this post was submitted on 05 Mar 2024
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The lawsuit against Yuzu is going to have the exact opposite effect they hope.
All it's doing is increasing public awareness of the project, and because it's open source it will just sprout more heads like a hydra, and it will live on forever.
I really doubt that they are that stupid. My guess is that they are hoping to hinder the development of the project for a bit to delay the switch 2 implementation in yuzu or a future switch 2 focused fork.
Also, all the ppl that were directly associated with the group are no longer legally allowed (or at least would risk a lawsuit against them) to contribute. So a lot of expertise got lost.
Exactly this. Nintendo lawyers were after the people, not the project. Else they'd go after Ryujinx too (they may still to be fair)
Okay, how would sintendo know if some of the original Yuzu devs are working on it if there is no trail leading back to them? If I were a Yuzu dev, I'd just start a new account and get right back to work on a fork that is gaining traction just to spite those subhumans working for a legal dictatorship.
Because you'd need perfect infosec to pull this off
An anonymous git account and tor?
Even if that were perfect, you'd have to make sure to never make a mistake. One commit with the wrong account or not using whatever you're using to mask where you're from and you're toast. Also there needs to be no other identifiers. It's almost certainly not worth the risk for them.
Lol. Sure because those ppl are not publicly known. Coding style, writing style on issues etc.
Opsec can be hard especially when you have to have a public facing entity.
Just simply too much risk for having nothing to gain only to lose.
But you are not. And you are just talking and doing nothing.
It would make it harder to compensate the devs for sure, though. They lost their finances and whoever picks the project back up will need to build their revenue stream from scratch although I feel that a good portion of yuzu contributors will just start funding one of the forked projects.
This is the correct answer.
It's like destroying a barracks full of elite soldiers and then going, "Don't worry. We have plenty more barracks."
They have no way of knowing who they verbally communicate with if they’re intent on passing along info at least lol
I wasn't referring to the Yuzu core team.
Sure, the core "Yuzu" team. That doesn't include any of the external contributors. There's very often a larger contributor base outside of a core team in FOSS projects.
And yes, there's expertise that was lost. But that doesn't mean no one else knows how to do the work. It will march onwards.
The only reason Switch emulation is as far along as it is is because they made a mistake with the hardware in the Switch's 2017 model. As long as they don't make a mistake like that again, they'll probably be fine.
Physical access is the one thing you can't shield a device from permanently. Eventually you have to relinquish some security to let users play on their consoles, or allow your service teams the ability to debug and repair it.
Those will always be the way in for anyone with the will and means to reverse engineer your system.
Modern systems being built on open hardware (compared to their predecessors) is a big thing too. ARM and x86 are easier to debug and emulate than Cell, for example.
The devs had years of experience with 2 very successful emulators . Any new project would require some serious knowledge of the switch and low level programming in a variety of domains. There are a handful of people able to do that. Im guessing they were all either working on yuzu or ryujinx. The yuzu team is no longer allowed to work on emulation so that just leaves ryujinx who are already working on their own.
I want the forks to succeed but its not your standard program we are talking about. Then we have the fact that any successor would have an immediate target on them. Thats a tall ask for anyone.
Is it possible for the devs to create a free guide? Or offer classes in "emulation"?
I doubt it, they need to leave the scene as part of the deal. Could they come along and do something anonymously , sure but I doubt its worth the risk to them.
I have always wondered why they use their "real" accounts to participate in this kind of things.
As normal protocol for me and the people i know its required to have everything isolated, so why dont they do the same with something witch even tough is legal, could get u in trouble. Why?
That's what everyone tells themselves because "haha Nintendo stupid".
No it's not going to have the opposite effect. Best case scenario a different team will take over the project and continue, which is not impossible, but far from a given. More awareness to an abandoned project? Yes, but the entire point is that Yuzu developers won't add Switch 2 support, and that was assured.
It will. The nature of the project will shift from a core team like Yuzu had to a decentralized process. If they avoid the legal pitfalls that killed Yuzu (like donations) then there's little to nothing that Nintendo can do legally.
There's already a project forked from Yuzu called Suyu that has a ton of activity on it. To me it looks like all the external contributors have jumped on to that new project and are working on removing all references to Yuzu and they will continue the work.
The dev process has absolutely been temporarily halted and significantly slowed down, but it's not going to stop.
It happened within 24hrs of the news.
The binaries for Yuzu and all the tutorials still exist. Everything that has worked on Yuzu until now will continue to work forever. The news has simply increased awareness to the average person that you can play Switch games on a computer. People who otherwise would never have known about it.
And all of this completely ignores another still existing Switch emulation project that was just as capable as Yuzu that has existed for just as long.
So yes, it is ABSOLUTELY going to have the opposite effect. At the very "best", Nintendo won an empty victory.
Yes the project can continue. The original developers, who were obviously best suited to continue it, are gone. I'm sure suyu can do a good job, but I just don't see how you can call it a positive.
I don't know who the suyu contributors are, but so far all the activity was renames and migrations to GitLab, not a single technical commit. Are any of them actually able to work on a Switch emulator? Maybe they are, I genuinely don't know, but the activity on the project so far doesn't indicate that.
You say the binaries and tutorials still exist. I wasn't interested in Switch emulation before this, but wanted to try out of curiosity when this happened. I'm a developer myself, and it was difficult finding information. All the download sites and tutorials are dead, and sketchy alternate downloads cannot be trusted. How is the average person, as you say, supposed to download Yuzu now? I eventually got it running but it was far from easy and I had to view tutorials through archive.org. Again, not impossible, but far from the "opposite effect". Access to Switch emulation for the average person was lowered.
Well, for one thing, I never said it was a positive. I didn't use that word, nor did I even imply it.
Look at LibreOffice. It was forked from OpenOffice and it has far outpaced OpenOffice to the point that it's embarrassing that OpenOffice is still being developed. Just because the original core devs are gone means nothing in the long run. Switch emulation isn't some black magic secret project that only a handful of people know how to do. The biggest hurdle is always the DRM portion, which has long since been cracked. The rest is basic dev stuff.
And in any case. There is another project that's been around as long as Yuzu and is as equally capable and performant.
This statement literally proves my point.
The binaries still exist in some repos, like the Arch extras repo.
You are saying it's going to have the opposite effect of what Nintendo wants (curtailing emulation), so your claim is that this is going to make emulation more widespread. Correct me if I misunderstood.
I never disagreed that a fork can end up good. I said Yuzu shutting down won't help emulation.
Your claim was that this is "increased awareness to the average person". How are you mixing "average person" and "Arch extras repo"? The average person uses Windows, Googles "yuzu" and doesn't find anything clear. This was my point, it brought awareness to me and I saw myself that Yuzu is no longer accessible to the average person.
Please explain how Nintendo is worse off now if that's really what you think. All your arguments boil down to "this means nothing in the long term, emulation is going to be fine", which I agree with. I still don't see how this is having "the opposite effect" though.
You're intentionally conflating two separate points I made.
Point #1: the fact that you went out of your way as a result of the lawsuit news to download and try Yuzu proves my point that more people will try it out.
Point #2: the binaries are still available in some of the usual places. For example, it's still available in the Arch repos.
Those two concepts aren't directly linked together. And I decided to check out the Suyu progress and they're making much more than just README and branding changes. They'll have binaries available soon also.
And like I keep saying, Yuzu wasn't the only Switch emulator out there. So even if people can't find Yuzu, they can find the other one which is very much active and available to use. It's called Ryujinx, btw. It's a terrible name, but it works.
Yes I'm conflating them to illustrate my point. You are right in that it will increase the amount of people wanting to try it. My point is that these people won't be able to get it running, if, for example, it involves Arch repos which are far beyond the reach of the average person. So the additional awareness might go nowhere.
You say Suyu will have stuff soon, and that there are alternatives. Yes that's correct, which to me means "emulation is not dead yet, there are still alternatives", which doesn't seem like "the opposite effect" at all.
The only thing im absolutely sure is this it's going to fuel rage agains this shit in some people, which being honest is what we need.
Im so feed up with us buying something just to not own it, that alegation about being unable to give instruccions to people to download info from their devices (the keys) is absolute bs.