Hacker News Reader

Comment by joshstrange | Hacker News Reader

With emulators those games can also be played on the Steam Deck.

Which is also a gray area. I personally am fine with it for older, depreciated consoles. But I won't emulate current gen games unless I'm also buying the game.. especially on the Nintendo platform where the games still have some "magic" to them, compared to the more generic games on other platforms that prioritize graphics over seemingly all other attributes.

"You need to buy the game" hardly makes it a gray area.

Even if you buy the game you need to bypass encryption in order to dump the game data to run it on an emulator. A big part of why Nintendo prevailed in their lawsuit against Yuzu is that they proved the emulator could not be used without extracting encryption keys and bypassing copy protection.

So no, there's no legal way to use a switch emulator. At least not for playing commercial switch games, I guess you could theoretically home brew your own game to play on an emulator.

In the US. Most of the world doesn’t have these laws.

> A big part of why Nintendo prevailed in their lawsuit against Yuzu is that they proved the emulator could not be used without extracting encryption keys and bypassing copy protection.

Not a lawyer but as I understand it, the case resulted in a settlement and as such no legal determination was made. They didn't prove anything in court and no precedent was set regarding the legality of emulation.

Just so you know, it’s _deprecated_.

It was a solid autocorrect typo on my part, mb. But fair callout!

Obviously there isn't a switch 2 emulator yet, and probably will be a while until one is released.

The challenge will not be hardware emulation (if it's a nvidia tegra 2 based SOC that will be easy) but hack the OS/security to make it usable.

So don't expect to play mario kart 9 on your steam deck anytime soon.

Edit: with easy i don't mean that it will not demand a really top of the line computer to run it. But that isn't completely undocumented or custom hardware, like i don't know, ps3 or sega saturn.

Sure, but you cannot play online, though. You can't trade Pokemon for example. Tetris 99 got a lot of play in our house. It heavily depends on what you're chasing.

You can't play online on an official Switch either, unless you subscribe to Nintendo's "we give you an internet connection" monthly service offering.

Why pay for the Steam Deck, though? Buy it online and claim it never arrived to get a refund.

I’m yet to hear a moral argument for emulating current games you don’t own unless you’re poor and need to choose between buying Zelda and starving.

What if I emulate current games that my friend owns, but I make sure to never play the same game at the same time as he does?

I already own those games and can only fit one device into my bag

What if you buy the game secondhand, cheaply? My friend got Animal Crossing with their switch for free with a bundle, but they don't like playing the game. This would be much better than paying full price for a game that never will go on sale.

Buying a used game means the original owner can no longer play, and has to repurchase if they want to play as again. The same is not true for emulators

> Why pay for the Steam Deck, though? Buy it online and claim it never arrived to get a refund.

If you do so, the seller has one less device. If you copy a game, the seller still has the same number of games. Your analogy clearly doesn't work. A better analogy would be possible if we had Star Trek replicators: replicating a full Steam Deck.

> A better analogy would be possible if we had Star Trek replicators: replicating a full Steam Deck.

Well, we literally invented Star Trek replicators for information, and we've seen what happened. If we had Star Trek replicators people would be complaining that replicating food, medicine, etc. is immoral because you should be paying the "original creator" for their intellectual property.

Not defending the length of current US copyright, but as long as we live under capitalism, the people who spend years of their time making the information need to get compensated somehow.

Indeed everyone needs to be compensated somehow regardless of what they enjoy doing or are capable of doing.

Not disagreeing, but also not sure what your point is

They have sold millions of faulty joycons (referring to drift), when the solution was already available (hall effect sticks) but it would have cost them an extra $1 per joystick, reselling games that came out in 2010 for $60 today, and using DMCA to bully youtube channels that show videos of their games are some morally reprehensible things from the top of my head.

It does not entitle anyone to pirate their games, but taking your words, Nintendo is not exactly starving either, they could have spent the extra $1 on the joycons to fit them with non drifting sticks. Even if you use their replacement program, you just get another joycon with the same stick.

Switch emulation works surprisingly well, but it has its quirks and some titles are barely playable. I love emulation primarily because it's necessary for long-term archival of game libraries, but emulating modern systems is not a super user-friendly process (not to mention the qualms around piracy).

The audience of people that would get a Steam Deck and then emulate Switch games is so small that this is a no-issue for Nintendo. If you can do that you're probably not the target audience to begin with.

> The audience of people that would get a Steam Deck and then emulate Switch games is so small that this is a no-issue for Nintendo

Given how Nintendo handled the situation with Ryujinx and Yuzu, they clearly thought it was an issue for them.

you can see why they are so aggressively pursuing emulators

Reply on news.ycombinator.com