this post was submitted on 11 May 2025
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Nintendo can't control anyone else's hardware, they can't stop you from doing what you want on a Raspberry Pi. They're trying to crack down on Switch modding, but even that's just a cat-and-mouse game.
You will not get in trouble for emulating at home. Emulation itself is legal, it's only illegal to download games you don't own. But it's nearly impossible for anyone to get caught doing that, and very obviously not worth any lawyer's time to pursue individual end users for pennies in damages. You are safe.
What Nintendo wants to do is attack piracy at the source. They can go after sites that distribute ROMs, but those are like a hydra, kill one and three more take its place. Then there's the likes of Yuzu and Ryujinx, where Nintendo claims to have found some technicality about these emulators having something they shouldn't. But the forks are still being distributed, and you the end user will not get in trouble for downloading the fork at home.
Note that for the most part, they're really only concerned with protecting their current hardware. They've never gone after Dolphin, Snes9x, mGBA, etc, because they know those are battles they can't win. Considering how aggressive Nintendo is on the battles they do fight, it's clear that anything Nintendo doesn't go after is something they can't go after.
Fuck me 10/10 response. Thank you that answered so many of my questions.
Maybe it's just a coincidence that because I switched to Lemmy almost 2 years ago I started seeing more IT related news and thats why im seeing so many more articles about Nintendo shutting down as much pirated material as they can. Or is it that they only recently started this crusade? If so, do you have any more information as to why they started making this a priority in the past couple years?
I'd never thought of it in these specific terms before, but the essentially educational and fear-ameliorating nature of your post led me to realize that it's likely that a lot of what Nintendo's doing with all of this legal barnstorming is essentially PR, and that's all it's meant to be.
They have little hope of actually winning cases or of doing anything more than cutting off one head of the hydra if they do, and all of their safeguards can be and will be worked around, repeatedly if necessary, so from a practical standpoint, they're fighting a losing battle. But all of their noise and aggressive posturing likely serves to scare a lot of less-informed gamers into not emulating in the first place, so it furthers their goals anyway.
I mean it's still important to walk an emulators for current Hardware while we still have modern working examples and can capture Network packets and whatnot but I'm not totally against the idea of Simply holding your insights from public consumption for a while out of practicality alone
I agree, it's important to preserve things today because it may be too late tomorrow. Some Switch titles have already been delisted, so it's good that we backed them up early.
But I'm just explaining it from Nintendo's perspective. If the tools we use to restore Super Mario Bros. 35 can also be used to crack Tears of the Kingdom, they don't want those tools in our hands.
The more important point though is that it is all cat-and-mouse, and the mouse is winning. We have those tools, and they can't fully stop it.