Nintendo Kills Ryujinx After Yuzu

66 pointsposted 9 months ago
by ekianjo
(boilingsteam.com)

30 Comments

rendaw

9 months ago

How? Did Ryujinx cross any lines? I thought emulators were OK given they didn't include verbatim binary payloads and the like. What's Nintendo's leverage here?

Also, for that matter, the last I heard was that the Yuzu steam release was killed, but it seems to have been killed beyond that?

DistractionRect

9 months ago

Second hand from other members of the dev team, apparently Nintendo lawyers approached the lead dev at his home with a Cease and Desist. Apparently they reached an agreement, as his fork went private and the Ryujinx organization went private.

So basically they got to the dev that controlled its online presence, and pressured him into removing it and abandoning the project. Naturally this scared off the other devs. So it's dead in the sense that no one is maintaining it and it was deplatformed.

While nothing is stopping anyone from continuing the project, the community is fragmented (there's a bunch of mirrors/forks but no primary fork), and there was zero knowledge transfer - anyone picking this up has to build their experience with both the code base and switch internals from scratch.

sunaookami

9 months ago

>emulators were OK

This has never been tested in court - the bleem case was before DMCA. Nintendo is always playing the copyright and security circumvention card and no one wants to fight it (understandably). Details of the Ryujinx case are not public but I guess they used the Yuzu case as a threat.

Yuzu was killed because Nintendo sued Tropic Haze LLC (the company behind Yuzu) and issued a permanent injunction.

benoau

9 months ago

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.

rahimnathwani

9 months ago

Corellium doesn't emulate iOS. It emulates the hardware so it can install iOS.

LocalH

9 months ago

Ryujinx doesn't emulate the Switch OS. It emulates the hardware so it can install the Switch OS.

In other words, that's a distinction without a difference.

ChocolateGod

9 months ago

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.

rendaw

9 months ago

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.

meesles

9 months ago

FWIW, the emulator and source are all still circulating in less prominent places. It'll be back at some point.

rowanG077

9 months ago

I don't think they crossed any line. But a private person cannot defend themselves against a billion dollar company.

yieldcrv

9 months ago

Nintendo asked with their lawyer goons and the dev agreed

Spivak

9 months ago

It's only going to get harder (for Nintendo) as the Switch 2 will be their second generation console based on tweaked commodity hardware. When you're close enough to hardware people already own that the amount of true emulation needed is minimal making it easier than past consoles to have performant emulation.

stonethrowaway

9 months ago

The switch uses an ARM processor I imagine? Not something custom? What chips do they have that are bespoke and have to be fully emulated?

zamadatix

9 months ago

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.

benoau

9 months ago

I wonder if it isn't handheld PCs that are scaring them, because I would never buy a Nintendo device for my children when unencumbered and repairable hardware is becoming abundant.

Aside from their litigious nature against emulators they robbed as many people as possible with habitually faulty Switch controllers until the EU forced them to provide a lifetime warranty, their no-refund policy is illegal in many places, and they demand launch-day prices on games in perpetuity because their monopoly on much of gaming's culture allows them to.

Spivak

9 months ago

Other than the Steam deck (which is great, love mine) does this exist?

kuba-orlik

9 months ago

I suspect Nintendo sees upscaling od existing switch games as competition, because they plan Switch 2's major selling point to be playing the old games in higher res/fps. Just a hunch. It would explain a lot, including the fact that they keep pumping new games for the seemingly EOL switch

SuperNinKenDo

9 months ago

Yuzu should have never played with fire. But to be honest, aren't Nintendo going after Palworld devs at the moment? Feels like this all ultimately boils down to someone in legal being let off their chain.

swozey

9 months ago

Nintendo has always been offensively litiguous

yieldcrv

9 months ago

25 years towards the emulator scene to my knowledge

SuperNinKenDo

9 months ago

Yes, they certainly have a history of that. Copyright in Japan has very little carve-out for "fair-use" equivalents, and I believe it is also a criminal offense. I'm guessing some of it comes from the attitudes there being informed by that setting, but can't explain all of it, since other Japanese companies aren't quite as notorious.

Tor3

9 months ago

Correct, it's a criminal offence in Japan, and you're even notified about that on the form you fill in (either online in advance, or on paper in flight) when you go there. Which is possibly one of the reasons it's close to impossible to find scans or similar (re the retro computing community - it's hard)

AnAaaaardvark

9 months ago

I think they have a financial asset risk situation and they're shitting bricks. That is why they are panicking and doing pointless things such as these which actually harm awareness of their games.

Case in point: there's a new zelda out and nobody seems to be playing it.

ramon156

9 months ago

I don't know the legitimacy of this, but they allegedly just gave the maintainer an offer to get it offline. Not a take-down.

calini

9 months ago

Just saw some screenshots of a Discord conversation where a supposed friend/collaborator of the maintainer denied it, instead confirming it was a cease and desist.

Take both this and the top comment with many grains of salt.