Good thing I’m not bothered by downvotes, because here they come.
As a retro gaming nerd with a ton of older Nintendo hardware, as well as modern emulation hardware, I don’t think it’s ethical to emulate the current gen. If the current gen supports the software, buy the game and play it on the current hardware. Shit, the physical games from prior eras have outperformed my retirement account in some cases.
That said, when you are given no legitimate options to purchase and play the game, well, you know, use your “legally acquired backup”
I probably wouldn’t disagree that it’s not exactly ethical, but given the current state of society, it’s kind of at the bottom of a very large list of really really awful, unethical, shit that actually deserves my attention.
I see where you’re coming from, but I think this attitude is rather shortsighted. Emulation is about much more than piracy, and I for example, run my switch library on my pc. I have my switch, and it’s essentially a game dumping device because I have such a better experience running those games on an emulator. Why should I spend money on another switch or a switch 2 to still have a worse experience than I’m getting now? Modding my games is easy, I can use and rebind any controller I want, and run most of my games without having to swap to another device.
I also care about the long term preservation of my games, and unfortunately my switch won’t last forever, it’s already in rough shape as is.
As far as switch 2, work on emulation now is going to make the preservation of their games long term possible. Emulating switch 2 doesn’t mean you don’t own one, or purchase your games, not by default. Ultimately though, even if someone pirates their games for switch 2, Nintendo is fine monetarily. They’ll be okay.
Another point, I am against purchasing the switch 2, as I am any new device using rechargeable lithium ion batteries. A large amount of the supply chain is mined via slave labor in Congo, and there’s not a good way to determine if it was or wasn’t.
Better to use the device you already have.
As I stated to the other person that said this, all Switch games are backwards compatible with the switch 2. Compare that to the 3ds or DS. Nothing is in current production that will play those games, at least not physical copies.
The Switch was technically last-gen when it was new. The Xbox One and PS4 came out in 2013-2014. The Switch came out in like 2016 and was weaker than them, closer in performance to 360/PS3. The Switch was, in fact, a professionally modded Nvidia Shield 2014 model. The 2014 iPhones were better equipped, and the 2016-2017 Android flagships were as well (Android flagships lagged behind iPhone by a few years back then, now it’s more like one year or less). So by the time the Switch was a few years old, your phone was more powerful in most cases.
Anything that can run on a Switch 1 can easily run on virtually every phone released in the last 5-7 years. And they’re the same CPU architecture (ARM64, with only a couple Android phones not using that, namely the Asus… I forget the model number, but they were not popular).
That’s why having a Mac is kind of like a cheat code to emulating Switch. The Switch emulator is doing a lot less work since it’s talking to the same kind of processor. Of course, PC guys still have the advantage because a dedicated GPU more than makes up for the ARM64 advantage M-series Macs have! So your CPU is working harder but you have GPU to spare. We have like no GPU (it’s integrated).
Isn’t every processor today outside of niche embedded use cases and the dream that is RISC-V either x86-64 or ARM64? By that logic, everything is fair to emulate, because pretty much everything shares the same processor architecture.
I mean laptops, desktops, non-handleld consoles and servers broadly use x86-64, phones and some specialised low-powered laptops and servers, and handheld consoles use ARM64.
The only special case was pre-ARM MACS this century, they were on PowerPC IIRC.
i disagree with you on the ethicalness of emulating current gen games, personally i think there’s nothing wrong with it, but regardless:
emulators for retro hardware often get their start while the console is still in production. for example, gamecube games nowadays are pretty expensive, so if you want to play them without breaking bank you’ll have to use an emulator, and the most mature by far is dolphin.
dolphin started being developed in 2003, while the gamecube was still the most recent nintendo console, and it grew from there. if dolphin started development in 2017, when nintendo discontinued the last console that could play wii & GC games natively, it would no doubt be far less capable today.
same goes for 3DS emulators like azahar, who descend from citra, which started development when the 3DS was recent.
nintendo here is not going after pirates, or even people who play legally backed up games, they’re going after emulator developers. even if it was unethical to emulate the switch now, stopping switch emulator development will ensure that switch emulation won’t be as good as it could be when it would stop being unethical.
in other words, it’s killing game preservation, or at least hampering it. that’s not good, even if you think piracy is unethical.
I don’t think it’s ethical to emulate the current gen.
I guess you haven’t noticed that the Switch is not current gen.
If the current gen supports the software, buy the game and play it on the current hardware.
I guess you live in a country where typical incomes can afford purchasing Nintendo games and hardware without giving up more important things, like food and shelter.
Go to Ebay, look for switch games, then come back and tell us with a straight face that’s a reasonable market.
Also, tell me the many innovative ways those overpriced glorified android tablets can be upscaled and run games at 60fps without either purchasing the overpriced switch 2 or emulation.
Emulation doesn’t just apply to games. The entire legality is based off of the fact that reverse engineering is also legal, which is how companies can replicate ideas or concepts from competitor products, or how 3rd party vendors make products compatible with other platforms.
It would be stupid to have to wait for a patent to expire before you can utilize the concept in your own product. Patent cockfighting would be a completly new level of hell, and no one would get anywhere.
Imagine having to wait 10 years before you can use 3rd party controllers for your switch because Nintendo uses a proprietary bluetooth driver. 3rd party Wiimotes wouldn’t even exist.
The only ethical conundrum is the aide in piracy, but we’ve already seen how little that has to do with emulation due to homebrew and flashcarts.
If anything, Nintendo has a higher moral ground on ROM libraries which they can argue aides in piracy due to “bypassing” copyright protection.
It’s dumb as shit from a business perspective. Get em hooked on it, and it’ll eventually get them buying it through a legit avenue. Emulations hardly perfected in most cases, and a legit product these days isn’t always procured at first point of touch. People would like to know if that $100 purchase you are asking of them is actually worth it, because quite a lot of the time in our modern age, it’s not.
I don’t even see downvotes, and I sort by date/time.
That said, I mostly agree with you. However, with prices and greed being what they are, and price gouging being ignored… I’d say it’s more of a fair play now than ever.
That said, if you’re trying to emulate a Switch 2, most likely, you’d have better luck with another platform. For one, Switch is an ARM-based system, and most Windows PCs are x86-64, so you’re emulating two things, the CPU and the code base. Emulating PlayStation or Xbox would be less work, provided you even can. If you have a Mac, of course those are ARM, but their GPUs are not really meant for gaming, unless you have a Max or Ultra variant. I had someone tell me their M1 Max (or Ultra, I forget) runs Cyberpunk as well as an Xbox. Well sure it does, but you paid 5-6 times what that Xbox costs, so what did you actually win besides a Darwin award? If you’re gonna spend big money on a Mac, you could have spent the same money on a solid Mac and a gaming PC/console and you’d have fewer issues. (Worth noting here, Macs can run Cyberpunk natively, but before CDPR ported it to ARM, Mac gamers were running the Windows version via Whisky and getting decent performance on comfortably (read: expensive) equipped Macs.)
If you just wanna play Mario Kart World and Donkey Kong Bananza, of course you can’t get those on an x86-64 console to emulate.
Anyway, the problem is, you are given no legitimate options to purchase the game because the consoles have nearly doubled in price and there’s no added value, it’s just “fuck you, pay us or don’t.”
The emulators have always been in a gray area, since they can play illegal copies of games with illegally sourced bios, etc. The emulator itself is simply the tool, which on its own isn’t proof of piracy much like owning a bong isn’t definite proof you smoke weed… just very suggestive (it can be used for tobacco I guess?)
As for current vs retro gen piracy, they’re equally illegal but obviously criminalized differently. And the ethics are obviously complex, you have people who pirate who otherwise wouldn’t be able to pay, you have people who pirate for a convenient copy of something they already own, and maybe people who could pay but simply don’t want to (although research has suggested this isn’t a huge group). And since it’s digital, there isn’t a loss in the same way as actual theft.
Personally, I just like taking control of the hardware and tweaking shit. I belong mostly to the folks who download copies of things I’ve already “bought” (which is a licence in many cases, as they don’t sell physical copies). A good example is Pokemon Scarlet, which ran like dogshit on the original hardware. I’ve been meaning to try it in an emulator to see if it works better, although I haven’t bothered yet. Would that be considered immoral, given I own the game and several switches?
I get what you are saying, I’m not discounting it whatsoever. I mean I’m an accountant, I could talk all day and night about ways to maximize and protect your profits and cash flows.
That said, Nintendo has to be the laziest company from a coding perspective. Their stuff is always the first of the current gens to get jailbroken, and then it’s open season. I think we should have learned by now not to fight piracy like this either, because it’s both inevitable and it’s a terrible look. The smarter companies know how to use it to their advantage. They also don’t always go thermonuclear on their perspective clientele. It’s a rotten look. Make a product that people want to buy and they’ll buy it. If you make shovelware and then price it in the AAAA tiers, I think we all know what’s going to happen…
To be fair the switch 1 only got hacked because nvidia messed up the firmware. I think there still isn’t a software hack for switch 1 so nintendo’s os security is pretty good
Good thing I’m not bothered by downvotes, because here they come.
As a retro gaming nerd with a ton of older Nintendo hardware, as well as modern emulation hardware, I don’t think it’s ethical to emulate the current gen. If the current gen supports the software, buy the game and play it on the current hardware. Shit, the physical games from prior eras have outperformed my retirement account in some cases.
That said, when you are given no legitimate options to purchase and play the game, well, you know, use your “legally acquired backup”
I probably wouldn’t disagree that it’s not exactly ethical, but given the current state of society, it’s kind of at the bottom of a very large list of really really awful, unethical, shit that actually deserves my attention.
I see where you’re coming from, but I think this attitude is rather shortsighted. Emulation is about much more than piracy, and I for example, run my switch library on my pc. I have my switch, and it’s essentially a game dumping device because I have such a better experience running those games on an emulator. Why should I spend money on another switch or a switch 2 to still have a worse experience than I’m getting now? Modding my games is easy, I can use and rebind any controller I want, and run most of my games without having to swap to another device. I also care about the long term preservation of my games, and unfortunately my switch won’t last forever, it’s already in rough shape as is. As far as switch 2, work on emulation now is going to make the preservation of their games long term possible. Emulating switch 2 doesn’t mean you don’t own one, or purchase your games, not by default. Ultimately though, even if someone pirates their games for switch 2, Nintendo is fine monetarily. They’ll be okay.
Another point, I am against purchasing the switch 2, as I am any new device using rechargeable lithium ion batteries. A large amount of the supply chain is mined via slave labor in Congo, and there’s not a good way to determine if it was or wasn’t. Better to use the device you already have.
Nintendo is such a scummy company that giving them money is unethical, IMO.
The Switch is last gen now though, isn’t it?
As I stated to the other person that said this, all Switch games are backwards compatible with the switch 2. Compare that to the 3ds or DS. Nothing is in current production that will play those games, at least not physical copies.
The Switch was technically last-gen when it was new. The Xbox One and PS4 came out in 2013-2014. The Switch came out in like 2016 and was weaker than them, closer in performance to 360/PS3. The Switch was, in fact, a professionally modded Nvidia Shield 2014 model. The 2014 iPhones were better equipped, and the 2016-2017 Android flagships were as well (Android flagships lagged behind iPhone by a few years back then, now it’s more like one year or less). So by the time the Switch was a few years old, your phone was more powerful in most cases.
Anything that can run on a Switch 1 can easily run on virtually every phone released in the last 5-7 years. And they’re the same CPU architecture (ARM64, with only a couple Android phones not using that, namely the Asus… I forget the model number, but they were not popular).
That’s why having a Mac is kind of like a cheat code to emulating Switch. The Switch emulator is doing a lot less work since it’s talking to the same kind of processor. Of course, PC guys still have the advantage because a dedicated GPU more than makes up for the ARM64 advantage M-series Macs have! So your CPU is working harder but you have GPU to spare. We have like no GPU (it’s integrated).
Isn’t every processor today outside of niche embedded use cases and the dream that is RISC-V either x86-64 or ARM64? By that logic, everything is fair to emulate, because pretty much everything shares the same processor architecture.
I mean laptops, desktops, non-handleld consoles and servers broadly use x86-64, phones and some specialised low-powered laptops and servers, and handheld consoles use ARM64.
The only special case was pre-ARM MACS this century, they were on PowerPC IIRC.
And the PS3 Cell. Also PowerPC IIRC.
Wasnt’ the 360 PPC too?
i disagree with you on the ethicalness of emulating current gen games, personally i think there’s nothing wrong with it, but regardless:
emulators for retro hardware often get their start while the console is still in production. for example, gamecube games nowadays are pretty expensive, so if you want to play them without breaking bank you’ll have to use an emulator, and the most mature by far is dolphin.
dolphin started being developed in 2003, while the gamecube was still the most recent nintendo console, and it grew from there. if dolphin started development in 2017, when nintendo discontinued the last console that could play wii & GC games natively, it would no doubt be far less capable today.
same goes for 3DS emulators like azahar, who descend from citra, which started development when the 3DS was recent.
nintendo here is not going after pirates, or even people who play legally backed up games, they’re going after emulator developers. even if it was unethical to emulate the switch now, stopping switch emulator development will ensure that switch emulation won’t be as good as it could be when it would stop being unethical.
in other words, it’s killing game preservation, or at least hampering it. that’s not good, even if you think piracy is unethical.
Its legal if you bought the game and dump the cartridge
The legality of emulating current gen hardware has already been decided. (At least in the US)
I guess you haven’t noticed that the Switch is not current gen.
I guess you live in a country where typical incomes can afford purchasing Nintendo games and hardware without giving up more important things, like food and shelter.
All switch games are backwards compatible with the switch 2, so yeah, still current gen for software.
Yes I do.
Go to Ebay, look for switch games, then come back and tell us with a straight face that’s a reasonable market.
Also, tell me the many innovative ways those overpriced glorified android tablets can be upscaled and run games at 60fps without either purchasing the overpriced switch 2 or emulation.
Emulation doesn’t just apply to games. The entire legality is based off of the fact that reverse engineering is also legal, which is how companies can replicate ideas or concepts from competitor products, or how 3rd party vendors make products compatible with other platforms.
It would be stupid to have to wait for a patent to expire before you can utilize the concept in your own product. Patent cockfighting would be a completly new level of hell, and no one would get anywhere.
Imagine having to wait 10 years before you can use 3rd party controllers for your switch because Nintendo uses a proprietary bluetooth driver. 3rd party Wiimotes wouldn’t even exist.
The only ethical conundrum is the aide in piracy, but we’ve already seen how little that has to do with emulation due to homebrew and flashcarts.
If anything, Nintendo has a higher moral ground on ROM libraries which they can argue aides in piracy due to “bypassing” copyright protection.
I don’t think it’s ethical to demand that if people want to play your games, they have to do so on your shitty $500 DRM machine.
It’s dumb as shit from a business perspective. Get em hooked on it, and it’ll eventually get them buying it through a legit avenue. Emulations hardly perfected in most cases, and a legit product these days isn’t always procured at first point of touch. People would like to know if that $100 purchase you are asking of them is actually worth it, because quite a lot of the time in our modern age, it’s not.
Then don’t fucking play them
Nah. Fuck them. The last thing we need on this planet is more single-use proprietary e-waste consumerism.
I don’t even see downvotes, and I sort by date/time.
That said, I mostly agree with you. However, with prices and greed being what they are, and price gouging being ignored… I’d say it’s more of a fair play now than ever.
That said, if you’re trying to emulate a Switch 2, most likely, you’d have better luck with another platform. For one, Switch is an ARM-based system, and most Windows PCs are x86-64, so you’re emulating two things, the CPU and the code base. Emulating PlayStation or Xbox would be less work, provided you even can. If you have a Mac, of course those are ARM, but their GPUs are not really meant for gaming, unless you have a Max or Ultra variant. I had someone tell me their M1 Max (or Ultra, I forget) runs Cyberpunk as well as an Xbox. Well sure it does, but you paid 5-6 times what that Xbox costs, so what did you actually win besides a Darwin award? If you’re gonna spend big money on a Mac, you could have spent the same money on a solid Mac and a gaming PC/console and you’d have fewer issues. (Worth noting here, Macs can run Cyberpunk natively, but before CDPR ported it to ARM, Mac gamers were running the Windows version via Whisky and getting decent performance on comfortably (read: expensive) equipped Macs.)
If you just wanna play Mario Kart World and Donkey Kong Bananza, of course you can’t get those on an x86-64 console to emulate.
Anyway, the problem is, you are given no legitimate options to purchase the game because the consoles have nearly doubled in price and there’s no added value, it’s just “fuck you, pay us or don’t.”
The emulators have always been in a gray area, since they can play illegal copies of games with illegally sourced bios, etc. The emulator itself is simply the tool, which on its own isn’t proof of piracy much like owning a bong isn’t definite proof you smoke weed… just very suggestive (it can be used for tobacco I guess?)
As for current vs retro gen piracy, they’re equally illegal but obviously criminalized differently. And the ethics are obviously complex, you have people who pirate who otherwise wouldn’t be able to pay, you have people who pirate for a convenient copy of something they already own, and maybe people who could pay but simply don’t want to (although research has suggested this isn’t a huge group). And since it’s digital, there isn’t a loss in the same way as actual theft.
Personally, I just like taking control of the hardware and tweaking shit. I belong mostly to the folks who download copies of things I’ve already “bought” (which is a licence in many cases, as they don’t sell physical copies). A good example is Pokemon Scarlet, which ran like dogshit on the original hardware. I’ve been meaning to try it in an emulator to see if it works better, although I haven’t bothered yet. Would that be considered immoral, given I own the game and several switches?
I get what you are saying, I’m not discounting it whatsoever. I mean I’m an accountant, I could talk all day and night about ways to maximize and protect your profits and cash flows.
That said, Nintendo has to be the laziest company from a coding perspective. Their stuff is always the first of the current gens to get jailbroken, and then it’s open season. I think we should have learned by now not to fight piracy like this either, because it’s both inevitable and it’s a terrible look. The smarter companies know how to use it to their advantage. They also don’t always go thermonuclear on their perspective clientele. It’s a rotten look. Make a product that people want to buy and they’ll buy it. If you make shovelware and then price it in the AAAA tiers, I think we all know what’s going to happen…
To be fair the switch 1 only got hacked because nvidia messed up the firmware. I think there still isn’t a software hack for switch 1 so nintendo’s os security is pretty good