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Comment by timwaagh | Hacker News Reader

Great. Facilitating more piracy. Can't people wait at least until the successor is out? I understand that it's a good way to put your name out there by being the first to do a certain thing and upload to GitHub but it's also just wrong. Also am I stupid for buying a switch instead of emulating it?

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Genuinely baffled that there are people out there that think emulation is “wrong”. Emulation is a civic good, full stop. To assert some kind of moral high ground against emulation is absurd.

These multi-billion dollar corporations cannot be trusted to maintain their digital storefronts or the ability to play games into the future. This has been shown time and time again as Nintendo et al. have shuttered eshops, dropped support for consoles, and removed titles from circulation. Video game history and its preservation fully depend on emulation efforts from the community.

Yes I'm aware switch games won't be forever and that's sad. I wish Nintendo was a little better in that regard. But I do not subscribe to the idea that these are multi billion dollar corporations and hence we can do basically whatever we want to them. In reality you are not hurting the CEO of Nintendo much but instead the ultimate beneficiaries ie Japanese grandmas whose pension fund happens to hold Nintendo shares.

The idea of a pension depending on shares of a company can be argued to be morally dubious way to do pensions.

Pensions are all bankrupt pyramid schemes who need new suckers (workers) to pay in so the scheme can pay out to the retirees.

That really varies by region

Agreed. Especially today where games are often bound to digital stores which are essentially a ticking time bomb. What happens to all your bought games once the owner loses interest and shuts down the store + online services? Unless you are able to emulate them they will most likely be gone forever, lost to history.

> Also am I stupid for buying a switch instead of emulating it?

No, while the emulation is pretty good, it's not perfect, and new titles won't always run out of the box. And things like online multiplayer naturally don't work. A Switch is a guaranteed-to-work way to play those titles, and arguably more convenient if you actually use the portability of it.

There are of course non-piracy ways to use them. I own a hackable Switch and have dumped the games I purchased so I can play them in an emulator on my Steam Deck. But not every title will run perfectly that way, so sometimes the Switch is the only portable way of actually playing them.

> And things like online multiplayer naturally don't work. A Switch is a guaranteed-to-work way to play those titles

Online multiplayer won't work on a Switch either. It's a separate paid subscription service.

Online technically works on yuzu - it emulates the same capabilities as switches connected to each others locally. This doesn't mean there are no issues. A PC and a Steam Deck running Mario Kart will have desync issues due to the Deck not hitting 60fps 100% of the time resulting in a quick connection loss.

It doesn't, that's a different feature called LAN play.

LAN play mostly exists to be able to reliably connect Switches to each other at tournaments and such (which is why you find it more frequently in competitive games). It doesn't connect to Nintendo's servers, it just looks for other devices on the same network for local play purposes. Its not the same thing as regular local multiplayer, that's a different feature.

You can somewhat trivially intercept this using DNS if you want to do long-distance co-op, but it's absurdly jank from my experience.

Also both Ryujinx and Yuzu support connecting with LDN_mitm which well, man-in-the-middles the LDN sysmodule on hacked Switch devices to enable the same thing as LAN play interception but then for titles that don't support LAN play.

>Can't people wait at least until the successor is out?

can't Nintendo get a clue and make a retrocompatible newer model which does not have the processing power of a potato?

While piracy is the most common use, it's not the only use for emulators. There's also the speedrunning communities, as well as modding communities which are steadily growing.

It's sad how many people here lose their ethical compass and reach for rationalizations (homebrew!) when it comes to something that is clearly mainly used for software piracy.

As much as you would like it to be, copyright is the status quo not per see the ethical choice. It's also not the only way to remunerate creation.

I don't personally care about copyright. I don't pirate video games because they are generally artistically as interesting as blockbuster movies which is to say not at all but I don't really have an issue with people denying profits to the entertainment industry.

Writing emulators is fun in and of itself by the way. I don't think most of the developers use them to play.

Imagine your friend is an indie developer, he releases his game, people pirate it, with the argument that he is merely part of the entertainment "industry" and thereby not worthy of an income.

Indie developer and large corporations like Nintendo are not fungible. Anyway, indie developers chose their plight. Most of them don't really make money so it's pretty clear they don't do it trying to strike rich. Plenty fund themselves through means which are not linked to copyright like kickstarter.

The fact that the system currently relies on copyright is not in itself a justification for it nor does it means it's a good system.

Tons of people do things that might one day make money while not actually ever making money. For me that's an indie game. But that kind of mostly unrewarded labour won't be done if getting paid one day relies on, essentially, begging. Speaking for myself I would rather spend my time on something that benefits me in that case, like a gym or a cooking class.

I own a Wii U. I own a copy of Breath of the Wild for Wii U, a game still sold for the Switch. Is it unethical if I dump the files for Breath of the Wild from my Wii U to run with Cemu on my Steam Deck?

No, but that's not how most people use Switch emulators.

I'm sure there's a survey of Switch emulator users you can cite to support this claim, right?

Beware Isolated Demands for Rigor:

https://slatestarcodex.com/2014/08/14/beware-isolated-demand...

So, no. The answer is no.

There is no way for you to, with the certainty you did, say what you said. You have absolutely no way of actually knowing what people use emulators for, and you're just pulling it out of your ass and pretending it's the absolute truth.

So no, you have no way of knowing that jumping out of an airplane without a parachute would kill you, since you can't provide a peer-reviewed study showing with p>0.95 that jumping out of an airplane without parachute kills you. So you have no way of actually knowing etc

Next time, don't make sweeping claims that you have no way of backing up and pretending that what you're spouting is God's given truth to the world. None of what you said is evident or obvious, and it's completely ridiculous to compare it to jumping out of a plane.

You are making a massive assumption based on nothing but your own beliefs, and you need to make it clear that the assumption is nothing more and certainly not the fact you are parroting it to be.

If someone could show that 50.1% of videos viewed with VLC were pirated, would VLC be unethical to use and support?

No. Everyone does understand that such usage is fine. It's like owning a gun. You can use it legitimately to display on the wall or illegitimately to rob a liquor store. In the case of guns the fear for illegitimate usage is such that a lot of countries chose to restrict gun ownership in general.

Not everyone understands that. There are plenty of people at Nintendo who would still tell you that is illegal

Not my concern how other people use software, the same as it's not my concern if they're using the same web browser as me but to do something illegal. I use emulators to have a better experience playing games I own.

Even Nintendo and Sony themselves directly benefit from emulation community:

https://twitter.com/PCBrown/status/794210799199760384

https://twitter.com/frankcifaldi/status/1060617281661595648

Ethics and legality are orthogonal. Not all legal activities are ethical, and not all ethical activities are legal.

Pirating videogames is clearly unethical. It's a form of freeriding.

It's not "clearly unethical", there is much more nuance than a "black or white" morality. It's also paramount to proper preservation of works. We can't trust rightsholders to be the stewards of their own preservation, as we have historically seen them destroy works because they don't want to store the archive. Given that copyright's end game is the public domain, I don't believe a rightsholder should even have the right to destroy a work. They owe that work to the public in the long term. If you believe that is "entitlement", then you argue against the core reason for copyright's existence, according to the copyright law of the US (which has also permeated the rest of the world in effect).

Some pirates may just want free shit, yes. But some pirates, especially modern ones, really are working more on a preservationist angle and intending to ensure that works aren't lost or destroyed. Rightsholders aren't forced to ensure that the public actually has access to a work once copyright expires, so the public must ensure that for themselves.

> Also am I stupid for buying a switch instead of emulating it?

For me, the form factor counts for a lot. That is part of the experience. The Switch itself also makes a great emulation platform for gaming on the go.

Yeah, we should restrict the creation of emulation software to authorized parties only. /s

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