this post was submitted on 27 Nov 2024
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My suggestion, get as many private copies of emulators you can before they go after all the Github ones. Seems to be more and more take-downs are happening lately.
It really is too bad we dont have a federated github alternative. I know theres some projects in development, but I can see the emulator scene getting harder and harder to get into if popular repos go down. Decades of work, gone.
Git is a distributed version control system. There doesn't have to be a single copy of the repo on which everything depends. It's a choice, and an understandable one, to treat one copy as authoritative, but there's no reason to despair if it becomes unavailable. Any copy of it will do.
What GitHub provides that's hard to do without it is not the repository but the stuff that goes around it: issue tracking, communication tools, discoverability, etc.
So if people take the distributed nature of Git seriously and make sure they all have a local copy of the repo, we won't lose the repo itself to Nintendo's actions. But we may lose the tools that make it easy to coordinate work on the repo.
Before we had GitHub and issue trackers we had mailing lists and Usenet groups. Not as convenient, bit they allowed people to coordinate work on open source software without a central, corporately owned point of failure. Maybe we should be looking to the early days of FOSS for ideas about how to make these projects resilient against corporate persecution. Not for the exact tools but for decentralized ways of coordinating collaboration.
There are self hosted github alternatives, like Gitea for example. It takes 10 minutes to set up and it behaves like github/gitlab. So all to advantages can be kept.
Forgejo (a gitea fork) is a better choice for FOSS, can't remember why.
Gitea federates with activitypub too
Is that feature live tho?
We do have a federated GitHub alternative. Perhaps not too mature yet, but it does indeed exist. Forgejo
I just discovered that this is Codeberg - I've seen a lot of projects there and I had no idea that it was an instance of Forgejo
Yup, I've been using Codeberg more over the past months.
Originally, it wasn't. Codeberg used to run Gitea. Forgejo is a fork of that, which came later.
Not really federated. You can't, for example, raise issues or set PR requests from another instance.
They have been working on Federation: https://codeberg.org/forgejo/forgejo/pulls?q=&type=all&sort=&state=closed&labels=79349&milestone=0&project=0&assignee=0&poster=0&archived=false
Yep its not nearly done....but I have a server and running through testing. git itself is fairly federated, but the support structures (PRs/MRs, review process, easy wiki/issue tracking, etc...) is where the real work is at.
I'm running a server as well, but have not tested federation (yet).
Nice! Them and gitea are really stable!
I thought codeberg was just a really well maintained and customized gitea instance...?
They have been doing so for a while now.
If you (or anyone else) has any suggestions for emulators/tools to mirror, send them my way. I already have a few on my Forgejo server https://git.ngni.us/mirrors
Don't forget to mirror suitable versions of the scarce dependencies. Sirit, the SPIR-V assembler, for example.
Re3/revc was banned by rockstar, mirror them if theres repos left
This is probably a good argument for torrents. Lame that something as gray as a simple emulator is catching flak but Nintendo can't really play whack-a-mole with dozens or hundreds of random seeders
Emulators aren’t even grey, it’s settled law that they are legal.
Gray as in that's what Nintendo believes and that's how Nintendo will act, and they have lawyers on payroll to back it up. Precedents are like crosswalks, you're best off acknowledging the ignorance of the dude who's apt to run you over
Such a good analogy. I'd go further and say all laws are like this. They don't actually stop anyone from doing anything, and they don't even guarantee anything will happen to them as a consequence. They're just lines on the road.
Get a device or two, as well.
Your computer may very well get obsolete when it comes to software support.
A handheld or console meant to be an emulation console won't have to move through time. It'll be as it is after the day you're done setting it up, like a hacked console.
Your PC has to keep up with web standards, codecs, online goings on but dedicated, offline devices do not. I may choose an SBC to do this to, and make a copy of the partition housing the emulators and boot drive for safe keeping.
I also have two different raspberrypi emulation images. Since those are literally everywhere, it's a sure bet you'll be able to find one to put the sd card into, even years from now.
Just don't play Nintendo games lol. That's what I do. I didn't grow up with these 'classics' and I don't feel like getting into these as an adult. 🤷♂️
Yeah, let’s just throw away everything and never touch childhood games or even games that you do enjoy on actual good hardware. Just because a stranger deems it necessary. Such as good idea /sarcasm
Alright, good for you.
Here’s the reason, you might not want to play them now and others do. As someone who did grow up with these games, I love to play them but hate Nintendo and their crappy hardware.
I can enjoy them through emulation and on a good PC. So I will (and others probably).
Okay then don’t?
Then stay in an abusive relationship with Mario and Link 👍
I sure do.
Oh, that's a good idea. Never thought of just tossing my entire childhood and lifetime hobby away because a stranger thinks keeping up with less than a terabyte of old games is hard.
Lmao. Some of us aren't vegetables.
Oh someone having different opinion makes them a vegetable? Choke on that nintendick while they shove an unlubed dildo up your ass.
Get rekt by AAA cock, sheepdick. Pay that subscription lmao. Hail corpo!
Sounds like someone couldn't get past the retroarch GUI. Oh well, maybe they'll put it on gamepass for you someday.
You're a special kind of moron, aren't you?
Fucking hilarious coming from someone giving a blowie to Bowser. Or other than scrappy Nintendo, every other game company is a AAA slop-serving corpo in your delusionland?
Ah elitism too. Figures. Are you going to say you Arch btw next? Which part of 'I don't give a shit about Nintendo classics' was too difficult to get into your brain? Or were you too busy getting pegged by Princess Peach?
Fucking chutiya.
Copypasted reply? Really?
Nah, fuck them too. They don't get a pass. They're in the sack with the rest of the greedy shits. Nintendo doesn't even make up the bulk of most classic romsets size, Sony does.
Is arch another tree you can't climb? Pegged by princess peach?
(if you must know, yeah, my desktop runs arch)
Quit projecting, bro. Insults don't have to come from so deep in the heart. I don't need to know you that well 🤣
There is Radicle which is a peer-to-peer forge.
Edit: Don’t expect all the features of GitHub or Forgejo though.
Stop making me sad sir!!!!
Emulators should provide torrents for releases.
Link for N64?
There is no federated guthub because git itself is. Just clone the repo - you're part of the network already!
Microsoft can still remove all copies.
Whereas another instance can't delete my account or comments from the instance I'm on. The most they could do is block it from theirs.
E: no matter how much you downvote, it doesn't change the facts. GitHub is not Federated. It is owned and controlled by Microsoft. If you fork a GitHub project and host it on GitHub, Microsoft can take both down.
No it can't. You're still thinking about github and its built in "forking" mechanism.
There is no "open" alternative for... the exact reasons some code is removed from Github/Lab/Bucket/whatever.
Someone submits a DMCA request or something similar? Microsoft and so forth will process that and decide if it is valid and so forth.
If you are running your own instance? That request goes to you and you probably don't have lawyers or just the willpower to determine if it is valid or not.
And the federation approach further complicates that. Because good luck explaining the concept of federation to a judge who thinks everyone who uses a computer is a hacker and doesn't understand why a DMCA to one instance didn't propagate to your instance and why it is an honest mistake. All while the Nintendos of the world are arguing for your wages to be garnished for the rest of your life.
And the other aspect is what anyone who runs even a semi-public instance of... anything learns. People are monsters. If you have image uploads you will have CSAM.
And the last aspect is just practicality. My github is a large part of my CV. I work on projects that I think are fun AND that I think will look good to people I am trying to convince to give me a job. Emulation is already a grey area (it isn't quite porn, but it can make you look like a liability to many companies). But if you have to link someone to a complete no name site because you are trying to avoid legal action? You aren't getting hired.
You can have an offline gitlab/forgejo and a public github. I do most of my work against a local gitlab, and mirror up to github for anything that needs to be shared.
I have a couple of projects mirrored down to my gitlab as a backup, and they are not online, so can't realistically be DCMAd.
I mean, you can just as easily just keep a project cloned if the purpose is an offline copy.
That doesn't change all the liability problems with running a public repo as well as why most coders aren't interested in a fly by night one that is designed to escape legal consequences.