Yuzu (Nintendo Switch emulator) is dead | Hacker News Reader

Yuzu (Nintendo Switch emulator) is dead

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61 pointssergiotapia46 comments

Related ongoing thread:

Yuzu emulator developers settle Nintendo lawsuit, pay $2.4M in damages - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39593647

that just shows how much they actually earned from selling yuzu.

It also shows that for-profit models of emulator development are a bad idea.

Did they really make $2.4M? It's a settlement, pretty sure Nintendo can settle for whatever amount.

There is little use in asking the court to award an amount that the defendants cannot pay, and in a copyright suit like this would make the plaintiffs look excessively malicious. That amount must be somehow calculated to fit.

> There is little use in asking the court to award an amount that the defendants cannot pay

Tell that to Gary Bowser.

Nintendo absolutely can, and do, request punitive damages that will put the defendants in permanent debt.

Reminder that the settlement against Gary Bowser was from the criminal investigation against him, as was his prison sentence. The civil damages added more for sure, but the US DOJ was a big part of that outcome.

They set up a company (LLC) to (presumably) manage the funding. I think the last patreon earnings were around 40k per month or so, but who knows what other means of acquiring money they had with that LLC. I'm sure they didn't pull out that $2.4m from thin air. It might be more than what they actually earned, but then again, their target is a company not a single individual so it makes sense that the total settlement is higher.

These are not a couple of hackers interested in coding an emulator for fun. It was a commercial venue designed to extract enough money to earn the main devs a comfortable living. That's a whole different goal.

I hate Nintendo for their takedowns and lawyers like everyone else on HN, but I tend to side with them in this case.

Cue song ... "Sayonara Basu"!

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Efl0Jj7LlV0

by folk-style acoustic guitar strummers and singers Yuzu. [1999 Album Yuzuen]

This is obviously a script cobbed together by lawyers, the display of which is a required part of the terms of a settlement.

It insinuates that they voluntarily shut down their project, which is glaringly false.

I imagine Ryunjinx is next

probably not, as they are not selling the emulator for profit.

If Nintendo were against ALL types of emulation they could (and would) have gone against all the other emulators that still exist. But they're mostly focused on shutting down for-profit emulators, so that's why they targeted yuzu.

Nintendo does oppose all types of emulation that isn't their own. Most of them are just too hard to intimidate with legal threats.

What difference are you seeing between Yuzu's patreon and Ryujinx's patreon?

They simply share progress reports there. Yuzu sold early access IIRC

It's true Yuzu did early access builds for patreons yes.

Not just for Patreon supporters—they had nightly builds available on GitHub.

They instructed Patreons to make use of an "early access key" to access EA builds.

Of course people shared them publicly, are you thinking of one of the unaffiliated github accounts that reposted them?

May I point you to:

https://www.thegamer.com/nintendo-defends-dolphin-lawsuit-sa...

  Nintendo Defends Legal Action Against Dolphin, Says Emulators "Stifle Innovation"

and my favorite: "While we recognize the passion that players have for classic games, supporting emulation also supports the illegal piracy of our products. Wherever possible, Nintendo and its licensees attempt to find ways to bring legitimate classics to current systems (via Virtual Console titles, for example)."

https://en-americas-support.nintendo.com/app/answers/detail/...

It’s wild that they can say that with a straight face.

> supporting emulation also supports the illegal piracy of our products

So does the original Switch which is trivial to hack and dump games from.

I think it may have mainly been the Patreon that killed Yuzu

And having a business entity in the USA as part of that.

USA is built entirely on litigation. Lawyers all the way down.

That's part of the reason why it costs millions of dollars to build half a mile of light rail and such.

I am -very- sad about this. In the past few weeks I've been playing a lot of games on Yuzu that I own for the Switch. The ergonomics of YouTube movies on the left - Hyrule Warriors on the right monitors is just prime time fun. Pure dumb fun.

But the game runs like ass on the physical switch. RIP Yuzu, you will be missed.

Nothing stopping you from just continuing to use it. Not like they flipped the kill switch for every downloaded copy on Earth.

Until it stops working with a new game and isn't developed anymore.

This is a rather disrespectful way to ignore a tragedy & suffering: utterly short on sympathy & consideration of where the world has been left.

Does anyone have a copy of the repo? I forgot to clone it and it's too late.

Last minute hard-fork. https://github.com/pineappleEA/pineapple-src

Thanks a lot!

What is the difference between `pineapple-src` and the main `yuzu` repo?

The main yuzu repo is gone. If you mean, pineappleEA/yuzu, it's heavily outdated. I'm assuming they renamed it to prevent (or delay) DMCA takedowns.

> it's heavily outdated

The latest build is 3 days old same as Yuzu. The difference that Yuzu used a webinstaller, while Pineapple is precompiled for Windows and as a Linux Appimage

I meant this one: https://github.com/pineappleEA/yuzu

I mean this repo (also a fork of the original): https://github.com/SomeAspy/yuzu

The content seems to be similar but also different.

Assuming you have a copy, is it straightforward to compile, or does it require a just-so build environment?

The repo linked below my comment has release builds. It uses cmake; not sure of the specifics, though.

Last official builds https://archive.org/details/yuzu-latest-builds-4th-march-202...

And Citra because that's gone too https://archive.org/details/citra-latest-builds-4th-march-20...

what about source code? It's open source. Forks were invented for situations like this.

Wow... although, a new website spawned already - https://citra-emulator.com

Hopefully some other group would pick up the development for this. And people whoever paid Nintendo would realize how they are sponsoring the evil.

> 7. With the exception of paragraphs 5 and 6 herein, the Court further enjoins

> Defendant and its members from destroying, transferring, altering, moving, returning, concealing,

> or in any manner hiding evidence relevant to the matters set forth herein—including any and all

> video game consoles, video games (or constituent elements thereof, such as video game files),

> ROMs, and video game emulators (and any digital files comprising the same) that infringe

> Nintendo’s intellectual property rights, and/or which were used in connection with developing or

> using Yuzu—unless authorized by Nintendo in writing. Defendant and its members are also

> enjoined from allowing evidence to be destroyed, altered, or concealed by third parties if the

> evidence is under Defendant or its members’ possession, custody, or control.

Aaaaand there it is. Nintendo figured out that Yuzu is not clean-room emulation, which is the only legal path to emulation. Reverse-engineering anything from Nintendo is verboten. Developing your own from scratch is not, hence why Dolphin is likely in the clear.

what makes dolphin clean room but yuzu not?

I bet Nintendo is bribing these devs. As if they didn't know the users would do shitty things with the emulator. Edit: It was the other way around. I think they are muscling these devs with lawsuits.

Bribing them? The Yuzu devs are paying millions of dollars to Nintendo as part of the settlement. They completely folded/lost.

The LLC (Tropic Haze, which is financially liable) folded, not the devs personally. Nintendo will grab whatever scrap is left (Patreon, etc) from the bankruptcy proceedings.

Don’t worry, there’s an unlimited supply of keyboard warriors dying for the chance to convince the world they are noble freedom fighters by forking the code.

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