Summary
- Nintendo isn’t afraid to use legal action to protect its rights, as seen by the takedown of over 8,500 Yuzu forks.
- With Yuzu taken down by Nintendo, emulation enthusiasts can still turn to Ryujinx or Egg NS for Switch game emulation.
- Emulation is thriving, with Delta emulator offering multiple Nintendo console emulation on iOS, while most developers tread carefully to avoid legal trouble.
Just as the dawn shatters the veil of night, and the moon pulls on the depths of the oceans, so too is the inevitability of legal action by Nintendo. For at least the last 40 years of its 135-year history, Nintendo has used the law as a cudgel to relentlessly defend its perceived rights. This is particularly evident when it comes to emulators.
The last big-name emulator taken down by Nintendo was the Yuzu emulator for the Nintendo Switch. The case was settled by both parties in court. Yuzu’s parent company, Tropic Haze LLC (the company that owns Yuzu), ended up paying Nintendo $2.4 million dollars in damages in addition to other penalties. Nintendo has now followed up on that legal victory with even more legal action.
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Who is Nintendo’s target now?
Today we learned that Nintendo issued a DMCA takedown notice to GitHub to wipe out every fork of the original Yuzu repository, all 8,535 of them. Nintendo alleges that every fork of Yuzu infringes on its copyrights to the same extent that Yuzu’s did, and therefore they must be taken down. Nintendo explicitly names its “technological protection methods,” such as cryptographic keys as being the bit of code in violation of its copyrights. In the notice, Nintendo says that Yuzu “uses unauthorized copies of these cryptographic keys to decrypt unauthorized copies of Nintendo Switch games.”
So now that Yuzu is no longer available, how is an honest emulation enthusiast supposed to enjoy their ROMs? There are still a few out there, but the best of the remaining bunch appears to be Ryujinx, which was developed independently of Yuzu, so wasn’t affected by today’s takedown. Another Switch survivor is the Android-based Egg NS, but you’re going to need a newer phone to get it to work. The developers recommend at least a SnapDragon 855 chip with around 6GB of RAM. Also, there haven’t been any updates since 2022, so it might be abandonware at this point.
The state of emulation
Emulation is definitely having a moment in the zeitgeist, not so much because of the recent takedowns, but mostly because of the Delta emulator on iPhones and iPads. It doesn’t emulate Switch games, but it does emulate at least six different Nintendo consoles and portables with the promise of more to come. Nintendo has allowed the development of Delta and others like it (such as Dolphin) for unknown reasons, but in contrast to Yuzu’s pre-lawsuit behavior (loudly publicizing compatibility with a leaked pre-release copy of Tears of the Kingdom), most other emulation developers are keeping a low profile. Hopefully, the remaining big-name emulators continue to watch their steps and avoid the litigious gaze of Nintendo’s legal team.
