Apple lost trying to argue that iOS shouldn't be emulated too.

https://www.engadget.com/apple-loss-lawsuit-corellium-120347...

> Apple sued security start-up Corellium last year, accusing it of violating copyright law for offering researchers access to “virtual” iPhones that can help them find bugs in iOS products. Now, a federal judge in Florida has tossed Apple’s copyright complaint, giving Corellium a major victory in its legal battle against the tech giant.

I wouldn't be surprised if they are legal (e.g. look at Wine), but in a US court Nintendo will happily make it so expensive for a defendant that they have no choice but to concede.

I can see that killing development by Tropic Haze, but the repositories are gone and not just stopped/locked/archived, and all forks seem to be eliminated too. I didn't think it was possible to that thoroughly kill an open source project, but nintendo apparently managed somehow.

Correct, just a variant of the Tegra SoC found on e.g. the Shield TV and most things (sound, graphics, security functions, system functions) are emulated at high level rather than hardware level. The problem for Nintendo is the Switch 2 is going to be the second generation to use a slightly modified Nvidia SoC like this so, unless the system software is vastly different, it will be significantly less complicated to spin up an emulator for this "new" system. E.g. Ryujinx had already been just using virtualization instead of emulation for the CPU on Apple Silicon devices.

With Yuzu and Ryujinx both being killed ~7 years into the Switch's lifespan and ~ <1 year before the Switch 2 I really wonder how much of their interest was in not having fully functioning switch 2 emulators before they even finished launching the hardware globally.

25 years towards the emulator scene to my knowledge