to have access to. The internet archive is missing much of the early internet, while old iPhone and Android apps are largely unable to be run even if you have the APK/IPA required,
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People think emulator protections in the law are stronger than they really are. Sony vs Connectix made emulation legal, but it wasn’t heard by the supreme court. PS1 games weren’t encrypted and relied on other methods like disc wobble to prevent piracy…so without proactively violating any measures you could just not include that check in your competing emulator and play retail discs without breaking any laws.
In steps the DMCA anti-circumvention laws for bypassing video game / console encryption measures, which is an even bigger untested minefield without precedent in favor of emulation. And since games are default encrypted on new consoles and arguably not subject to exemption (at least while still supported) it really might be a disaster to fight it.
Nintendo is a dick but it’s not in our interest or theirs to really push the boundary on the status quo. The get to slap suit whatever they want taken down, we get to play the emulation hydra game where it’s still legally grey.
Personally I don’t give a flying Fuck what the law says, breaking copyright is the only thing preventing the world from being more of a dystopian nightmare with subscription mice and trains that break down if you take them to a mechanic and I can’t wait for someone in china or India to take the Open source code and make a better emulator.
If they had an actual plan or history of preserving games I’d not care about emulator development. But with the industry track record being so poor we need emulators if for nothing else for preservation.
So much culturally interesting data has already been lost to time which I bet future historians would absolutely love to have access to. The internet archive is missing much of the early internet, while old iPhone and Android apps are largely unable to be run even if you have the APK/IPA required,