I sincerely hope you enjoy this video, I loved digging through the emulation history since it has such a huge part of today's gaming world Sorry that my English is not perfect, it's not my native language. Made by Sakharu, voiced over by Brad Ziffer.
I feel old know because I was a teenager in the 90s and adult thru all that followed. I was in the early emulation scene and someone who followed this closely. Now it's "history".... and has to be "researched" by people who where not even alive on the planet at that time, and for whom it might as well be research into the Edison lightbulb. 😔
Oh man NESticle! I haven’t heard that name in 28 years. I remember my friend installing that on the computer lab computers back in middle school. Dude was playing Super Mario Bros. It was a sight to behold back then.
Yuzu’s problem was not just emulation. It was the fact they were emulating a current gen system AND they were making a shit ton of money from Patreon. They also used leaked IP to assist the reverse engineering AND they updated the latest version of Yuzu behind a paywall so that it was compatible with the leaked Tears of the Kingdom files prior to the game coming out. They messed up big time and just hurt all other emulator makers by their greed and irresponsibility
@@dtape Nintendo also get a lot of crap for getting their lawyers after ROM sites but almost all the ones who have gotten in serious legal trouble were making money in some way. A few years ago they went after a few big ROM sites but left even more alone. The difference was the ones they went after were generating revenue. I mean, almost every single Nintendo game with the exception of the last few generations can be found on Internet Archive, tens of thousands of ROMs. Until now, IA has been left alone and they are a non-profit.
Those weren't the punishable offences. Because they aren't illegal, like Nintendo wishes to be. Also TOTK was only bootable with third party mods. It only became bootable after release date. Their discord server contained pirated roms for debugging. Which made Yuzu team settle out of court. This was their downfall. The paywall wasn't a mandatory thing... Like you easily could build your own Early access build. Yuzu team gave Instructions how to do that, like how to dump games. Only thing Yuzu's Patreon did was giving financial ammo for a lawsuit. (It's basically useless to make a lawsuit to a party who has no money.) Donating also let you use their EA builds, which are often in mainline in less than two weeks. Again, it was not needed at all. Beside the piracy, Nintendo claims were iffy at best. With History of emulation Nintendo wouldn't gotten far, but they had a trump card due to the discord server. Also, If piracy wasn't the thing. Nintendo would have stretched out the lawsuit till Yuzu ran out of money. Justice didn't win, the deepest pocket did. This is why people find it weird Ryujinx also got hit. They were clean.
4:39 the Super Game Boy really wasn't emulation at all. It had the exact same CPU, etc, as a real Game Boy. It was just a different form factor. "Hardware emulation" is not the correct term here, IMO, which most people use to refer to FPGA. That nitpick aside, great video, as always. Keep up the good work.
In my opinion, the problem is that people started emulating games back when you could still find games and they were affordable. Obviously, people did this because they wanted to play as many games as possible with paying the lowest amount. But from my perspective, now that created what we have which is none of the big companies ended up re-releasing games for older systems, and now it's impossible to find them at reasonable prices. And now, even people who don't want to have to do anything in a legal grey area in order to play the games that they want to play have to participate in that. Or spend a lot of time searching for big priced games. And not just games to put on the shelf.
Wow, amazing doc. Just started getting into the emu scene and this scratched the itch for me. Obviously a lot of work and talent were required to make this exist. Great work!
45:50 To be fair, the decision to Impliment Denuvo and the decision to file against Tropic Haze were two unrelated issues. Denuvo was an attempt to curb piracy itself, Tropic Haze painted a target on their backs the moment they admitted in interviews they utilize work that players made for games prior to retail release date. That as well as many of the public statements about Decryption, and the large Patreon, really put them in Nintendo's radar. Nice video, I'm a long time emu contributor and games modder, and thoroughly enjoyed the effort you put in
It would've been interesting how much of that would keep up in court. It's sad the lawsuit never came to be, just to let Nintendo sing a different tune. But their pockets would be the winner.
"Untold history" that has been covered many times by many people. Good video tho. Hard to justify emulating current games - but it just shows how behind the brand is.
one of the best gaming channels on youtube. your excellent writing with the professional narration and tons of relevant interesting clips is a really great combo
Emulation and Abandonware sites have saved and made so many games possible for people to rediscover and explore that would otherwise be impossible withouth being rich, god knows you still have to fennagle with old PC games but its the price you pay, all i care is that one can still play em. People who have made these emulators, usually for free are definetly some of the heroes of video game history, cause it SURE as hell aint the publishers or IP owners that bought up the companies that failed and never did ANYTHING with them.
The first big revolution was NESTicle but most of that Genecyst from the same developers. In 1997 you were suddenly able to play 4MB particularly good graphics games from the Genesis in VGA 320x200 on a Pentium PC. At the same time, the only good platform games on PC we had so far were Jazz Jackrabbit and Prehistorik. The Street Fighter or Sonic official ports on DOS/Windows were awful and required 40MB! So Genecyst was a revolution to let us access 500+ games fluid and with good graphics on the PC at that time.
I wish emulation wasn't frowned upon, to the point that you're supposed to rip roms of your own physical games. If you have a computer, you should be able to download games for your favorite CLASSIC console and play them. By Classic console I mean a console that is no longer supported by its company. So the original NES, SNES, N64 as examples.
@@HAHb-zc2dpthe companies, but people take advantage. Even super mario party Jamboree has been bootlegged before launch. It's sad how it's abused. These companies mess up a ton too, but emulation should be reserved for classics no longer available to buy, as Heather-Br said. Translations too, as starfy trilogy on switch online showed too.
@@MrVariant if something is bootlegged before launch that's an internal leak problem. Emulation should be available for everything, digital has zero value to me, I simply don't pay for digital anything it's repulsive. It's not my fault someone was smart enough to make emulations and roms or anything else I take for free online,and I find no moral objections to taking ones and zeros . Might as well be on the side of the companies and try to say modding a console is wrong,no, i paid for it,it's mine to do with as I please.
@@HAHb-zc2dp I was mostly referring to big companies like Nintendo who frown on third-party emulators. Even though, as the video says, they can be used for much more than piracy. Including making making titles like Pokémon Clystal playable by visually imaired gamers, thanks to their ability to run mods or patches that add text-to-speech capabiliteis into these old titles.
Emulation as a general concept is 100% legal in the US. It's what other things that emulators do or require users to do that end up in illegal territory. Like as far as I know, most NES emulators are just fine, they contain no proprietary code under copyright. It's 100% legal to take a game cartridge you own, and dump the data from it. Format shifting is legal, just like ripping a music CD into mp3 files. Distributing the ROMs is the illegal part. An emulator website that also links to ROMs or encourages you to find illegal sources can be seen as promoting piracy, and be sued. A popular PlayStation emulator by itself is legal, but requires the user to obtain BIOS dump(s) which are under copyright and illegal to distribute. It's technically possible to get a PlayStation you own and copy the BIOS for personal use, just like a Nintendo cartridge, but far harder because it's specialized hardware the average person only needs to use once. So same as the above, the emulator website can't point you to where to download the BIOS files or copies of the game CDs. Afaik, the Yuzu case went even farther. As mentioned in the video, the emulator not only emulated hardware, it also decrypted encrypted files, using a key that is technically copyrighted. If they had left the decryption part out of the software they were distributing, it would've been an easier defense. Like relying on ps1 BIOS from a third party in the above example, they could've relied on third parties cracking the encryption and pirate sites distributing the decrypted game files, not the emulator's website or its code. From what I recall, the Yuzu website itself was also blatantly encouraging piracy, bragging about it, which was also a point not in its favor when it came to a legal challenge. So the simple answer to "Are emulators legal?" is "If it doesn't do anything illegal, yes, if it does do illegal things, probably not." Like skateboards are legal, skateboarding wherever you want is probably not.
Apparently, it's some angry Nintendo fan abusing the RU-vid takedown system since RU-vid is dumb enough not to verify the contact email. They used some random Nintendo dev's name and used one of the emails from other takedowns but since they didn't have access to that email, appeals went through without contest. They then used a proton email which is clearly not something a proper business would do.
Thank you so much for another episode, great channel! A word to the great voiceover artist: You're quite talented, but you mispronounce the names of some people and companies in previous episodes, making it sound like the person speaking is not knowledgeable on this subject. This is only meant to encourage improvement, I'm very impressed by this work so far.
Big companies have the attitude that emulation is the epitome of evil, unless it's being used by them to sell you the same games over and over again in which case emulation is just awesome!
it really is the only way to preserve video game history. no matter the downsides of piracy it's the only way to essentially keep the history or games alive. it's a digital museum.
If you pull the keys off your own legit console, it is legal, period. If you don't do that, it is illegal, period. Why is that such a complicated concept. Format shifting is specifically protected use case by US copyright law. DMCA anyone?
Its made complicated by the fact that their are laws that are stated in section 1201.a that bring into question if you are actually allowed to legally dump your games and keys or not. And then there is laws like section 117 that say you can dump your games. Its a massive mess.
The issue is that if the company would just take down an emulator only to use an emulator of their own, couldn't they just use what the fans made? Sony used PCSX ReARMed for the PS1 Classic, Capcom used Final Burn Alpha for their Home Arcade System (when then shouldn't since it's not made to be commercial), and Atari had Digotal Eclipse use a version of one of the newer Jaguar emulators for those games on Atari 50. Of course I know why, because they don't want the community to make these to begin with. It's not a "companies shedding their good side" thing, they have always been anti-consumer, this isn't new.
@48:20 What ruling? Tropical Haze didn't go to court, instead they settled outside for the 2,4mil. There is no trial to definitive decide that as far as I know.
Thank you for a very informative and entertaining vid-docu.I myself absolutely love emulation,for many reasons ,no.1 is of course cost,if i had the relevant consoles that i emulate,plus all the games,it would take up considerable space,and money.Not to mention,the exceptional quality improvement in emu in the last 5years.I actually worked out the cost,if i had bought the consoles and games that i have on my pc,all in all the cost was close to £50,000.Without emulation ,the gaming market would suffer
Emulation helps game preservation, but for older consoles, not when the emulator is competing with a console that is on the market. The case for Switch is more obvious, but you can still legally buy new 3DS and Wii U games at Web-stores in 2024, even though Nintendo is not selling more Wii U or 3DS consoles.
the Yuzu community really screwed up at uploading roms for new games to their social channels they've jeopardized the future of emulation and the dev team understood that. 2.4 Million dollars is a cheap price to pay to protect the future of game preservation, but ways for a stronger legal defense are necessary.
95% certain that the Super Game Boy was a complete Game Boy hardware (screen, buttons, etc.) that used the SNES for it's controls, display and sound. I don't think the SNES was powerful enough to emulate anything.
The Super GameBoy and GameBoy Advance Player are not emulators. They are GameBoy (SGB) and GameBoy Advance (GBAP) hardware, respectively, with their screens, speakers, and controllers replaced by a connection with the Super Famicom/SNES or GameCube, respectively.
If there were no emulation, i would never played or know, about N64, Atari, GameboyAdvance, PSP, never ever had these when i was a kid, or even know about them, because i was poor as a kid.
12:56 Sony claims the emulator outputs poor graphics, and could harm their business. 15:06 Sony cries because the emulator makes their games look TOO good. 22:08 Back when XFire Messenger was around, it had the ability to detect what game you were playing, what server you were on if the game had those, and track play time(this was before Steam could do that, and before Steam was even any good). I had to fight to get emulators added to the tracking list because most people who used XFire(even the developers) claimed that emulation was piracy. However, I made a post about piracy was the problem of the user, not the emulation developer. Citing several sources that proved that emulation was legal, including the two court cases that Sony had been involved in. Emulators became trackable in XFire within the week. Probably my only claim to fame, and no one today will ever know as XFire has been dead quite some time now. 26:01 It gets better. Second generation PS3 consoles moved to software emulation for their PS2 backwards compatibility. Rather than including the full guts of a PS2 like in the first generation. Third generation dropped PS2 completely in favor of the PS2 classics(buy it again, you plebs!). 47:07 It should be noted that Dolphin was removed from Steam because the Steam version of the emulator included the Nintendo BIOS files required to run the Wii and GameCube. 49:27 As of this video: RetroArch(supports all consoles it does on PC), PPSSPP(PSP), Gamma(PS1) and Delta(NES, SNES, N64, GB, GBC, GBA and DS).
Remember everyone, emulation does not equal piracy. Legally obtained games can be played in emulators and pirated games can be played on real hardware. Nintendo had the right to go after Yuzu because at least one dumbass was distributing Nintendo's copyrighted works. They did mot have the same claim against Ryujinx! The Ryujinx takedown was a case of corporate bullying! Nintendo sent their lawyers to this poor guy's house to threaten a lawsuit that Nintendo would never have won in a fair court, but that the developer could not afford to fight.
I honestly don't see a problem with emulation or repro carts with hacked games. I really do like the Super Mario World Hacks of which there are plenty as I have discovered. When a system's lifetime is over I have no problem with emulation, however I DO have a problem with emulation when the system is still actively on the market. Yeah. That's wrong. That hurts the economy in it's own way when it comes to emulating new games. New games that just come out on the market were painstakingly created by people who worked their butts off to make a good game, and of course with profit in mind. That's like going to work and not getting paid essentially. I'm sure no one here would like that. Piracy should be illegal during the life of a console no doubt, however if the console is retired especially for 20 or 30 years where's the harm? A lot of people are up in arms about Nintendo right now but keep in mind their games are being pirated while the consoles still out. Mind you though.... Nintendo's first two consoles were Pong Clones, and essentially they got their start in the video game market by pirating themselves. I digress. No that's frigging wrong, man. I grew up in the 1980's and the 1990's and so naturally those are the games I like to play. I'm just not into the modern gaming market and how they're making their games nowadays. The breaking point for me was when Sony and XBox allowed dirt bag scalpers to buy their new consoles and then sell them on Ebay for 4x what they were worth, and people were stupid enough to pay their ridiculous prices. There was a butt head who had a small storage unit filled to the brim with PS5's when they were first out with a text message that said... "Eff your feelings." Yep. That inspired me all the more to start using emulators for older games. I paid for an emulator box with 8 TB off of Ebay for like $300.00 and I was totally thrilled. What should be happening is that the consoles SHOULD be going to retail stores instead of being bought online by scum sucker scalper bots right and left. Not cool, dude. These companies really need to stop using the internet to launch their consoles because in the end people are getting burned for it, but then again if people had an ounce of patience for the new tech and they saw that the scalpers did that right there it would have stopped if no one had bought from them, but these dumb dumbs today... I want it... I want it now.... I want it right now. It's the principal of the whole thing where if these dirt bags had been boycotted on Ebay or better yet if Ebay didn't let them sell the consoles on there seeing they were scalping butt holes this crap would have probably deterred these D-bags from doing it again. Nope..... nobody seems to want to stop it but everyone wants to complain about it. That's okay. I'm old school. With WATA and VGA and CGC creating inflation in the market for retro games it's like... nah, I'm good. All they did was screw over not only the consumers but the sellers as well. They followed the Democrat model for profit by creating inflation and boy howdy it worked. Nope. I'm good. Have a good one.
If you dont want emulation provide a product thats better and as accessible. Hell, first party ways to connect games to emulators or more ways to play in general would prob help. I refuse to buy nintendo at this point because of anticonsumer bs too on top of meh hardware. Remember - just because Yuzu or Ryujinx shut down it isnt because they werent legal, its just because they cant afford to fight the much larger Nintendo in court.
I'ma throw some names out there. RAGE Callus NeoRage System 16 Retrocade I think it was called? I have to dig thru my backups. I remember when MAMEcould fit on a single CD. Anyone remember this? 😎
In the EU and several other places such as Australia, emulation will always be legal. Why the fuck would they care about mostly foreign entities crying over emulation? It's the same mentality that drives right to repair laws and standardization of various things, like phone chargers for example.
a third of those said pirateers probably bought the game, have atleast one switch, and a high end gaming pc to emulate on, the other 2 thirds who pirated the game, dont have switches and will never buy them, so I dont think it hurt sales, if anything bumped them up because of all the FREE advertising of these titles these pirates do. I have thousands of dollars worth of Nintendo games and products, I am starting to dislike their attitude. How about they create a paid emulator, and then sell roms for it.
To me so long as the emulator isn’t the current gen it’s fair game. I do make some exceptions to the switch emulators because some games can run better on pc than switch
22:01 this here (and other hit pieces like it) prove that with just a little bit of fear mongering, and a dash of propaganda, you can convince the customers that something good for them, is actually bad for them! 😂 I've encountered these types on the Internet often, even in real life a few times. The type that are so brand loyal, will consume any slop handed to them, so brainwashed and lacking in unbiased logic: The type thst buys an iPhone every year because it's apple. The elitist collectors who own 2000+ physical games and 30+ consoles that condemn emulation because it's not "authentic" or not "the real experience"... No it's because they don't want their video game collections feeling invalidated. I used to own a whole bunch of gaming stuff too, gameboy megadrive ps1 ps2 xbox 360 etc, but it is just stuff designed to do one thing, and it'll eventually break. Emulation works on any computer, windows linux android etc. It is truly forever ❤
Ehhh I'm pretty sure those "players" were just fanboys, you can see that to this day ponies absolute loathe emulation and so do Nintendo fanboys but you never see that attitude from Xbox, PC, or Sega guys even the diehard fanboys of those platforms
I still hate Nintendo for their actions. They don't understand that the fact there are old games being sold from them, is the emulation scene. So I am now saying, "FUCK NINTENDO"!!! You became so big because of us all! I will never ever buy anything Nintendo anymore!
it's piracy and there's no argument about it being piracy or not and it's not a question of whether it is piracy or not the question is whether piracy should be legal or not and justifying piracy for games is going to lead to the inevitable all piracy should just be allowed because it's OK for games. the issue with it all is that people, including the court and lawyers and well yeah people.... believe that "piracy" is a word you can use synonymously/interchangeably to a whole bunch of stuff that already have proper legal terms and should not be labeled as "piracy". you are creating a whole new 30 pages in the law book that just should not be there, because the previous 30 did the job just fine, you just think your software is that special.... it's not... look at the emulator..... your software wasn't that special. so the actual question is if we're talking about some form of theft, should it be allowed regardless of the game being "encrypted"?.... well, offline encryption is hardly encryption.... that's like anyone going to a store and buying a lock coming back home and unlocking the lock without a key, even though they bought it with the key.... like i can make a video of myself doin that shit and you can't sue me cause i didn't use the key... BUT if the encryption of the game was online and the player required to login to a server to play that specific game THEN your encryption argument would be valid, because i'd have to hack your server to get in and that's literally a crime it's called "breaking and entering". so the major difference between these 2 scenarios is that besides the obvious crime in the latter the crime is not so clear for offline encryptions... to me, regardless, one thing IS very clear.... and that is: the fact that original games are NOT build from scratch... they used platforms like windows and mac to program THEN port to a cartridge/cd etc, which means IF ANYTHING they're just as liable for piracy when they ENCRYPT the damn thing. because the OS terms of use EXPLICITELY state you're not allowed to change their code? doesn't an encryption DO EXACTLY THAT!?!? as a matter of fact! they probably used an engine, which already breached the TOS with an encryption, only to make and end product which they ENCRYPTED AGAIN! there's some major fraud going on here!! why aren't any of the files in .bat!?!? Fraud! Fraud! Fraud! OR ARE YOU GOING TO ARGUE YOU BUILT YOUR OWN COMPUTER!? @_@ DAMN ZEUS! so for me the only thing that makes sense to fight in court is if either there was an online decryption happening (flat out server hack) or if the emulation is just a blunt copy of the original..... in most cases it's just the blunt copy of the game and that being illegal, honestly, to me is fair.. .why? well because you just took all that effort to emulate the thing and you don't mod it? you're being just as lazy as the devs that decided to put the game in the basement to collect dust at that point..... what about the game are you really trying to preserve at this point? the game? or just the art ? cause that's NOT YOUR ART. so properly mod your shit and you're good to go.... how would they know? it's not like they can copyright wasd.
Um, you are wrong. IBM did NOT dominate the home computer market in the 80's. The Commodore 64 DID with Apple II being the close 2nd. Then came the Amiga which dominated the late 80's. It wasn't until Wolf 3D and later DOOM that PC's took off more than they were. This is not even up for debate. It wasn't till Windows 3.1 and later 95 that caused the X86 PC's to dominate the market.
While I get why this episode is Nintendo heavy with the recent yuzu and ryujinx stuff, I beg you, please dont become another nintendo channel. Don't be like did you know gaming, where despite gaming being in their name (implying that they talk about all sorts of consoles) they only put out nintendo vids. There are countless games / consoles over several generations worthy of vids. Don't resort to the lazy tactic of just pumping out nintendo stuff.
I only play emulators now, new systems suck, i have thousands upon thousands of games at my fingertips and the controllers for each system, this is the way.never pay for software kids
