Let's see how long it stays up now that more people know about it
> On February 26, 2024, Nintendo of America filed a lawsuit against Tropic Haze LLC, the legal entity behind Yuzu's development. Development and official distribution of Yuzu ceased on March 4, 2024, after Tropic Haze settled the lawsuit with Nintendo of America for $2.4 million.
A dev team that was actually clean and didn't pirate a single thing would have done much better.
Notice how the other emulator, Ryujinx, isn't being targeted. There is no talk of a dev "stash" on its discord server.
The marketing people inside Nintendo must have been completely furious to have their supremely controlled media cycle completely sidetracked by them. They clearly sicked the legal department on them after that.
Any time an emulator developer, or a fan game artist gets a cease and desist from Nintendo, it's always because marketing gets wind of their existence.
Citation please? Yuzu couldn't start the game at all without a patch, which I don't believe was being promoted by the Yuzu team.
Of course the patch + game + yuzu got bundled together and offered as a download on many websites, perhaps this is what you're thinking of.
Ultimately, Ryujinx's emphasis on accuracy makes it the better Switch emulator for actual preservation anyways, and I imagine that project is seeing a lot more support now that Yuzu is dead.
Note that 10NES style lockout systems are NOT "technological protection measures" under the DMCA, because they don't restrict access to the copyrighted works themselves (the games), but instead restrict what games the console will play.
The one Game Boy emu dev who canceled their project was being overly cautious
Tropic Haze (Yuzu) didn’t settle because all they were doing is writing an emulator. As others have pointed out, Nintendo had very strong reason to believe the Yuzu devs were engaged in outright and flagrant piracy. Among the allegations in Nintendo’s filing was that the devs (who publicly bragged about launch day support for new releases) were contributing the compatibility patches for new games prior to release.
Further, Tropic Haze didn’t lose the lawsuit in the sense that they went to court and had a judgement against them. They likely knew they were cooked and chose to settle.
For more on the legality of emulation in the US, review Sony vs Connectix.
Nintendo has never, ever, called the rerelease of their older titles emulation. Nintendo makes a conscious distinction between what they do internally, and external emulation. They have somewhat softened the wording of their statements, but their actions have shown they consider emulation outside Nintendo as a scourge.
Several developer kits have used the word emulation without much ado.
> But can’t I make a backup copy if I own the video game?
> You may be thinking of the backup/archival exception under the U.S. Copyright Act. There is some misinformation on the Internet regarding this backup/archival exception. This is a very narrow limitation that extends to computer software. Video games are comprised of numerous types of copyrighted works and should not be categorized as software only. Therefore, provisions that pertain to backup copies would not apply to copyrighted video game works and specifically ROM downloads, that are typically unauthorized and infringing.