Dolphin Emulator on Steam
Dolphin Emulator on Steam
I'm sure you've already heard that Nintendo has blocked Dolphin Emulator on Steam, allegedly because of the DMCA, but as it turns out, this is not the whole story. According to The Verge, which was provided by the Dolphin development team, Valve helped Nintendo draw attention to the Wii and GameCube...
The plot continues to thicken over this. I don't believe emulation should be considered illegal. The only illegal part is how you get the ROMs. Another friend mentioned to me the part that burns him is that Nintendo has been sitting on GameCube and hasn't done anything with it since the Wii Virtual Console!
I can unfortunately understand why Valve would tip off Nintendo, to avoid being directly liable because it’s not the standard DMCA provision.
But, at this point, emulation, where you legally have the game and console, shouldn’t be illegal and they shouldn’t be preventing it.
As for the decryption keys, rock and hard place. Either that needs to not be illegal, or it’s impossible to emulate a game legally. Since emulation isn’t illegal, the former shouldn’t be either.
DRM was a mistake, without it there would be no reason for a decryption key. The obvious solution is to make the user supply keys or BIOS from their own console, I think that's what yuzu does, for example.
Then of course, you run into the issue of having to install homebrew on the console to get those files...
At this point, I'm happy to admit I ethically sourced a recent Nintendo game meant for a certain portable console, just out of pure
spitelove, even though I'm not really that into it!They're doing great things to promote their brand for sure!
It's not the emulation that's illegal here, it's the decryption key included with dolphin AFAIK
Nintendo should just stop enforcing such insane regulations for games they don't produce any copies of anymore. Nobody is loosing a profit from emulating the 12 year old year game, except for the random amazon seller. same goes from the decryption keys. It's just deliberate trolling at this point
if I recall correctly, some of this translates from Japanese intellectual property law, which states that if companies don't enforce their IP they lose their right to it. It explains why Nintendo is so often heavy handed with their legal enforcement. However it's obvious there is still a market for these old games and I don't understand why they dont fulfill this need.