“Premium” Emulators - The Definitive Review
Taste that open source. Taste the goodness of the open source.
It was with considerable interest that I read Wes Fenlon’s lovely overview of the Yuzu Switch emulator debacle in the face of its lightning-fast resolution in the US courts. Please do give it a thorough examination, for not only is Wes’s newsletter really fucking good, he brings some great insights to the furore and the fate of Yuzu’s creators. The short version is Nintendo fucked them for $2.5 million and total ownership of Yuzu and its sister 3DS emulator, Citra. For Wes, the issue also concerns exploitation of the remarkably unpleasant DMCA and its banning of copy protection circumvention. This is an appalling bit of legislation that only protects corporations who don’t bother to adequately secure their platforms. This is something that Nintendo has a long and rich history of indulging in, as detailed in my post on the Nintendo Wii security flaws. Yet it seems that the DMCA was merely the blade; the motive for the assassination was, naturally, a perceived loss of income1. You see, you’re doubly deserving of a legal sledgehammering if you dare to actually make money from your emulator, but in this case I can’t help but feel just a little touch of “well you were asking for it” for the Yuzu team.
I do wonder sometimes if people ever bother to consider the risks when publicly releasing a paid-for Android version of an emulator for a platform holder’s sole source of revenue2, especially when that platform holder is one of the most maliciously litigious companies in the world. To then also accept donations through an American platform like Patreon seems like outright goading. Again, Yuzu’s takedown also makes great reference to Tears of the Kingdom and a spurious claim of lost revenue. One wonders if Nintendo would have gone as hard against an anonymised version where the coders weren’t using an LLC to manage their income. In a sense, it’s the professionalisation of Yuzu that made for its downfall and for me, that’s the real teaching here3.
Way back in the 1990s, I remember my first encounters with paid-for “premium” emulation. If you wanted fun times with PC-Engine games, David and Cédric Michel’s Magic Engine could seemingly do it all, for a fee. I got plenty of mileage out of the time-limited demo version before stumbling across a pirate copy of the full version which, because I was a shameless pirate, I happily stole and used4. That is until Magic Engine was superseded. Really, it was more about the presentation. Magic Engine was slick, sure, but other PC Engine emulators arrived that offered the same functionality without demanding payment. I hopped between a fair few and can’t even remember their names, but I can recall giving my Game Park 325 a good dose of the PC-Engine’s finest for long bus trips into town. In the modern day, of course, there’s a dizzying array of completely free options yet, hilariously, Magic Engine soldiers on, and can still be purchased! Likewise, for the Commodore 64, I remember an era where there were three emulators where one was paid-for, with CCS64 and Frodo offering much the same capabilities for free. And then Vice came along and essentially ended the argument. Being a Commodore Plus/4 survivor, I’d also used the Minus4 emulator and was somewhat overjoyed to end up working for the author, one Mr Mike Dailly, ex of DMA design and then co-creator of Game Maker - who were my client for PR at one point. Needless to say, being a pioneer in the field of Plus/4 emulation was never a commercial enterprise for him. It really was about the nostalgia and joy of recreating the system and letting other people enjoy it. The key thing to note about Magic Engine was my claim that really, it was selling its quality of presentation more than anything else6. The quality of the emulation seemed great, but once I had actual PC-Engine hardware, the divergences were pretty clear. My favourite PC-Engine game is the wonderful Parasol Stars7. Being the unreleased arcade sequel to Rainbow Islands, it carries on the Bubble Bobble lineage with superb style and grace, utilising a brand new umbrella-based combat system for capturing and corralling enemies in a much-welcome return to Bubble Bobble’s fixed-screen stages8. Having thoroughly rinsed the game on Magic Engine, I was used to a particular power-up appearing on the first world that makes the whole game a lot easier to grind through9. And yet this item, which had around an 85% chance of appearing on the emulator, is so elusive on the actual hardware that I’ve never seen it despite going for a shitload of 1CC runs. The implication? Magic Engine simply wasn’t accurate to the hardware, even though the creators expected people to pay for it.
Personally, I found that just a little bit off. But then I find paid-for emulation to be a little bit off in principle. It’s always been piracy-adjacent because how else do the majority of users acquire the games to play on them? So the idea of paying for an emulator feels too close to the idea of paying for pirated games. For me, both represent crossing a particular moral line, one that very clearly in Yuzu’s case had utterly predictable consequences. And it’s worth bearing in mind that paid-for emulation is very much the minority, as it rightly should be. If the greatest justification for emulation is the utterly necessary demand of preservation, then keeping it free-to-use supports a kind of academic protection, that a lack of profiteering keeps a certain unassailable virtue intact. The actual legalities, bypassing this and that, distributing BIOS files as some gross violation of IP law, mean little to me other than as ways for exploitative companies to enforce ownership. This seems especially disproportionate when concerning obsolete hardware, where any claim of revenue loss is mostly laughable. On the subject of fair recompense for undertaking work, I have some faint sympathy but have to point out that the greatest emulation project of them all, M.A.M.E., doesn’t even have a donations button on its official website. And M.A.M.E.'s contribution to the culture is literally priceless, not to mention its now-omnivorous assimilation of anything that runs code means eventually, it’ll likely be playing all Switch and 3DS games with extreme accuracy, for free10. I’d rather we followed the admittedly bonkers example of Grigori Perelman11, wherein progress within a noble pursuit is far greater a reward than anything monetary, but then I’m not doing much in the way of emulation coding, so perhaps should just shut the fuck up?
Wes’s piece touches on resultant implications for the emulation scene in general, where he fears a chilling effect on the development and creation of emulators in the future. I’d argue that’s unfounded for emulation per se, but likely to be very strong for paid-for emulation. In fact, one bright upshot of the legal ruling is seeing a widely popular Android-based Nintendo DS emulator remove its paid-for version from Google Play and go fully open source. Looking at community discussion around this emulator, it seems that people have been asking for that open source move for some years. And, of course, with open source, it’s always possible to contribute anonymously. Likewise, Yuzu’s source, which fair enough has always been open, will undoubtedly live on - safely beyond Nintendo’s practical capabilities to remove it. Once again, anti-legal development contributes to the culture and its ongoing preservation with far more dedication and democracy than the rightful IP owners’ most earnest attempts. I’d suggest that for the majority of cases - in this case, hardware platforms - that’s the best we can actually hope for. Platform holders have proved themselves to be absolutely shameless assholes in this respect. I never recovered from Nintendo’s gall of offering Commodore 64 titles for more than £3 per game when the Virtual Console launched on the Wii. And of course, it was the same petty little collection of IPs that crops up wherever there’s money to be made from Commodore 64 nostalgia. Don’t worry - I paid for my set when I bought an original Ellsworth C64DTV. It cost me a bargainous £15 and came with 30 games. Nintendo would have charged me £90 for the pleasure of that little catalogue of IPs, I wouldn’t even have a nifty Competition Pro joystick to plug into the TV. And it goes without saying that this capsule of Commodore 64 luminaries may be officially ‘legal’ to use, but that I’m fairly confident the rights holder12 no longer passes any royalties onto the actual creators, so the overall moral balance has to lie between whether you prise creator compensation over the abstract legal designation of the right to earn money from some specific property. My overall point being this - when it comes to emulation, unless there’s a genuinely valuable artefact being sold to you, such as a mini-console full of games to run on a modern TV, the commercial side is generally a rip-off and in my opinion by paying for it, you betray a certain ethos and, I believe, change the relationship between the past and the present of videogaming13 by being complicit in the commodification of that which should really be free for all. And in a sense, I’m saying that applies to the little guys selling their emulators too, whether they’re eventually crushed in the jaws of corporate sharks or not. Yuzu might have been the best Switch emulator available, but it will be replaced - and by something that’s probably better. Because they always are, and as mentioned before, the majority of emulator authors seem to be doing it for the love, for the kudos, for the simple good of preserving the culture. In this light, perhaps, I can see Nintendo’s legal aggression as actually helping us all. In shutting down the retail emulator, Nintendo is unwittingly pushing emulation back to an anonymised underground, where, until some radical overhaul of media rights occurs, it’s probably the safest.
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I cannot discount that it's also a simple case of classic Nintendo intimidation via lawfare - something the company also has a long and rich history of indulging in.
Yeah, yeah, sole source aside its extensive IP monetisation in movies, merch etc, blah blah blah
What I'm actually saying is that if you really do want to get paid for doing an emulator, then direct people to a digital download print-at-home poster on a wholly EU-owned marketplace and launder the cash via three crypto tumblers into drugs, sell the drugs, then launder that money into three more crypto coins, then finally back into bitcoin and then go to Venezuela and buy a house or something.
To be perfectly honest, I'm not even sure I would have been able to actually complete the purchase, given that I think you had to send Euros to France or something, or use a nascent online payment gateway that seemed beyond dubious.
Yes, this is indeed an obscure handheld flex.
To get this straight, Magic Engine had a really nice GUI and totally acceptable gameplay when I was trying to get early versions of, I think, Snes9X running from a command line, then watching a super-glitchy intro to Final Fantasy V at about 20 frames. Per minute.
Most I ever spent on a retro game: £75 for Parasol Stars HuCard, complete in box with the little cards and whatnot. Ebay sales in Dec 2023 and Feb 2024 are £153 and £164 respectively, so more than doubled in value wooooooooooooo! I'M NEVER SELLING IT.
Controversionally, I never liked Rainbow Islands' obsession with enforced ascent. Like, fuck you. If I can shoot fucking rainbows I should be able to fucking swim, right?
It's a magical multicoloured ring, a hyper version of the standard monochrome ring of diamonds. The standard unleashes a magic spark that bounces around the level, killing enemies for high-end bonus item drops. The multicoloured variant sparks an immediate "miracle" that unleashes the same spark, but also opens a secret door on the next boss battle victory that contains a massive coin that grants 255 free credits AND access to secret stages so you can shoot for the secret ending. If I recall correctly, it also has RNG tweaks for the rest of the game to spawn rarer/more favourable powerups.
As an aside on reverse engineering, M.A.M.E.'s demands are insane - thousands of chipsets, hundreds of custom chips with sparse or absent documentation, all of which need to be reconstructed to the highest rigour. When you consider that the Switch is an ARM GPU and an Nvidia Maxwell GPU, both with copious amounts of documentation and support, I find it hard to believe that coding Yuzu is the same feat as say, implementing the Sega Model 3 hardware in a M.A.M.E. driver. And that's without those hard yards in cracking the Switch's copy protection. The Yuzu team didn't do that either, yet for M.A.M.E. drivers, that's another hundred or so security regimes to crack. All. For. Free.
Perelman famously solved the Poincaré Conjecture, a long-standing problem in extremely difficult mathematics. Qualifying for a $1m prize under the Clay Millennium Prize Problems initiative, he refused to accept it on ethical grounds. He had a long history of making award-winning contributions and never accepting said awards. All because he believes in preserving the purity of the research.
In a nutshell, the C64 games are mostly from three publishers: System 3, Epyx and Hewson. Now I know that the owner of System 3 had the rights to Epyx, and would definitely have the purchasing power to get Hewson if they wanted. That said, the person behind Hewson had a reputation of his own that wouldn't rule out licensing the other two. Please note, I have done zero research into this, so I could be completely wrong about everything (as usual).
Please note, I am one of those awful bores who subscribe to the hippy hacker ideology that thinks information wants to be free. I remember some mid-2010s writeup on some tech site about how naïve and unrealistic that late-60s hacker ethos was in the raw commercial maturity of Web 2.0. Needless to say, that tech site was bought by a conglomerate and quickly closed and you know what? Information still wants to be free.