Quoting: Liam Dawe

Quoting: pleasereadthemanualA common opinion in the comments of that Ars article was that "the Patreon was really asking for it." I'm curious what GOL users think of the Patreon which is bringing in more than 10 times as much money as GIMP's Patreon accounts.

Is it illegal to develop commercial emulators?

Well, their early access to builds for people who pay probably isn't helping their case here.

I don't think selling emulators is actually illegal. Connectix, for example, won in the case Sony brought against them: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Connectix_Virtual_Game_Station

Of course, Sony brought them to the brink, purchased them, and shut it down anyway...

I'm actually really interested to see if there's anything about commercial emulators being illegal, because I can't find anything. I figured the potential issues were the same regardless of whether Yuzu was making money from it or not.

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A common opinion in the comments of that Ars article was that "the Patreon was really asking for it." I'm curious what GOL users think of the Patreon which is bringing in more than 10 times as much money as GIMP's Patreon accounts.

Is it illegal to develop commercial emulators?

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Quoting: emphyOn another note: I find it very telling that the yuzu github page doesn't seem to have been hit by a dmca notice.

Indicates to me that nintendo are far less sure of their legal legwork than they pretend to be.

That's because Yuzu doesn't violate the DMCA. Yuzu itself is just an emulator to play Nintendo Switch games. It doesn't contain any circumvention tools.

I suppose Nintendo could try to nail Yuzu on contributory copyright infringement in the same manner Betamax was attacked some 40 years ago.

What is more concerning is whether emulation is actually legal (the video I linked earlier goes over this in great detail). That's a sticking point.

Re: The Ars article doragasu linked:

QuoteCrucially, though, the open source Yuzu emulator itself does not contain a copy of those "prod.keys," which Nintendo's lawsuit acknowledges that users need to supply themselves. That makes Yuzu different from the Dolphin emulator, which was taken off Steam last year after Nintendo pointed out that the software itself contains a copy of the Wii Common Key used to decrypt game files.

It's ridiculous to think Yuzu could be taken down for providing instructions on a website. Yuzu isn't a company. It's software worked on by developers from all around the world, and someone who contributes to the project provides a website for them with those instructions.

And here Nintendo argues for contributory infringement:

QuoteIn its lawsuit, though, Nintendo argues that "the vast majority of Yuzu users are using Yuzu to play downloaded pirated games in Yuzu." For instance, the lawsuit points to data showing that leaked copies of The Legend of Zelda: Tears of the Kingdom were downloaded one million times in the week and a half before the game's release, a time period that also saw "thousands of additional paid members" added to Yuzu's Patreon. Yuzu is "secondarily liable" for "inducing" this kind of infringement, Nintendo argues.

Now make the exact same argument for torrent clients.

None of these arguments in themselves are convincing. Taken together, they might be. But the main point is: using Yuzu is not in itself illegal. There is no part of Yuzu that is illegal. It just so happens that many users of Yuzu run afoul of the DMCA at some point before using Yuzu.

QuoteBut Loiterman said he's "skeptical this goes to trial. Unless Yuzu has very deep pockets, I think they're likely to take it down, and the software will live on but not be centrally distributed by Yuzu."

Yuzu is not "centrally distributed" by Yuzu. It's distributed by Github. Yuzu will die unless someone steps up to host the repository elsewhere because it lives on contributions by multiple people from all over the world.

Bleem!, the Playstation emulator for the Dreamcast, was sued by Sony. They won the case. They went bankrupt anyway. Yuzu is very different, because it's not a company. Who are they suing? The developer who owns the Github repository? A vertical slice of the most active contributors? The person who hosts the Yuzu website? The person who owns the Yuzu discord group?

Either way, Yuzu has an impressive amount of Patreon donations. In the order of $45,000 AUD a month; they might actually be able to take on Nintendo with that kind of cash, but not forever.

This seems like just the sort of case the EFF would want to provide legal resources for.

I don't own a Switch or play any Nintendo games, but this case will certainly set a precedent.

Anyway, I donated to Yuzu today because fuck Nintendo.

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If anyone is interested in the legality of emulators, I highly recommend this video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wROQUZDCIMI

It is incredibly difficult to get exceptions to the DMCA, and the worst part is that even if you get an exception one year, you have to keep arguing for it.

Section 1201 of the DMCA will haunt us for a very long time.

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Quoting: Purple Library GuyI'm not sure I understand the problem. Was this not the behaviour he was expecting? Is the problem that the crypto app stole his money instead of the exchange doing it?

I'm reading Tracers in the Dark at the moment. I'm up to the part where Mt. Gox lost 500,000 bitcoins (every single Bitcoin they were entrusted with), managed to find 200,000 from an old wallet, and the rest remains lost.

Cryptocurrency exchanges (huge ones) have fallen again and again over the years.

If you're going to hold a lot of cryptocurrency, you want to hold that in a private wallet... ironically, you might be better at protecting it yourself than these exchanges with so many resources.

And I wouldn't trust just any store. Get the wallet software directly from the developer.

This is something AppImage is best suited for, actually...

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QuoteIf you own either the original Star Wars Battlefront (2004) or Star Wars Battlefront II (2005) you get a 20% discount during the pre-order period.

What do I get if I rented the second game from Blockbuster a few times?

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Quoting: Purple Library GuyOK, I don't think much of some of the stuff gbudny is saying.

But there is an issue with old Linux native games not running on modern Linux (to be fair, even Windows' once-impressive backward compatibility has been slipping in recent versions). But it seems to me like it could be a pretty solvable issue. I mean, all the code from then is available, right? And the Linux kernel itself as I understand it is very backwards-compatible, so it's all about libraries and stuff, yes? So, like, shouldn't it be possible to make Flatpak-ish sandboxes that reproduce various vintages of Linux, using old libraries (or, where they'd actually work fine, new libraries renamed to look like old ones)?

My immediate thought is that this is a problem Distrobox is designed to solve. Obviously, there needs to be a more user-friendly solution in the future.

Yes, this is a real issue. I don't play that many games, but I've had to manually patch half of the ones I played last year, without guidance from the developer (they have no clue how to fix it either), just based on error messages. Issues ranged from needing older libraries (I compiled from the AUR), needing newer libraries (I deleted the bundled libraries), to "the game engine is EOL so the developer can't update the game easily, but Linux's fontconfig introduced a breaking change a few years ago, so I need to download a newer version of the bundled library, replace it, and hope it works with the other bundled libraries".

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Quoting: gbudny

Quoting: pleasereadthemanual

Quoting: dvdI find it weird that people find it weird that a company supports our platform of choice. I wish more devs had an option to bypass the bullshit stores. Why is it so necessary to put the game on these stores?

Because Proton, which is only usable by most people on Steam, provides a better experience in most cases than a native Linux version.

That's not necessarily my experience, although I recently had to install old libraries to get Loop Hero from GOG to work again, but a lot of Linux users do say as much. I also had to manually patch a library for another native Linux game from Itch. And delete some old bundled libraries for a Ren'Py game from Itch...

But I do support devs releasing their games wherever they want. It's just, supporting Linux natively long-term, even with open source engines, seems far more challenging than other platforms.

I know it's annoying sometimes to load all Linux libraries. On the other hand, Linux allows users to run some games released 10-20 years ago on the modern Linux distributions. Users should start to think about it as an advantage because it frequently works in this way.

I prefer to think about Linux distributions as separate game consoles, so put your favorite game consoles below if you don't like this example:

Linux 2.0 - 2.2: PlayStation 1 (this is just the example)
Linux 2.4 - 2.6: PlayStation 2
Linux 2.6 - 3.0: PlayStation 3
Linux 4.0 - 5.0: PlayStation 4
Linux 6.0: PlayStation 5

For instance, Mac users can only rely on old computers or open source projects. Apple frequently removes emulators or parts of the operating system that are necessary to run old games.

I think users can mitigate this issue, and they should mainly play games on the long-term support distributions. That can give us an experience similar to Windows or Mac users, but it probably also means keeping two Linux distributions on the same computer for relatively modern games.

It starts to get scary when I read comments of users about buying games only from Steam.
It's my advice to avoid buying games for Linux only from Steam if a specific game has the DRM-free version on GOG, itch.io or other online stores.

You should always check if the game is the DRM-free version on Steam and then, make a backup copy. You never know if a new version of a game will require a Steam or something else to run. It's fine to buy games for Linux from Steam if you don't have a choice or you don't plan to play them in the future.

Steam is a web browser, which will be almost impossible to run if a game requires the old libraries that don't load a game correctly on the modern Linux distributions. You can end up with games you can't play anymore because the most recent version of Steam won't install on the older Linux distributions.

I read about issues with Steam for the older operating systems. I saw people who couldn't log in or Steam crashes when they tried to run it. Some people reported they couldn't use Steam even if they made a copy of the Steam. Steam always requires to fully install with all the updates on the fresh operating system. When you can't install Steam on the specific operating system, then you frequently can log in, but you could be offline. In this case, your internet connection could work correctly, but Steam doesn't allow you to download anything from your account.

You can try hacks, which could work for only some games. The weird issue with Steam is that it requires fully install and update on new, installed system. Otherwise, your old versions of Steam could be useless, and your games are gone with your money.

You shouldn't need to pick a particular Linux distribution to mitigate compatibility issues. I run Linux for a lot of scenarios, including work. Additionally, LTS distributions are more prone to security issues. Read about XScreensaver and Debian if you want to go down a rabbit hole...

Linux, the kernel, is very backwards compatible. It's all the other important system libraries that don't care as much (glibc comes to mind).

I personally purchase games from GOG, itch.io, and DLsite (they have DRM-free games). I rarely ever purchase games from Steam anymore. But I certainly don't blame users who do, because it's a better experience. Valve has invested a lot of time and money in making it a better experience. As a result, it is the easiest way to play games on Linux; everything else requires knowledge newbies aren't likely to have.

If you're using an older operating system for gaming and it's too old to run Steam's version of CEF, get a newer operating system. You can run modern Linux distributions on pretty old hardware. There's really no reason to be running an older operating system unless, of course, you need to run old software that doesn't run on modern OSes. In which case, get a VM or use Distrobox. Or even build a Docker image with the environment you need (it's not hard!).

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Quoting: Phlebiac

Quoting: pleasereadthemanualsupporting Linux natively long-term, even with open source engines, seems far more challenging than other platforms.

Which other platforms? Microsoft does a fair job of backwards compatibility with Windows, but certainly Apple does not. macOS developers have to keep up on maintenance, or their customers can't play their games after a few OS updates.

Alright, just Windows then :)

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Quoting: dvdI find it weird that people find it weird that a company supports our platform of choice. I wish more devs had an option to bypass the bullshit stores. Why is it so necessary to put the game on these stores?

Because Proton, which is only usable by most people on Steam, provides a better experience in most cases than a native Linux version.

That's not necessarily my experience, although I recently had to install old libraries to get Loop Hero from GOG to work again, but a lot of Linux users do say as much. I also had to manually patch a library for another native Linux game from Itch. And delete some old bundled libraries for a Ren'Py game from Itch...

But I do support devs releasing their games wherever they want. It's just, supporting Linux natively long-term, even with open source engines, seems far more challenging than other platforms.

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