First beta of Nintendo Switch emulator Suyu goes live

https://overkill.wtf/nintendo-switch-emulator-suyu-beta/

by brandrick • 2 years ago

128 92 2 years ago

speps• 2 years ago

The key bit:

Unlike Yuzu, the Suyu team does things differently in regards to Nintendo Switch emulation than their predecessors. Whereas Yuzu only required prod.keys, Suyu will also require you to dump your title.keys and firmware from a hacked Switch to run games. The devs also clarified that they are doing this for nonprofit (there's no Patreon) and do not condone piracy.

We'll see how long it lasts...

tempoponet• 2 years ago

One argument I heard for the Yuzu settlement was to avoid discovery. There's speculation that Nintendo had the goods on them, and that discovery would expose them to more than the civil penalties they were facing.

Nintendo has never been friendly to emulation, or most fan content in general, but there are protections for fair-use and this team appears to be building their work behind those, rather than playing fast and loose with them.

LelouBil• 2 years ago

Yeahw if they used leaked games to optimize the emulator for release day, they would have much more to fear.

klausa2• 2 years ago

My understanding was that they were offering a specially-patched version of Yuzu to their Patreon supporters, that included improvements for games that _weren't released yet_.

*Making money* by helping people run Zelda _before it came out_ was begging for trouble.

Nintendo's approach to fan projects and emulators is ridiculous, don't get me wrong — but Yuzu authors were definitely playing with fire and overstepping what's generally accepted in the community.

testudovictoria2• 2 years ago

There are fair-use protections, but it costs money to defend. Part of why so many Smash tournaments folded in 2022 was because of Nintendo telling people they weren't allowed to host tourneys using their IP. Granted I'm not a lawyer, but people gathering to play a multiplayer game and then streaming the matches doesn't inherently constitute any infringement on Nintendo's rights or ability to make money. Many TOs (tournament organizers) left the scene or stopped featuring Smash as a title over the C&D notice. No one wanted to take on Nintendo in court.

Kind of. Some TOs are calling Nintendo's bluff. Nintendo released a set of guidelines[0] on what kinds of tournaments can be hosted. However, Collision 2024 just happened with attendees and a prize pool surpassing the guidelines.

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

kotaKat• 2 years ago

Beyond speculation. Nintendo is known to not fuck around, thanks to its leaks.

In one of the various Nintendo leaks in the past few years was a bunch of documentation of "Operation Belgian Waffle", their attempt to "Knock and Talk" with a private investigator, law enforcement, and Nintendo Legal visiting a fairly well-known hacker in the scene. All of this was being spearheaded and commanded by Nintendo of Japan towards the subsidiaries in other countries.

https://torrentfreak.com/nintendo-conducted-invasive-surveil...

Nintendo was already operating inside the Discord as per screenshots of evidence in the case, so they really had some leverage here.

junon• 2 years ago

Notably, Japan has no fair use laws.

jrockway2• 2 years ago

How come Satoshi Nakamoto can remain anonymous in spite of his worth in the billions of dollars, but emulator developers, worth almost nothing, can't hide from Nintendo? Opsec mistakes, or just no opsec at all?

brendoelfrendo• 2 years ago

My impression of the Yuzu team is that they didn't keep a very clean house. While the project didn't officially condone piracy, some members of the team were absolutely willing to help people run pirated games. Add to that the fact that they were emulating a current system, and that they ran a very successful Patreon to pay their team, and I think they eroded their plausible deniability down to nothing.

Consider that Nintendo leaves Dolphin more-or-less alone. I think Nintendo understands where emulation sits legally, and they went after Yuzu because of what was happening around the emulator, and not because of the emulator itself.

KingOfCoders• 2 years ago

I might be wrong, but buy a game, dump the keys, sell game?

jdiff• 2 years ago

The keys are in the console, not the games.

bassiek2• 2 years ago

I'm having 50,- on the fact they won't get to May before Nintendo Legal starts cutting up their loved ones.

ryandrake• 2 years ago

Yea, I wish them the best, but I would not take the other side of that bet. It’s sad that we all know it will happen and have relatively no political power to change it, despite most of us living under democratically representative governments.

arghwhat2• 2 years ago

Note that emulators for all(?) other Nintendo consoles remain available, and were available while the consoles were relevant. There is little Nintendo can do as long as the authors actively steer clear of guiding/condoning piracy or guiding/condoning certain types of DRM-bypass.

It was to my knowledge Yuzu's stance on this particular matter that cost them the project, with Nintendo lawyers striking once they saw the hole in the homebrew armor.

gjsman-10005• 2 years ago

Legally, there's actually quite a bit Nintendo can do, there's just always the risk of setting an undesirable precedent due to how few cases there are.

Yuzu's actions just elevated the likelihood of success to near 100% instead of 80-90%.

exitb2• 2 years ago

Suyu will also require you to dump your title.keys and firmware from a hacked Switch to run games

It seems misleading to imply that you NEED to dump them from a real device? Can't you just provide the files found on the internet?

antiframe3• 2 years ago

Well, that would be piracy. The Suyu team condemns that behavior.

Edited: condones -> condemns

0xcde4c3db• 2 years ago

Has the team explained their reasoning anywhere? Yuzu ostensibly already "required" dumping keys from a Switch console, and I don't understand how more involvement of Nintendo firmware and keys lowers the risk. If anything I'd have expected a "safe" fork to go the other direction, position itself as a homebrew development tool, and remove explicit support for commercial games altogether (requiring e.g. a third-party tool to decrypt and unpack commercial game formats into some quasi-homebrew format).

setToNull• 2 years ago

“Sue You,” as in Nintendo will…

teddyh• 2 years ago

<https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Sosumi&oldid=1208...>

saintradon• 2 years ago

3 things in life are certain. Death, taxes, and Nintendo emulators.

nicce2• 2 years ago

There is no 3rd without the legal problems with Nintendo.

mherkender• 2 years ago

Not sure what you mean, there are a ton of Nintendo emulators out there, some decades old.

bluescrn• 2 years ago

It only became a problem when emulator performance overtook their current-gen hardware

(Especially if enhanced versions of big titles like the Zelda games are intended to be a significant selling point for their next console)

tombert4• 2 years ago

I mean, Higan/BSnes, SNES9X, Project64, Mupen64, FCEUX, mGBA, and probably dozens of others that I'm missing have been around for a very long time, and as far as I'm aware haven't had any legal issues from Nintendo, though that might be because all of them don't require any kind of BIOS.

TheCaptain4815• 2 years ago

Why don't any of these major emulator teams build and release anonymously?

Eiim3• 2 years ago

You can still be sued. At that point, you either: a) defend yourself as normal, while attempting to maintain anonymity (difficult & doesn't solve anything) b) let the case go to default judgement (for likely an enormous amount of money) at which point Nintendo has every reason to try to track you down in real life, and can use the courts to help them do so. Hope you were really, really thorough about your anonymity.

bitcharmer• 2 years ago

How do you sue someone that is anonymous?

archargelod• 2 years ago

Because making an emulator takes a lot of work. And emulator devs want some compensation for this work - be it money (in form of donations) or a status that could help them gather followers or even land a job.

giancarlostoro3• 2 years ago

It can be a resume piece. Having been in these communities (server emulation instead of console) you find some insanely bright developers in them. A lot of them don't have a formal education background, but are willing to build out well thought out pieces of software. You just have to do the research on them if they tell you this is who they are, a lot of the times you can find out plenty about how they code and design things out in the open. I'd probably almost always hire such a dev if their code seemed good, and I knew they cared about the quality of their code. Having been involved in those communities though I do know there are awful devs who don't care about what anyone says "my code aint broken" types who never give credit when you help them either (reputation / respect matters more when you're coding for free in some of these communities).

caminante4• 2 years ago

Not making sense.

These anon devs can still have socials.

Their resume is public, and you can reach them without revealing their identity.

gamepsys2• 2 years ago

I'll double down on personality that parent comment pointed out. If you see someone submit a project they worked on instead of formal education then you need to see what their exact contribution is and how they interact with other devs. Look at past github comments, issues, etc. Lurk in their chat server or pull logs. Expect to see a more casual attitude than what will show up at work, but pay attention to how contributions are handled, how credit is handled, and how disagreements are handled. It's not a universal problem, but I've seen some of the worst developer drama around volunteer open source video game projects.

HideousKojima• 2 years ago

If you want Patreonbux for your work it has to be tied to a real person (or a real legal entity which is tied to real people)

sswezey• 2 years ago

Is the name intentionally a pun on sue you?

bassiek2• 2 years ago

You just made it so.

blowski• 2 years ago

The readme used to contain the text:

suyu, pronounced "sue-you" (wink wink) is the continuation of the world's most popular, open-source, Nintendo Switch emulator, yuzu.

https://github.com/lineCode/suyu-

Zambyte2• 2 years ago

Here is a link to the commit where they changed it:

https://gitlab.com/suyu-emu/suyu/-/commit/bc4f5c38fee23b8e8b...

brandrick• 2 years ago

It is. This was removed from the GitLab page 5 days ago: "Removed sue-you wink wink"

KMnO42• 2 years ago

Reminds me of the Mac OS 7 sound “Sosumi” (so sue me!)

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sosumi

urbandw311er• 2 years ago

On my Mac, the .dmg mounts but the executable says "“suyu” is damaged and can’t be opened. You should move it to the Bin."

KMnO42• 2 years ago

You can usually circumvent that by right clicking (or control clicking) and pressing open. There will now be a button that says “open anyway”.

adderthorn• 2 years ago

If it's apple silicon you need to run `xattr -cr` on the .app to get it to be executable.

wiz21c• 2 years ago

If Nintendo sued Yuzu because they were indirectly causing damage, then I can sue car makers for making air polution.

arghwhat2• 2 years ago

You can, but to win ridiculous cases you need massively out-lawyer the defendant. It's a lot easier for a big company to out-lawyer a handful of individuals than the other way around.

Zambyte2• 2 years ago

Land of the Free

Cthulhu_• 2 years ago

That's literally what happens though: https://www.reuters.com/business/sustainable-business/german...

bogdan• 2 years ago

VW got fined for that, not enough though and many others got out scot-free for similar rigging. A handful of cars (within regulations) don't pollute enough to cause harm but throw in thousands and thousand on narrow city roads and then do we blame the city planners?

burrish3• 2 years ago

What's the big fuss when we still have Ryujinx ?

tombert4• 2 years ago

I think the fear is that this is only the beginning. Nintendo successfully killed one emulator, why would they stop there?

Nintendo certainly knows about Ryujinx and is patiently waiting for them to screw up anything legally so they can bring them down next.

burrish3• 2 years ago

Yeah I still think Ryujinx should be safe for a bit since they don't monetize the emulator as much as Suzu did, who knows, Nintendo Lawyers are ready for anything

m_rpn• 2 years ago

I'm sure nobody mentions it because of the fear that the mighty Nintendo might discover us Ryujinx rebels.

tentacleuno2• 2 years ago

If 5 minutes of online research yields Ryujinx, I'd say it's a fairly safe bet that Nintendo are already very aware of its presence.

10GBps• 2 years ago

In some ways Nintendo suing the original project was a good thing. It brought the project to the attention of a lot more people. Now there is a new version with a bunch of bugs fixed. Who knows how many new developers will be working on it now.

I have to think Nintendo knew this. They had to defend what they could and did so because the original project actually seemed to be doing some sketchy stuff. They know they can't stop everything though.

tombert4• 2 years ago

I think it's pretty clear that if they felt that they had a case against emulation as a whole, they would have brought down the Dolphin project. As it stands, the worst they've done is gotten it booted off Steam, but I can happily still download it from their website. The Dolphin project has been around in some capacity since 2003, while the GameCube was still relevant, and had more-or-less decent Wii Emulation in 2009 as well; by all accounts in 2010 Dolphin was directly competing with "real" Wiis (while offering proper HD output no less).

I'm sure Nintendo's lawyers were perfectly aware of Dolphin pretty early on, and if they felt that there was any case against them then they would have done something.

prophesi• 2 years ago

Is there a definitive fork of Citra as well? That was the actual tragedy of the Yuzu aftermath.

I do know there are forks for Citra VR, Mac, and Android that were unaffected which is great however.

haunter• 2 years ago

At least Citra is a mature emulator, almost 100% of the games work.

The disaster is actually the online lobbies. Citra had a multiplayer network and it’s not available anymore

k12sosse2• 2 years ago

I would pay Nintendo the price of a physical switch console - and then each game individually - for the ability to play their games legally in top graphical fidelity using my supercomputer. I'd even be open to the idea of paying a subscription fee to do it, instead of buying individual titles, and includes back catalogue

First beta of Nintendo Switch emulator Suyu goes live

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