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      Switch emulator Suyu hit by GitLab DMCA, project lives on through self-hosting

      news.movim.eu / ArsTechnica · 6 days ago - 15:20

    Is a name like "Suyu" ironic enough to avoid facing a lawsuit?

    Enlarge / Is a name like "Suyu" ironic enough to avoid facing a lawsuit? (credit: Suyu)

    Switch emulator Suyu—a fork of the Nintendo-targeted and now-defunct emulation project Yuzu—has been taken down from GitLab following a DMCA request Thursday. But the emulation project's open source files remain available on a self-hosted git repo on the Suyu website , and recent compiled binaries remain available on an extant GitLab repo .

    While the DMCA takedown request has not yet appeared on GitLab's public repository of such requests , a GitLab spokesperson confirmed to The Verge that the project was taken down after the site received notice "from a representative of the rightsholder." GitLab has not specified who made the request or how they represented themselves; a representative for Nintendo was not immediately available to respond to a request for comment.

    An email to Suyu contributors being shared on the project's Discord server includes the following cited justification in the DMCA request:

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      Here’s how the makers of the “Suyu” Switch emulator plan to avoid getting sued

      news.movim.eu / ArsTechnica · Monday, 11 March - 16:22

    Is a name like "Suyu" ironic enough to avoid facing a lawsuit?

    Enlarge / Is a name like "Suyu" ironic enough to avoid facing a lawsuit? (credit: Suyu)

    Last week, the developers behind the popular Switch emulator Yuzu took down their GitHub and web presence in the face of a major lawsuit from Nintendo . Now, a new project built from the Yuzu source code, cheekily named Suyu , has arisen as "the continuation of the world's most popular, open-source Nintendo Switch emulator, Yuzu."

    Despite the name—which the project's GitHub page notes is "pronounced 'sue-you' (wink, wink)"—the developers behind Suyu are going out of their way to try to avoid a lawsuit like the one that took down Yuzu.

    "Suyu currently exists in a legal gray area we are trying to work our way out of," contributor and Discord moderator Sharpie told Ars in a recent interview. "There are multiple plans and possibilities for what to do next. Things are still being organized and planned."

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      pubsub.blastersklan.com / slashdot · Monday, 4 March - 21:13 edit · 1 minute

    An anonymous reader quotes a report from Liliputing: Yuzu is a free and open source emulator that makes it possible to run Nintendo Switch games on Windows, Linux, and Android devices. First released in 2018, the software has been under constant development since then (the Android port was released less than a year ago). But last week Nintendo sued the developers, claiming that the primary purpose of the software is to circumvent Nintendo Switch encryption and allow users to play pirated games. Rather than fight the case in court, Tropic Haze (the developers behind Yuzu) have agreed to a settlement which involves paying $2.4 million in damages to Nintendo and basically shutting down Yuzu. As part of a permanent injunction, Tropic Haze has agreed to stop distributing, advertising, or promoting Yuzu or any of its source code or features or any other "software or devices that circumvent Nintendo's technical protection measures." The court is also ordering the developers to turn over the yuzu-emu.org website to Nintendo and bars them "from supporting or facilitating access" to any other related websites, social media, chatrooms, or apps. In one of the more bizarre parts of the court order, the Yuzu team is told to delete all "circumvention devices," which includes any tools used for development of Yuzu and "all copies of Yuzu."

    Read more of this story at Slashdot.

    Nintendo Switch Emulator Yuzu To Shut Down, Pay $2.4 Million To Settle Lawsuit
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      games.slashdot.org /story/24/03/04/215255/nintendo-switch-emulator-yuzu-to-shut-down-pay-24-million-to-settle-lawsuit

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      Emulation community expresses defiance in wake of Nintendo’s Yuzu lawsuit

      news.movim.eu / ArsTechnica · Thursday, 29 February - 23:43 · 1 minute

    Power (glove) to the people.

    Enlarge / Power (glove) to the people. (credit: Aurich Lawson)

    Nintendo's recent lawsuit against Switch emulator maker Yuzu seems written like it was designed to strike fear into the heart of the entire emulation community. But despite legal arguments that sometimes cut at the very idea of emulation itself, members of the emulation development community I talked to didn't seem very worried about coming under a Yuzu-style legal threat from Nintendo or other console makers. Indeed, those developers told me they've long taken numerous precautions against that very outcome and said they feel they have good reasons to believe they can avoid Yuzu's fate.

    Protect yourself

    "I can assure [you], experienced emulator developers are very aware of copyright issues," said Lycoder, who has worked on emulators for consoles ranging from the NES to the Dreamcast. "I've personally always maintained strict rules about how I deal with copyrighted content in my projects, and most other people I know from the emulation scene do the same thing."

    "This lawsuit is not introducing any new element that people in the emulation community have not known of for a long time," said Parsifal, a hobbyist developer who has written emulators for the Apple II, Space Invaders , and the CHIP-8 virtual machine . "Emulation is fine as long as you don't infringe on copyright and trademarks."

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      How strong is Nintendo’s legal case against Switch emulator Yuzu?

      news.movim.eu / ArsTechnica · Wednesday, 28 February - 04:32

    Chopping Yuzu into three parts is not a proposed legal remedy, for now...

    Enlarge / Chopping Yuzu into three parts is not a proposed legal remedy, for now... (credit: Yuzu)

    Nintendo has filed a lawsuit against Tropic Haze LLC, the makers of the popular Yuzu emulator that the Switch-maker says is "facilitating piracy at a colossal scale."

    The federal lawsuit —filed Monday in the District Court of Rhode Island and first reported on by Stephen Totilo —is the company's most expansive and significant argument yet against emulation technology that it argues "turns general computing devices into tools for massive intellectual property infringement of Nintendo and others' copyrighted works." Nintendo is asking the court to prevent the developers from working on, promoting, or distributing the Yuzu emulator, and requesting significant financial damages under the DMCA.

    If successful, the arguments in the case could help overturn years of legal precedent that has protected emulator software itself, even as using those emulators for software piracy has remained illegal.

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      Nintendo’s lost 1990s “VR” console comes to 3DS thanks to a remarkable emulator

      news.movim.eu / ArsTechnica · Tuesday, 27 February - 19:26 · 1 minute

    Virtual Boy game running on a Nintendo 3DS

    Enlarge (credit: Floogle/X)

    Nintendo has made some bold, weird choices with its hardware designs. But none were so bold and weird as 1995's Virtual Boy, a "woefully premature commercial curio," as one Ars writer put it , that "quickly passed unlamented into history," as remarked another . The awkward red-on-black tabletop headset system wasn't so much ahead of its time as beamed in from an alternate reality. In this reality, it didn't sell much and was largely forgotten.

    Nintendo has seemed eager to let the Virtual Boy fade from the collective memory , but clever coders have labored to keep the system accessible outside vintage hardware collections. The latest, and perhaps most accessible, is Red Viper , which plays Virtual Boy games on a ( lightly hacked ) Nintendo 3DS, the other Nintendo system on which 3D features were underappreciated. It is full-speed, it supports homebrew games, you can change the drawing color to something other than red, and it is free. It's built on top of the work of earlier 3DS emulator r3dragon , which itself drew heavily from the Reality Boy project for Windows .

    Red Viper makes use of the 3DS's top screen for game display and turns the lower screen into a system options panel. It maps the Virtual Boy's own face buttons onto the touchscreen. In the Twitter thread announcing Red Viper's general release, coder Floogle notes that the emulator is only roughly translating the Virtual Boy's 50 Hz refresh to the 3DS' 60 Hz by pushing a frame every 20 ms. There is, Floogle supposes, some hardware headroom for improvement.

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      Flurry of firmware updates makes Analogue Pocket an even better retro handheld

      news.movim.eu / ArsTechnica · Friday, 5 January - 19:43 · 1 minute

    An Analogue Pocket running <em>Super Mario World</em> on an openFPGA core with the scanline filter enabled.

    Enlarge / An Analogue Pocket running Super Mario World on an openFPGA core with the scanline filter enabled. (credit: Andrew Cunningham)

    We've got a soft spot for the Analogue Pocket , the premium portable game console that melds 2020s technology with the design of the original Game Boy. Since its release, Analogue has added some new capabilities via firmware updates, most notably when it added support for emulating more consoles via its OpenFPGA platform in the summer of 2022 . This allows the FPGA chip inside of the pocket to emulate the hardware of other systems, in addition to the portable systems the Pocket supports natively.

    But aside from finalizing and releasing that 1.1 firmware, 2023 was mostly quiet for Pocket firmware updates. That changed in December when the company released not one but two major firmware upgrades for the Pocket that slipped under our radar during the holidays. These updates delivered a combination of fixes and long-promised features to the handheld, which Analogue has been re-releasing in different color palettes now that the original versions are more consistently in stock.

    The most significant update for OpenFPGA fans is the ability to use display filters with third-party FPGA cores. Part of the appeal of the Pocket is its 1,600×1,440 screen, which is sharp enough to perfectly re-create the huge chunky pixels of the original Game Boy screens. By default, most FPGA cores now get access to a similarly high-quality CRT screen filter named after the Sony Trinitron TV , adding a touch of retro-blurriness to the sharp edges of 8- and 16-bit games. I've seen lots of bad, unconvincing scanline filters in retro game re-releases, and this isn't one of them.

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      Analogue’s next project is an accurate, hardware-emulated Nintendo 64 replica

      news.movim.eu / ArsTechnica · Monday, 16 October - 16:06 · 1 minute

    The Analogue 3D is the company's next FPGA-based retro console, but the company isn't showing the whole thing off yet.

    Enlarge / The Analogue 3D is the company's next FPGA-based retro console, but the company isn't showing the whole thing off yet. (credit: Analogue)

    Retro game enthusiasts will know Analogue for its consoles’ dedication to accuracy. From the original Analogue Nt , which used chips harvested from broken NES consoles, to the Analogue Pocket , which uses an FPGA chip to accurately emulate handheld hardware, the company has always focused on modern hardware that can play actual game cartridges while preserving the idiosyncrasies of the original game consoles.

    Today Analogue is announcing the Analogue 3D , a console that will use an FPGA to run games made for 1996’s Nintendo 64. Because FPGAs emulate consoles at a hardware level, they're much better at replicating all of the specific quirks of the original hardware, making games look and run like they would have on the original consoles without any performance problems or rendering inaccuracies. Like Analogue's other home console replicas, the Analogue 3D is designed to play original cartridges and not ROM files, and the cartridge slot is region-free, so it'll work with games from all over the world.

    Analogue didn't reveal a price or a specific launch date for the Analogue 3D, just that the console will show up at some point in 2024. It also didn't show off the design of the console itself or the controller, though it did tease both—if you look closely, you'll see an 8BitDo logo on the controller, the same company that made Analogue's replica controllers for its Super Nintendo, Sega Genesis, and TurboGrafx retro consoles.

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      Atari launches replica 2600 console to go with all its replica 2600 cartridges

      news.movim.eu / ArsTechnica · Tuesday, 22 August, 2023 - 21:02

    If you read about Atari issuing a new cartridge of a new Atari 2600 game and your first thought was, "What am I supposed to play this on?" there's an answer for you. Today, the company announced the Atari 2600+ , a $130 retro console with a cartridge slot that can accept vintage and modern Atari 2600 and 7800 cartridges, plus a $25 CX40+ joystick and $40 CX30+ paddle controller bundle that appear to more-or-less faithfully re-create the originals.

    All items are currently available for pre-order and will ship in November 2023. The console includes a 10-in-1 game cartridge with Adventure , Combat , Missile Command , Haunted House , Yars' Revenge , and a few other 2600 games.

    The Atari 2600+ takes its design cues from the early-1980s revision of the original console, with fake wood grain on the front and four control switches. But Atari says the console is only 80 percent as large as the original console, "making it easier to fit into modern living spaces." The console also has an HDMI output and uses USB-C for power.

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