Dolphin on Steam Indefinitely Postponed

Thanks for more info! And excuse my language, but holy fuck Valve is not what it portrays itself to be. Going around and proactively seeking legal approval of third parties, that is NOT what I expected them to do, let alone in a case where an emulator is the core of the issue. They basically preemptively covered their ass just so the 0.1% chance of Nintendo suing them is 0. Nice. Imagine selling a product on Steam and Valve going behind your back and discussing with your competition if it's ok to have your product on Steam (lawyers to lawyers, no courts involved!)... I know it's not the same, but this case doesn't exacly inspire confidence in them being hands off in the future!

I would bet good money that this is exactly why a DMCA was sent; someone at Nintendo was shown a Steam Deck, which is a big Switch competitor, loading Dolphin and playing Gamecube games for free with better performance than what Nintendo themselves deign to provide us.

Dolphin doesn’t need to be on steam to be used on a steam deck. You can install any program you want, it’s not restricted to steam.

It's not like having dolphin on steam will give you access to free gamecube and wii games. You will still have to get them yourself and/or any bioses that may be required, I dunno.

Which means a bit of hacking, which means you should already be capable enough to install emudeck on your steam deck. Which is vastly superior to any single emulator on steam itself.

Which just paints an even bigger target on it.

When it was on its own website and hosted on its own servers, with mostly word of mouth (online) spreading it, Nintendo were probably not too happy, but accepting that it was legal.

But when Valve, who are sort of competing with Nintendo, host it and promote, that's another matter. Especially when many people do play games using it that they have not legally obtained.

Is there a reason you can't just use the normal OS package repo like everyone else?

Only if they implement steam cloud saves. Its not automatic.

My impression is that Nintendo doesn't really care about piracy. It doesn't seem to affect them meaningfully, and their actions to stop piracy are always in the "too little too late" fashion. I have a Switch, and I don't pirate its games because I like the company. It wouldn't be hard to do it if I really wanted to.

What they really seem to care about is their brands and IPs, and seem to go after about people using those - for example, the draconian rules on streaming, shutting down Smash Bros competitions, etc.

I can understand their actions. More than any other game company, Nintendo lives and dies on their brand and IPs. Sony and Microsoft are larger than their gaming divisions. Nintendo only has gaming to save itself, and their IPs are major console sellers.

> they are just extremely bad at securing their hardware platforms

Frankly, though I hate to defend them; this is wrong and an insult to Nintendo.

The Nintendo Switch was so, so close to being a masterpiece of security. Nintendo even built their own OS from scratch for it based on a microkernel. It is so secure that an open-source developer who reimplemented it (SciresM) has said we very likely may never have a kernel exploit on future Nintendo systems, ever. The entire kernel is so compact there’s almost nothing to attack. Everything else from graphics to USB runs in sandboxed usermode and can’t run homebrew. This thing is intrinsically more secure than the Xbox One and PlayStation 5 in design.

Nintendo’s software was, according to him and other developers looking at it, downright almost flawless in security. The problem was NVIDIA, who had a bug in their recovery mode allowing unsigned code; and NVIDIA again for releasing a chip with inadequate protections against glitching. Nintendo did everything they could almost perfectly, but their chip supplier didn’t.

Both of those are one-time plays though. The next chip will almost certainly contain glitch protection; and the recovery mode bug has already been patched on newer Switches. Combined with Nintendo’s (literally) impeccable OS design, and the Switch 2 may not be broken for a very, very long time.

Switch was broken through a Nvidia tegra hardware bug.

And Nintendo Fokus on gameplay and not doing the hardware race makes emulation much easier for current games (switch is also really old by now)

>Nintendo since the gamecube has been uniquely abysmal at anti-piracy, the worst by far of any console maker.

I'm still amazed at the 3DS piracy that was done through downloading from the official eShop.

I think a big part of the issue may be that the Switch is extremely weak (compared to competing consoles like the PS5 and Xbox Series X) so its games can be emulated very easily.

What are you talking about? Every game developer licenses with Nintendo to publish to Switch. Nintendo takes about 30% royalties, which stings if their platform is insecure. Only Nintendo can make physical cartridges. Nothing with the status quo there has changed.

Also, the last original Wii game was Just Dance 2020. Not joking, a Wii game was released 3 years ago.

Maybe the separate internet was an exaggeration, but there are things I would never post on a frequently visited public forum, because they're best left unspoken or found if you look for/hear about them in private-ish convo (like emulators/ROMs), given the legislative climate around them. Too much (stimulated) popularity can be poison.

Because the last time it was litigated in the US, the good guys won. But SCEA v. Bleem was over 20 years ago, and there's no guarantee that the courts won't roll back protections for emulation development.

NoA is notoriously vindictive & litigious, and they have more money than the Dolphin devs. Even though Sony lost the case, the lawsuit ruined Bleem. It's not outside the realm of possibility that Nintendo will try to do the same thing to Dolphin, Ryujinx, Yuzu, etc.

It’s an expensive theory to test. I would imagine most OSS projects or their contributors are not in a financial position to get to court, let alone see the trial to a conclusion.

I don’t know what to do about it, but it seems we’ve fell into aristocracy of ruling corporations.

The main point is that it's not a good survival strategy for a hobbyist project that may draw the ire of a big company: even if the companies legal action is completely frivolous, it can easily destroy the project (basically the only option they actually have is enough public outcry to get the company to back off due to the bad publicity). Generally speaking laying low is the better option. It sucks, and it's a big problem with the current judicial system, but it is the status quo. It would take someone able and willing to put some serious resources into a risky bet to change that.

Sometimes it's just better to settle for good enough, or in this case pretty damn good.

But no, some of you want the most convenient way. Only this time, that's painted a massive target on the back of what you want.

Every interaction with IP law is a total gamble and if you lose you are gone forever. It's best to take as few gambles as possible

Many people agree but don't have the resources or are risking too much if they try.

If you think you can make a difference, the world will welcome you.

That seems implausible. There's only one way for the sender of a DMCA takedown notice to get in serious trouble, and that's by lying about being authorized by the copyright holder to send DMCA notices over their works:

> 17 U.S. Code §512(c)(3)(A)(vi) A statement that the information in the notification is accurate, and under penalty of perjury, that the complaining party is authorized to act on behalf of the owner of an exclusive right that is allegedly infringed.

(emphasis added)

Yes. Sometimes it can even run better than native Switch games better than the Switch itself, but sometimes it doesn't. IIRC it depends on the game.

I disagree. I find TOTK to be much more polished and they fixed everything that annoyed me in the first game.

Huh? The sequel is the perfect video game sequel and improves on a once in a decade masterpiece in every possible way.

I think you're underestimating the effort required to complete the task you're suggesting, probably by multiple orders of magnitude.

The point that people seem to not get is that Nintendo's entire brand rides almost entirely on having a "perfect" experience. Word is that they spent an extra year just on polish for TOTK; having played it myself, I believe it. No game is this quality on release on any other platform. They have their walled garden in the switch (and previous consoles) where they make sure it works absolutely perfectly, and it costs them a lot just to do that. I believe it might be literally impossible for any company to achieve that reputation under any other circumstance, and the polar opposite circumstance is emulating your game on the hyper-chaotic hardware situation that is PC gaming. Not to mention the fact that modern emulators almost universally offer things that Nintendo wouldn't dare: upscaled textures, higher FPS (this is a huge one that causes a litany of bugs), mods, etc. Even a release to PC wouldn't matter because people would demand parity with what emulators offer or just go back to them.

Look at this list: https://nintendo.fandom.com/wiki/List_of_Nintendo_games

What you are suggesting would require the following for every one of them:

1. Thorough testing for performance and stability to ensure a PC port works at all

2. Thorough testing of innumerable hardware configurations

3. Thorough testing of every conceivable type of controller, display, keyboard/mouse, etc.

4. Ongoing support of some sort, forever.

Nintendo's focus on quality means that what you're asking is probably a multi-trillion dollar effort that would take decades even if they increased their staffing by 10x. Do you think there's that kind of money in it for them? To top it off, I will repeat that hardware on PCs is far, far more chaotic and unpredictable than any other platform. To even attempt this would be folly; it would be guaranteed to be a buggy mess (like how emulators all have been and to some extent remain), and their main selling point would be ruined.

It seems self-evident to me that Nintendo doesn't really care about emulators for old games. They throw their weight around and make broad gestures to say they hate it, but that's the point. They know they can't stop people from doing this stuff, and they make almost no effort software-wise to prevent it. They just want people to know without any shred of doubt that if they play a nintendo game outside of a platform they have deemed worthy, they are not getting the "real" experience. This absolves them of any blame when the games inevitably don't work right, and it makes clear that they will never allow emulators to become "official" platforms. I'm sure they carefully weigh their actions to ensure they don't actually extinguish emulators, and I wouldn't be surprised if they have covertly contributed to their development at some point. These old games are unlikely to be money makers, but keeping people playing Nintendo IP will make them more interested in buying more in the future.

> How can a measure be "effective" if it can be circumvented?

"Effective" is defined in the law. It basically means any copy protection measure which, during the normal course of its operation (i.e., the happy path), prevents unauthorized copying. A bit of JavaScript that disables "Save Image As" qualifies. If you write a browser extension that knocks out that JavaScript, you could be civilly and criminally liable under the DMCA.

By "effective" it means "that has the effect of"

Effective is very clear in legal drafting - it means that there must be a function that occurs for this purpose, not that it has to succeed.

Essentially all "effective" means is that you can't put a piece of paper in the box that says "this is a technical protection measure", you need to have some engineering that is intended to be one.

No ambiguity in the drafting here, and if you took your argument to court you would lose.

That's the intention. They make the law so unclear on purpose that they can arrest you for almost anything.

DMCA 1201 is good law in France. America conditions trade agreements upon countries adopting equivalent language to 1201 in their local law. In the case of France, the EU Copyright Directive has had 1201-equivalent language in it since the early 2000s.

Even if it wasn't good law in France, Steam is a US platform, there is no "French Steam". You need something entirely owned and operated by non-US individuals to even have a chance of escaping US jurisdiction. Chinese domestic equivalent services would be your best bet these days, except now you have to deal with China's censorship machine, which makes the censorship[0] of not being able to release encryption keys for old videogames look like nothing.

[0] US courts have categorically rejected the argument that copyright infringement is free speech. In fact, they seem to believe the opposite: that artists not being paid in monopoly rights is censorship, and that the 1st Amendment has a sort of ROBOT9000[1] rule where copies aren't speech.

The EFF has 1st Amendment challenges to DMCA 1201 specifically but I do not expect them to be successful.

[1] An IRC bot operated by XKCD creator Randall Munroe, which was also implemented by moot in 4chan's /r9k/ board. The bot removes speech that has been spoken in the past.

Yes, they are Nintendo's private keys. I believe the comment is referring to the early factory programming stage of the console, though I'm not 100% sure. PCGamer.com also confirmed the DMCA notice says it's about encryption keys [0]

> The DCMA letter sent to Valve cites the anti-circumvention language of the DMCA and specifically claims that "the Dolphin emulator operates by incorporating these cryptographic keys without Nintendo’s authorization and decrypting the ROMs at or immediately before runtime. Thus, use of the Dolphin emulator unlawfully 'circumvent[s] a technological measure that effectively controls access to a work protected under' the Copyright Act."

> If they're Nintendo's keys, why would they DMCA a Steam page but not a GitHub repository that's distributing the keys?

Because Nintendo's legal department is not dumb and makes very specific takedown requests that they know they can win, as opposed to taking down more gray-area things like source code.

Grabbing an emulator from dolphin-emu.org or GitHub is not the same thing as grabbing an emulator from a well-moderated public storefront where a good number of your third-party partners also publish their games.

Nintendo does not publish their games on Steam as of right now, but for an analogy, imagine how happy Sony would be if a PS4 emulator showed up on Steam recommended right next to their other PC games.

This was always playing with fire.

[0] https://www.pcgamer.com/nintendo-sends-valve-dmca-notice-to-...

you can extract that exact key from a real Wii using a pair of tweezers

> If they're Nintendo's keys, why would they DMCA a Steam page but not a GitHub repository that's distributing the keys?

I don't know

Fair use is irrelevant to the anti-circumvention provisions (at least unless the Library of Congress explicitly sets out an exception, and they have not for emulation), and the statement that encryption is fair use is significantly more ambiguous than people hope it is (for a start neither of the relevant cases were heard in a high enough court to establish a significant precedent).

The "effectively" means that it has the effect of, not whether it does it poorly.

In theory you can dump disk images pre-decrypted, but that would make the Steam version of the emulator incompatible with every disk dump tool and personal Wii game archive out there.

Now you can also memorize 0xebe42a225e8593e448d9c5457381aaf7

Something like "In years past, many emulation projects were more niche and development done as part of a scene rather than collaboratively. Maybe that early history played into Dolphin starting out separate and then never having a good opportunity to merge its already developed codebass with MAME/MESS?" might come off less aggressively as well as focus the discussion around substance, if it were to be the original comment. Hopefully you can agree that it's a lot easier for meaningful conversation to form around that while, on the other hand, it's a lot easier for an emotionally charged conversation to form around a statement starting "Probably a combination of NIH syndrome, not knowing other projects exist,". Both statements might have genuinely seeked to make the same intended argument, but had completely different approaches are what make it interpreted as insults/flamebait vs well intended conversation, not the personally perceived factuality. Similarly, past experiences (second or third party) with other developers who had infighting problems is not an excuse to argue that's the problem with other developers you don't know while expecting it to be interpreted as well-intentioned, without a particularly deep explanation. Those kind of claims leave little in the way of content to respond to and invokes only emotional responses, which is precisely what flagging is for.

It wouldn't necessarily make it any more true as to why Dolphin is merged with MAME/MESS currently though. Dolphin has been an extremely collaborative open source effort over the years and went through multiple rewrites with hundreds of developers who were well aware of MAME/MESS (as well as other projects like retroarch these days) and still kept it standalone. What it would, however do, is be a well received comment and open the floor to earnest responses which could earnestly talk about those thoughts with more direct knowledge of the project. The other comments did a good job of covering technical reasons this kind of merger wouldn't really make sense, so I'm not going to duplicate that conversation here, but the comment being put next to them likely amplified that it seemed like a particularly unfounded take of the Dolphin team.

None of this is to say any of us here are perfect, me very often not, but just because you are asking why it was flagged so heavily and nobody else gave any explanation.

Even if you disagree with every last bit of the above though, please keep in mind many long time members of the Dolphin development community are active here on HN and they probably don't feel great reading comments from people they've never interacted with assuming these kinds of things (e.g. infighting, guarded about contributions, unaware of other popular projects, motivated by NIH as a primary reason) about them.