Enlarge / Don't expect to see this on the iOS App Store any time soon. (credit: OatmealDome )

Last week's release of the Delta emulation suite finally gave iOS users easy, no-sideloading-required access to classic Nintendo game emulation up through the Nintendo 64 era. When it comes to emulating Nintendo's subsequent home consoles on iOS, though, some technical restrictions imposed by Apple are making it difficult to get a functional emulator on the App Store.

In a recent blog post , DolphiniOS developer (and longtime Switch hacker ) OatmealDome explains how a Dolphin code fork —which ports the popular GameCube and Wii emulator to Apple's smartphone OS—uses just-in-time (JIT) compilation to translate the PowerPC instructions from those retro consoles into ARM-compatible iOS code. But Apple's App Store regulations against apps that "install executable code" (Section 3.3.1B) generally prevent JIT recompilation on iOS , with very limited exceptions such as web browsers. That restriction may have some valid security reasoning behind it , but it can also get in the way for developers of tools like third-party browser engines ( except recently in the EU ).

While MacOS developers can make use of an explicit entitlement to allow JIT recompilation in an app, that exception doesn't apply to iOS developers. And while alternative App Stores and sideloaded apps (including DolphiniOS) have discovered various ways to enable JIT compilation on both jailbroken and stock iOS devices, these workarounds can get quite arcane and occasionally break with new iOS releases .

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

Nintendo continues to use DMCA requests to halt projects it says aid in the piracy of Switch content. Discord has shut down the discussion servers associated with two prominent Yuzu forks— Suyu and Sudachi —while GitHub has removed a couple of projects related to the decryption of Switch software for use with emulators or hacked consoles.

The takedowns are the latest aftershocks from Nintendo's federal lawsuit against Switch emulator Yuzu , which led to a $2.4 million settlement weeks later. Yuzu voluntarily shut down its GitHub page and Discord server as part of that settlement, though archived discussions from Discord are still accessible.

That settlement includes a section prohibiting the makers of Yuzu from "acting in active concert and participation" with third parties in the distribution or promotion of Yuzu or any clones that make use of its code. But there's no evidence that anyone enjoined by that settlement is actively working with Suyu or Sudachi on their projects.

Enlarge / The classic Sega Genesis game Sonic the Hedgehog running on an iPhone—in this case, as a standalone app. (credit: Samuel Axon)

When Apple posted its latest update to the App Store's app review and submission policies for developers, it included language that appears to explicitly allow a new kind of app for emulating retro console games.

Apple has long forbidden apps that run code from an external source, but today's announced changes now allow "software that is not embedded in the binary" in certain cases, with "retro game console emulator apps can offer to download games" specifically listed as one of those cases.

Here's the exact wording :

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:

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."

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."

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.

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.