Experimental Nintendo Switch Emulator written in C#
github.com
github.com
Getting it to work with the host os(windows usually) can have minor issues with output in rare circumstances, or when a game is still not running the proper speed, but they've ironed out the major ones.
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This is my requiem, I present to you Amadeus, a complete reimplementation of the Audio Renderer!
This reimplementation is based on my reversing of every version of the audio system module that I carried for the past 10 months.
This supports every revision (at the time of writing REV1 to REV8 included) and all features proposed by the Audio Renderer on real hardware.
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.
Switch has an ARM processor so it's definitely a requirement to emulate that, which QEMU is well-suited for. But to your point, Windows has great graphics APIs that would make it easier to pipe the graphic stack from the Switch OS into rather than writing your own implementation. The processor can be taken care of via JIT as well, but it still needs to be lifted.
I mena, in principle, presumably.
> that QEMU already does
Potentially a couple devices. But for most of the hardware, probably not.
Regardless they might—I would—find QEMU harder to hack on, harder to extend, because it is written in C. C is of course the lowest level of all high level languages.
It's in its infant stages at the moment according to the "Emulation General" wiki and focuses heavily on "accuracy" over performance
Other emulators such as CXBX-Reloaded have made larger strides, currently emulating roughly 10% of the software library
It's also worth stating, while the Xbox seems like an "easy" target, being based on an ia-32 (Pentium III) PC with an Nvidia GeForce chip (somewhere between a Geforce 2 and 3 at the time) it is an absolutely monstrous beast with minimal documentation about its hardware and numerous "gotchas"
It also has a very small library of 'exclusive' content which detracts from gaining many developers
Interesting... since .Net is cross-platform and can run on ARM, if it's running on an ARM processor does it just run the instructions directly?
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 between but one would think it would at least result in very similar instructions.
This seems like a good use case for using .Net. Why did they move away from it?
Also, I haven't tried JITting them but I've always found their bytecodes to be pretty inexpressive compared to a real CPU (or even LLVM).
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.
IANAL, but in the US at least, I think every person would need to buy their own Switch and dump the software themselves for it to be even remotely legal.
Maybe things are more standard now these days, but the support hardware around it, memory layout, etc... at least for the 6502, made this prohibitive.
The kernel however runs absolutely fine with zero modifications required. HorizonOS is a microkernel, and all the components are fairly well separated. To make it work on a jetson, you'd only have to replace a handful of services to make it work.
> IANAL, but in the US at least, I think every person would need to buy their own Switch and dump the software themselves for it to be even remotely legal.
Honestly, I'm pretty sure it'd violate the DMCA DRM protections in the US (you'd have to dump some crypto keys and provide them to an EL3 reimplementation, like Exosphere, to run anything below the kernel).
- You could emulate the hardware only, on its lowest level, and make the user provide the firmware dump. This makes the emulation more faithful, but sourcing the firmware isn't always easy.
- You could instead go up a layer emulate the firmware interface that games see. This might get you performance benefits, because you now have the freedom to optimize the low-level implementation details for your particular host platform, but that would mean the emulation itself would not be 100% accurate.
>Rest assured, this is in our long term plan. Initially, we'll be bringing up ARM support as a dynamic code translation target architecture in the short term, as this is a relatively straightforward thing to add to our existing JIT. This work is already underway.
Edit: "cracking" -> "piracy", for clarity
If anything the way nintendo treats it's competitive communities makes me feel bad for giving them too much money. But on the other hand they are one of the only devs who consistently ships quality finished games, so that should be rewarded.
That would be truly terrible!! Making a copy of your owned games is a capital crime.
Even with all of that said, I support piracy. Information wants to be free, and games are made of information. 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 longer has enough money to feed their family, and their children go hungry that month. The intern has lost something.
My comment isn't intended to be positive or negative on the whole towards piracy (I do sometimes pirate things). What's it's critical of is the blithe way in which people dismiss concerns with statements like "no one has lost anything". Sure, maybe the developer doesn't have an abstract right against copying the game, and it is true that they have not lost copies of the game when it is copied. But people do lose things.
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. I'm not saying you don't do this, I'm well aware of your contributions to open source, for example.
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 theoretical argument with the conclusion that the Department of Homeland Security has no right to exist, then claim that a janitor who works there has "nothing to lose" from calls to abolish it. Even if you're right about the DHS, it's a complete non sequitur, and a rather callous one at that.
Emulators might hurt developers who treat being console exclusive as a form of DRM or have exclusivity agreements with console manufacturers if their work becomes wildly pirated. I don't track what is pirated or how frequently, nor do I track game developers closely, are there examples of this happening to developers who have shut down?
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.
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?
"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."
I'm not saying that piracy is good or bad; I really don't care. I'm simply stating that your argument was wrong.
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.
Which isn't something that would have happened in the real world, since piracy increases sales.
ddevault:
> Even with all of that said, I support piracy. Information wants to be free, and games are made of information. No one has lost anything when a game is copied.
"Information wants to be free, and games are made of information" is a defense of piracy that has nothing whatsoever to do with the consequences of piracy. The argument is that copyright claims are morally invalid because they go against the nature of information as such.
This is used to make the claim that "no one has lost anything when a game is copied".
That claim is a bit of verbal trickery, and that's what my comment is complaining about. If a developer has a copy of a game on their hard drive, and after releasing the game, someone pirates it, the developer still has a copy of the game on their hard drive. This is one sense of "not having lost anything", and it's what ddevault understands to be the nature of information that underlies the moral argument I gave above.
But what that moral argument can not tell you is that "no one has lost anything" in the fairly conventional, pragmatic sense that one can "lose a job".
My comment is a theoretical example (or thought experiment) that highlights the difference in a way that makes clear how the words "no one has lost anything" are at least misleading, and potentially hurtful. That is why I begin with the words "suppose" (which is how philosophers often introduce thought experiments) and proceed to give a highly theoretical example about a indie dev studio which does not exist. The upshot is the philosophical point that people can "lose something" (a livelihood) without "losing anything" (a piece of intellectual property).
I have no idea whether, on the whole, piracy is good or bad for video games. Despite your apparent certainty, I do think the jury is still out on that point. But that is most emphatically not the point that I am making in my comment.
That goes against all evidence and all studies on the topic and has no supporting evidence to back it up.
Conclusion: all swans must be either grey or white
Me: that doesn't follow! Suppose there were a black swan.
You: That goes against all evidence and all studies on the topic and has no supporting evidence to back it up. ALL SWANS ARE WHITE.
Otherwise, why not construct the absurd thought experiment: what if the intern that got laid off won a bunch of money and didn't have to work? Piracy is obviously moral and great because the intern is now rich.
Obviously this wouldn't happen to most interns given how the world works (losing your job is bad). Thus it is a bad thought experiment.
Similarly, if having a game pirated leads to an increase in sales, this is a bad thought experiment.
Here's my thought experiment, they told you studies shows that vaccination is safe, you point out there happened to be a case after injecting a person died. In some places people categorize it as FUD.
Just to be clear I don't have a side in this race, I haven't priated anything for a long time, don't find the need.
You can't use a thought experiment to argue that people should change their behavior because of a problem, as you're pointing out - and I'm not doing that. I'm not saying people should not pirate things because piracy is bad for game developers. I pirate things. I'm not making a statement about piracy.
ddevault is doing something rather specific: arguing that because intellectual property rights do not exist, anyone whose work is copied does not lose anything. This is an argument that is contradicted by a possible world in which someone loses something, even if you don't think it's our actual world.
In response to a deductive argument, it's always acceptable to try to present a possible world in which the premises of the argument are true and the conclusion is false. It simply does not matter that quite a lot of angry people in this thread are insisting that the world I presented in the example does not actually exist. If the world could exist, then that's enough to show that there's something wrong with ddevault's point, and that's what I wanted to do in my comment.
Ironically, ddevault understood this when hardly anyone else did. They replied to my comment with a slight pivot on the original take. They said that while people might "lose things", it's not the kind of "losing" that matters, because if someone loses something that was never legitimately theirs to begin with, we don't care or worry about this. (The example of Nestle stealing water is used as an example.)
This was a great response from ddevault, because it actually understood what I was getting at. I disagree with the response, but the point is that it understands what is happening at the theoretical level here, and that's crucial.
It is not unreasonable to argue that some piracy is not a big deal and may, in fact, be helping developers (and producers of other content). However, as soon as you start arguing that it should be legal, expected, and normal to do so, you change the entire landscape.
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.
Your comment also highlights another aspect of theoretical arguments of the sort ddevault gives that I think is interesting. If you take them seriously, then there ought not to be any intellectual property at all, so someone should be able to just set up a website like "get your stuff here dot com" where you can download whatever you like, with no legal prohibition or moral inhibition.
If this were true, the piracy landscape would look vastly different than what it looks like today, and I think this seriously undermines the kind of pragmatic responses my comment has gotten along the lines of "actually, piracy is helpful to the industry". Because in all likelihood, that can only be true (if it is true) up to a point.
The ultimate question is, do we see the point of making sure artists and creators have a way to live off the work they do for us? A copyright system may not be the best way to ensure this, or it might even be outright unethical! If so, let's come up with a better one.
I also oppose companies like Nestle monopolizing water supplies to sell back to communities at a premium. If they're not allowed to do that, then their employees will have to find something else to do, or they won't be able to feed their family and their children will go hungry. Naturally, we'll not speak of any of the benefits which might be possible if we eliminated their business model. The only consequence of any import is that their employee's family will starve and die.
This is clearly a false argument. Intellectual property is based on an artificial scarcity and has no basis in the tangible value of goods and services. It's a kind of intellectual rent. It should not be granted special status in law.
1. Under capitalism, the only way someone who makes something for others can be sure of providing for themselves and their dependents is if they have a property right in the things they make, thereby ensuring that it has exchange value for them as a commodity.
2. Property rights in intellectual or abstract creations do not exist. Because (insert moral argument), no one ever truly has an intellectual property right. (your premise)
Conclusion: People who create intellectual or abstract works should not be sure of providing for themselves and their dependents, and should therefore do something else and find "other ways to make money". In fact, we can't even say that people forced into some other work (or starvation) have lost anything, because they never had a moral right to it to begin with.
Me: Welllllll
I hope it's obvious that the conclusion doesn't follow from the premises. (Though we can get into that if you like.) I think it's also obvious from this perspective that this is certainly not like the Nestle case. Nestle is making things worse by monopolizing water that they didn't even create and would exist if they did not. Artists are people who create things that you and I love which brighten our lives, and are asking that they not go hungry in exchange. They are not seizing a pre-existing work of art and holding it out in exchange for an income, they are instead creating things and witholding them to ensure an income the only way that is possible under our present system of capitalism.
I want to live in a world where artists can be assured of not going hungry. I certainly don't think we need intellectual property to get ourselves there, and I'm nearly certain most artists themselves don't intrinsically love intellectual property. But this means we need an alternative. What does that look like: UBI? Something even more drastic? That's the question I was getting at toward the end of the comment you replied to.
The last several thousands of years of society and economics are based on this principle. Capitalism depends on it. You can be against capitalism and work towards achieving that end. But until we get there, we need to make sure that those in a society built around capitalism obey these fair trade rules.
If you don't want to pay for your software, don't use software that's offered for pay. There's a whole market of free software out there.
You write a book and would be paid by the word. After toiling away for 2 years, 30% of your work will not be paid for because the publishers feel this is just information. You have been decived.
When labor is carried out with certain promises of compensation and after the work is completed if the fruits of the labor are not compensated to the person company doing the effort then it's fraud / stealing.
Broadly your argument sounds like 'knowledge work is not real work' because it doesn't produce tangible assets.
The problem is, in compensation of the people involved in doing the work.
For example if someone sponsored content 'x' and made it free to the public it would be fine to copy it around. Think govt funded research. This has its own problems. The people that commission these works and the general public may not share the same tastes.
The risks of selling to a patron and selling to a yet unknown audience are vastly different. This is why the compensation varies wildly between the two. Its possible that one game may take enormous resources and then not give back any returns resulting in a loss and another one makes massive profits.
The positive ones cover up for the failing ones. If you only look at the positive ones it's easy to be dismissive and say they are getting compensated undeservedly. In the broader picture it is the massive successes that allow for variety in the market place, it is an essential mechanism. If you cap off the upper limits of getting paid, people will be unwilling to make newer / different types of things. The market is essentially funding innovation, variety and a buffer for failures - it serves as a direction mechanism for knowing what people want.
Knowing what to make that people will buy is a very hard and expensive problem to answer. People that can answer it correctly get paid a lot of money deservedly.
I wish there was an easier way to run legitimately purchased cartridges. I don’t know how many people ever did it, but PCSX2, for instance, has always been able to run PS2 discs right off a standard PC optical drive.
If buying games can be made easier than piracy, lots of people will probably do that. But if piracy is way easier, then that’s what 99.9% of users will do.
It's been many years, but I tried this to play FFIX. Turned out it was one of the few games that still had game-breaking issues at the time. I wonder if it works now.
Apart from folks who have no way to perform online transactions and would have to physically visit a shop to pay using cash, piracy hasn’t been “way easier” than buying games in more than a decade.
Everybody has online shops now. On the Switch, you can even buy from your computer using their web shop, if the Switch itself happens to be out of your reach (or in the hands of your child or etc).
In the vast majority of cases, these days, I suspect that piracy is a lot more about “cheaper” than about “easier”.
How? When I go to a Nintendo store page for a game I want to buy digital [1], all I get are the options "Add to Wish List", "Download demo", "Buy physical".
[1] https://www.nintendo.com/games/detail/katamari-damacy-reroll...
Edit: Australia, here.
In the US it clearly gives me the option to buy a digital copy: https://i.imgur.com/dIbfnjP.png
It would be great if it was more like PCSX2. Not that I have any idea at all how you’d do that.
I will not purchase a console that forces me to buy hardware I do not need because they ban experiences from other platforms to try gain a competitive edge. I feel this is damaging to the industry as games with incredible experiences are blocked behind a paywall (and often restricted quality).
Consoles should compete on experience and features, not exclusive games that you can't play without buying into the ecosystem.
I only just got around to finishing Bloodborne (at 20-30 fps) and it's a game I have wanted to play since I saw the trailer back in 2013. It's so sad that they limit this game's IP to only PS4 owners. I would love to see the lore expanded upon in sequels (that run at an unlocked, variable frame rate), but if demon souls is anything to go by, we won't.
If it were available for PC, I would buy it. If it were available via emulation, I would buy it.
People who pirate games do so because they can't afford them, and there is nothing less affordable than having to buy an entire device to play a game.
Emulation does complicate this somewhat because piracy is a necessity to the experience, something that could be addressed by the hardware vendors themselves.
I also think steam has proved that the way to beat piracy is to offer a better experience than piracy offers. I get headaches playing 3d content at 30 fps, I would pay double the cost per game to run first-party nintendo games on my PC at an unlocked resolution and frame rate.
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 Wii is comparatively hard to emulate, which is why Dolphin is still struggling with certain things after a long time, while Switch emulators can run a lot of games nearly perfectly after less than half a decade.
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.
Do you differentiate between games being “made” and “sold”? If not, which consoles specifically are thinking of as ethical to emulate? Nintendo still sells NES, SNES, N64, etc. games via Virtual Console.
The problem is that in practice Nintendo only makes a very small portion of their back catalog available for purchase at any given time. The only Zelda games from previous generations that I can play on my Switch are Zelda 1, and (soon) Skyward Sword. No others are available.
If Nintendo made their whole catalog available for digital purchase (or even better, as part of a subscription) then I wouldn't emulate any of it.
But more to the small catalog. Nintendo has not the rights to just publish the old NES/SNES catalogue as they are not the sole rights owners. Also they won’t dump all these games at once. I still wait for Windwaker HD as I never owned a WiiU and don’t want to emulate the game.
When the competition for emulators is buying a hackable switch and running dumped games natively with 0 bugs or slowdowns. I doubt switch emulators have prevented the sale of a single switch game.
Unfortunately with Switch we're not there, and I don't think we ever will be. These emulators target, in order of priority, Cracked/Dumped Retail Games, then Homebrew games. I can't use them as part of my game development stack because they won't run binaries if they haven't been submitted to Nintendo to be signed (and subsequently cracked).
maybe that's the case here
And then there is WinRT/COM as well.
Unless you mean pure safe assemblies.
I have used C++/CLI long ago for a couple of minor things, and I didn’t like it. The two runtimes, C++ and .NET, are interacting in a weird way, I got an impression it combines worst parts from both C# and C++ languages.
I prefer IUnknown-based COM interfaces ever since. With some care about API design, C# side of the interop is only marginally more complex that it would be with C++/CLI, but unmanaged side is much easier in regular C++, without the CLI.
I'm sure neither this nor Yuzu are 100% working - but if let's say work was done regarding allowing legal ripping, i.e. a license system whereby Nintendo grants sale or other rights to hobbyist runningthe express purpose of runnin their games on some emulator.
I think a lot of the people drawn to emulator, work, are drawn by the cool factor. Working on homebrew games is a way to learn and express passion about embedded platforms, game dev and coding.
They say 'piracy is stealing', but locking down platforms is also stealing. We should enforce universal IP monetary attribution - keep a low standard rate of mandatory fees which must be paid out while at the same time make it illegal for companies to entirely hide their designs.
pspplayer might have been the first? I could be wrong there
I’m sure there are techniques to work around this, but you’d then usually have to leave behind the “idiomatic” area of the language you’re using.
https://devblogs.microsoft.com/dotnet/performance-improvemen...
Most notably:
> When running with the “Server GC”, a thread per core is involved in collections, and as threads finish their allotted portions of the marking work, they’re now able to “steal” undone work from other threads in order to help the overall collection complete more quickly.
I recently bought a Switch and have been playing Fortnite online...noticed more and more "online gamers" have been behaving like bots, so I'd like to take a look at the data if possible (to see if I'm playing against actual people)
It looks like that might be deliberate?
Maybe I should try Witcher 3.
It could allow Nintendo to take action against this emulator.
There's not really good precedent for this that I'm aware of - Nintendo did DMCA the repo for a GBA emulator a while ago, but it came with Nintendo game ROMs in the browser.
Nothing in particular, I was thinking about it from the other end. Seeing as the Switch is Nintendo's latest gen console I'd say it's different to something like Dolphin in terms of how much it might bother Nintendo. That plus the fact that when you want something off the internet nowadays a DMCA is typically the legal path, makes me think that Nintendo would love to find something to DMCA the repository for.
Whether there's anything to be DMCA'd I can't say (and from the replies I see probably not).
Copyright infringement is a civil offense, but there's none here.
I'm not familiar with this case, but [this page][0] seems to be more focused on the use of screenshots rather than the emulator software itself? Did this set a precedent?
[0] https://itlaw.wikia.org/wiki/Sony_Computer_Entertainment_Ame...
Bleem used HLE to avoid needing a copyrighted BIOS image. Sony complained to the courts, but Bleem successfully defended all counts using the Connectix precedent.
You're looking at the appeal - in appeal, the only leg Sony had left to stand on was the use of screenshots of copyrighted games, but the court determined it to be fair use.
So the precedent comes from looking at a series of cases around this time, but Sony v Bleem is commonly used as a handwaving reference to the whole saga. It's the first major time this defense was successfully used in court.
For an interesting comparison, the GPLv2 was written in 1991 but technically wasn't tested in a US court until 2014.
(IANAL.)
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.