Yuzu – Nintendo Switch Emulator

by hising • 9 years ago

466 171 9 years ago

Jack5500• 9 years ago

Even if you don't believe in emulation due to piracy, having an emulator around for the sake of archiving is good for the future, I think.

Cthulhu_• 9 years ago

I'm inclined to agree, but it's a debatable grey area. Archive.org has emulators for some older systems, so that's great. I've also heard of the big console manufacturers actually using community-built / open-source emulators themselves to allow for re-releasing their own games on newer systems.

I think every console manufacturer should release their own legal emulators; companies like Nintendo could make a lot of money off of a NES or GB(A) emulator on smartphones, they can keep selling their classics for $1-$5 apiece.

davweb• 9 years ago

Nintendo have been doing exactly this for years [1], albeit only on their own hardware and not on smartphones.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Virtual_Console

dtech4• 9 years ago

Even with Virtual Console and backward-compatibility around emulators are still a good thing.

Backwards-compatibility is usually only 1 generation, so it just pushes the bitrot forward 5-10 years.

Relying on original manufacturers to re-release old games depends fully on that manufacturer's ability and willingness, and up to now the only manufacturer doing it, Nintendo, has been very selective in which games they re-release. And it's a separate release per console so again only pushes the rot for that game forward to that console's lifespan.

Thanks to emulators I'm willing to bet that in 100 years you will be able to play currently-emulatable games since I expect a good Windows/PC emulator to exist at that time.

syaz1• 9 years ago

I don't think you need an excuse, really. Could be educational, or other honorable things (or not), so long as they're open source for others to hack on top of or learn from.

ben-schaaf• 9 years ago

Emulators are also great for the speedrunning community. They especially help in developing TAS's (Tool Assisted Speedruns), which contribute strats back to the human runners and push the boundaries of how fast games can be beaten.

0xcde4c3db2• 9 years ago

The kind of insight offered by TAS experimentation and reverse engineering enables some really impressive stuff, like manual arbitrary code execution. There are multiple ACE exploits in Super Mario World, which have been used for credit warp runs and even poking code into RAM to turn the game into a Flappy Bird clone.

laumars• 9 years ago

I completely agree. In that regard reading the replies to the Twitter announcement[1] was an exercise in frustration

[1] https://twitter.com/yuzuemu/status/952461671368478721

reificator• 9 years ago

I shouldn't have clicked that link, it was very frustrating. It's like when watching AVGN, any time they bring up emulators it's always in a negative way. "Yeah, this is where people on emulators would cheat and make a save state" etc...

I've got a Switch, I buy all the games that I play, and I am extremely excited for this emulator to come out.

In my Steam library I have several games that are DOSBox wrappers around the original title. They're emulators, and I paid money for them, and they're perfectly legal.

Digital archival is a growing problem, so much of our culture is going to be lost without efforts like these.

On a side note:

When I talk to fellow gamers about my history of modding games, there's generally two groups. The ones who play on PC ask what I added, new levels, skins, etc.... And the ones who play only on consoles typically get upset because they think it means I made cheats for online play.

(For the record it was usually new features in code)

dtech4• 9 years ago

Also historically emulation only gets into a state usable for pirates after the end of the console's lifetime, or at the least near the tail end.

So right at the time emulators are good enough to enable piracy the impact is significantly less because you can't buy the original console and games anymore.

chrisper2• 9 years ago

Since the Switch is similar to the 3DS and it uses a well documented chip (Nvidia Tegra) development should be faster.

laurent123456• 9 years ago

Also historically emulation only gets into a state usable for pirates after the end of the console's lifetime, or at the least near the tail end.

The Nintendo 64 was an exception since Ultra64 was released quite early and worked impressively well on PCs of that time (as long as you had a 3Dfx card).

OptionX2• 9 years ago

I operate under this as a guideline. If the game can't be bought anymore in a way where money gets to the devs then (you can always get random box copy's from eBay or some such) then it's OK to use an emulator.

astura4• 9 years ago

You're confusing (pirated) ROMs with "emulators."

There are emulator products that you can only play with original games (such as bleem!) and/or ROMs provided by the publisher (such as Nintendo's eStore)

The devs at mainstream game studios are salaried, they've already been paid for their work performed no matter if the game sells or not. If the game is never released (which happens) they still get a paycheck.

frik• 9 years ago

Exactly, emulator are good for archiving. It allows on to play decades old games. Even some museums use emulators.

Yuzu Switch emulator is made by devs of a 3DS emulator Crita: https://citra-emu.org

3DS is unique with its 3D display that doesn't need a 3D glass. The "New 3DS XL" is especially great, as it has a stable 3D effect because of infrared eye-tracking. While most gamer got a bad impression from the first gen 3DS 3D effect without eye-tracking. I would pay premium for such a 3D PC monitor. Unfortunately Nintendo Switch doesn't feature such a 3D display nor does any other device available.

snausages• 9 years ago

True, but lets not forget when a fully playable version of Breath of the Wild became available on Wii-U emulators last year just after release.

It's a tricky area.

cuckcuckspruce• 9 years ago

The WiiU has been dead since the Switch released. Nintendo put out BotW on the WiiU because they hadn't put out a Zelda game on it yet and Switch supplies were short. I wouldn't say that it's hurt sales for the game for the Switch - BotW had an above 100% attach rate at launch on the Switch.

dtech4• 9 years ago

It doesn't seem to have hurt sales, it's outpacing Zelda: Twilight Princess in terms of sales and that's currently holding the record.

rplnt• 9 years ago

Emulators don't make piracy legal. So it would be the same argument as for DRM-enabled videos or music. And that is a pretty bad argument.

astura4• 9 years ago

And there's great legal uses for emulation:

https://hyperkin.com/Retron5/ (it was pointed out to me they violate open source licenses, so forget this one.)

every game system's "virtual store"

wrapping old games around an emulator to make them (seamlessly) compatible with current computers. Allows the publisher to continue to sell decades old games with vert minimal effort.

I don't know how much rereleases of games use emulation vs rewrites, but I assume at least some use emulation.

I believe I heard that the xbox360 contains an Xbox emulator for backwards compatibility. If it wasn't the Xbox360 it was some other console.

Then there's the failed bleem! commercial emulator.

criddell• 9 years ago

Copyrights don't last forever.

iClaudiusX• 9 years ago

History is full of examples where a developer/publisher decided to port or remaster a game from its back catalog only to realize they have lost the source code and need to rely on an emulator ROM. Sega, Nintendo, and Capcom I think are the most infamous examples.

Of course the hypocrisy is lost on these same companies who for decades have used piracy as the boogeyman to vilify archival work and fair use.

heywire• 9 years ago

Although most here probably know this already, I'll take this opportunity to point out that the Internet Archive has a great collection of games playable in your browser.

https://archive.org/details/consolelivingroom

distantsounds• 9 years ago

bless the internet archive for having an exception to the DMCA clause!

chrisper2• 9 years ago

Emulators are not illegal. Sony even lost a lawsuit: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bleem!#Sony_lawsuit

slg5• 9 years ago

This the equivalent of "this pipe is for tobacco use only" or "BitTorrent is used to share Linux distros".

Yes, emulators are legal. But we all know that the overwhelming use of them is in illegal situations.

EDIT: Since this comment is currently sitting at -2 points, I figured I would expand on my rather glib comment. From Nintendo's website:

whether you have an authentic game or not, or whether you have possession of a Nintendo ROM for a limited amount of time, i.e. 24 hours, it is illegal to download and play a Nintendo ROM from the Internet.[1]

What percentage of emulators are only used to play homebrewed games or commercial games that an individual has personally backed up? Almost all other uses are illegal.

[1] https://www.nintendo.com/corp/legal.jsp#emulator

strictnein• 9 years ago

I paid for Bleem. Even though I had used other emulators for things like NES, Sega, etc, it seemed like absolute magic to be able to throw a PS1 game in a computer and have it work.

balls187• 9 years ago

I bought my Switch after playing BotW via CEMU.

I have a WiiU, but trying out BotW at 1600p was intriguing.

0xcde4c3db2• 9 years ago

I've been told that even some authorized arcade emulator releases actually use bootleg MAME sets because they lost the original code that ran in the "protection MCU". If you don't know what that is: to delay bootleg production, arcade vendors used to put some bit of important code inside a microcontroller, so that just copying the ROM chips produced a broken game and bootleg vendors would have to reverse engineer it and reproduce it in the main CPU program, sometimes leading to gameplay differences (IIRC, the generation of the "EXTEND" bubbles in Bubble Bobble was an example noticeable to expert players).

Sephr• 9 years ago

Not just for archiving, but also for playing at higher framerates and resolutions. 30fps games give me headaches but the same game running at 120fps can make a huge difference.

degenerate• 9 years ago

"At this time, yuzu does not run any commercial Switch games. yuzu can boot some games, to varying degrees of success, but does not implement any of the necessary GPU features to render 3D graphics"

In case anyone thought it was a full-blown emulator

ReverseCold6• 9 years ago

There's already an "emulator" that's used to make Homebrew. It has zero graphics support, only enough to debug basic homebrew tools.

This is the first one that is "marketed" as an emulator.

speps• 9 years ago

Actually, it can render some graphics now: https://twitter.com/notfunnei/status/952460754996944896

I guess they didn't update the website.

elliottcarlson• 9 years ago

The README specifically says 3D graphics, which still seems to be lacking.

jpmoyn• 9 years ago

Hopefully this gets developed more and is actually able to run games

Fej2• 9 years ago

Glad that the first major Switch emulator is open-source, it sets the standard.

kakarot8• 9 years ago

Agreed! Cemu is a great piece of software, but coming after Dolphin, the premiere open source console emulation project, it was pretty lame that they opted for closed source.

In the case of Cemu, I understand that closed source = $20k/mo in Patreon subscriptions which enabled a blistering pace of development in 2017. It's my hope that the developers eventually open up the source after the subscriptions dry up.

For long-term support, something that is extremely important when you're dealing with games that will eventually be decades old, open source is critical.

dtech4• 9 years ago

Does it have to be closed source for the Patreon? A significant amount of open source developers have their own successful Patreon. And it's freely downloadable so it's not like that is the Patreon incentive.

jjrh• 9 years ago

The stated reasons for keeping the code closed seem rather silly to me ( https://www.reddit.com/r/cemu/comments/3ou88k/rcemu_is_now_o... )

I wonder if there is code in there that was perhaps acquired in a way that wasn't totally above board/not written in a total clean room?

BoorishBears• 9 years ago

It’s been rumored CEMU was bootstrapped by Nintendo code that’s under NDA, so it can’t be open sourced without facing DCMA requests

hellbanner2• 9 years ago

"It's just Emulation!" - The Challenge of Selling old Games https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16151538

drngdds2• 9 years ago

That's an hour long video, can you summarize its arguments?

jamie_ca2• 9 years ago

TLDR summary slide near the end:

- There is an audience for old games - Out of print games are lost revenue - Emulation is cheap - Emulation is accurate - _Embrace the emulator_

The speaker works as a game developer, worked on the Mega Man Legacy Collection (the 6 NES games, packaged together with a bunch of value-adds).

He posits that it's really easy these days to bundle up a "classic" game ROM with an open-source emulator that is commercial-permissive (DOSBox has been so for years, MAME/MESS became open source in 2016 and covers a large number of arcade and home consoles), and is a missed opportunity for long-tail revenue. If the film industry can do it, why not the games industry? [Nintendo's been doing it successfully with the Virtual Console on Wii U and 3DS, why aren't 3rd-party publishers going all out?]

vlunkr• 9 years ago

While I think that video is great, the games on the Switch are the opposite of old.

hellbanner2• 9 years ago

Yes, but in 5, 10 years they will be just like the games discussed in the presentation.

ry_ry2• 9 years ago

Much of the Switch's appeal for me was the interesting hardware configuration, I wonder if Nintendo focused less on obfuscating its inner workings compared to other current-gen consoles based on that?

Edit: urgh, was supposed to be a reply to another comment. I guess the point still stands though.

amaranth• 9 years ago

It's an almost stock Tegra X1 reference system. The hacks that got access to the system recently started with a Tegra backdoor/debug option Nvidia and Nintendo apparently forgot about.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ec4NgWRE8ik

ReverseCold6• 9 years ago

Video TL;DW:

- Launch hidden web browser through WiFi Web Auth or the Japanese version of PuyoPuyo Tetris.

- Connect to MITM'd WiFi hotspot that has a webkit exploit.

- Gain userspace access.

- Exploit preload (pl:u) service, it has an array out of bounds read.

- Exploit SM service by forgetting to initialize it with your PID, therefore it thinks you are PID 0.

- The whole Kernel is mapped into userspace for some reason, can be used as ASLR bypass.

- Search Tegra manual for "bypass SMMU" - follow instructions, bypass kernel using the GPU. (35:00, oversimplified here)

- Change certain parts of DRAM, PMC, etc, and during wakeup TrustZone will execute whatever. This is fixed past v1.0.0.

kakarot8• 9 years ago

I've had every previous Nintendo console to date except for the Wii U. I've gone through 2 SNES's, 2 N64's, 2 Gamecubes, 3 Wii's, but 0 Wii U's.

Nintendo had a great streak going, and they just ruined it with such a shit piece of hardware. Sure, the Wii was pretty terrible, but it redeemed itself with the ease of which it can be hacked and customized, plus the Wiimotes were pretty neat even if not perfect.

My solution to shitty hardware? Buy the games and emulate. Never touch that awful gamepad.

I don't care if full-blown 100% commercial emulation dropped tomorrow, I will still buy a Switch this year and probably another in a couple years.

Hardware design is extremely important, and with Nintendo's commitment to continually finishing last in the GFX arms race, it's all they have. At least with the Switch, they found a way to justify reduced graphical performance with a hybrid mobile design.

As soon as some nice third-party joycons hit the market, I'm in.

ReverseCold6• 9 years ago

third-party joycons

You don't like first party Nintendo controllers better? I always find first party to be higher quality, even if the third party one is more expensive.

elsonrodriguez• 9 years ago

Hardware design is extremely important, and with Nintendo's commitment to continually finishing last in the GFX arms race, it's all they have.

I'd like to point out that the Gamecube was much better than the Playstation 2 in terms of graphics.

In fact, I'd say that they learned their lesson about being a "Me Too" player that generation, and began to focus on usability and innovation instead of raw speed. This is a lesson they should have learned from their portables, but somehow never applied it to their consoles.

jlebrech• 9 years ago

the appeal of the switch is portability, if you need a powerful gaming laptop to run it it's defeating the purpose, but for posterity it's a good project to keep an eye on.

drngdds2• 9 years ago

This is good for some other reasons too:

- There are some good Switch exclusives that are worth playing even non-portably

- Eventually, this will probably let us play Switch games in higher resolutions with better textures, post-processing, etc.

- In the long-term, emulators let gamers get around eternally renewing copyrights, which are basically just rent-seeking.

baby• 9 years ago

True. I hope that this doesn't scare game developers away though, the switch is truly one of the best console I've own so far and I'd be sad to see developers running away from it because of emulators and piracy.

rkuska2• 9 years ago

don't hesitate to join our Discord and talk to bunnei

Is that you bunnie? Or someone from Boston who was inspired by bunnie?

(bunnie = https://www.bunniestudios.com/ reverse engineer too, graduate from MIT)

Retr0spectrum• 9 years ago

bunnei != bunnie

senatorobama• 9 years ago

hahaha

rkuska2• 9 years ago

I understand that. It's just a bit of coincidence with naming, the area of interest and also boston.

Relys• 9 years ago

haha, yeah I thought that at first too. Separate individuals. Both exceptional.

falcolas• 9 years ago

If you want more interesting consoles that break from the "set top box" paradigm, be sure to buy a switch.

If you want more games that are awesome and fun to play, buy those games.

Only after you've bought them (or can no longer legally buy them), break them apart and create roms and emulators for your own use.

</Soapbox>

Artists will often create even without pay, but the scale and quality of many of these games is beyond what even a group of artists could create in a decade long side project.

thinkpad20• 9 years ago

Some of the time stamps I’m seeing on the code are on the order of two years old. How is that possible, considering how long the switch has been out? I guess they were able to reuse a lot of code?

AlexAltea• 9 years ago

Yuzu is fork from an existing emulator for the Nintendo 3DS written by essentially the same developers: https://citra-emu.org/

zdw• 9 years ago

Interesting that they didn't try to make it run on the nVidia Shield, which has the same hardware as the Switch, but clocked higher.

Yuzu – Nintendo Switch Emulator

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