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by benoau 620 days ago
These days you can load up almost the entire history of gaming on a dozen different PC handhelds, choose from a thriving Android ecosystem of less-powerful but cheaper handhelds, and run emulators on iPhones and Android phones. Their walled garden is on the brink of ruin, unencumbered hardware and software have surpassed what they offer. I don't think it's existential yet but if they don't have a digital buffet ready for PC/Mac/iOS/Android then they are in real trouble IMHO.
2 comments
izacus 620 days ago
And the IP laws as they stand right now can kill off all of that software, especially with aggressive addition of DRM and private stores which police existence of these kind of perservation efforts.

Remember that Apple had to be forced to even think about allowing emulators on their platforms by the EU and even then they aggressively block Americans from being able to access them.

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komali2 620 days ago
> And the IP laws as they stand right now can kill off all of that software

Right but laws are only as good as their capability to enforce.

If I were to start an emulation project today I would mask my identity and try to do a better job of it than the silk road guy.

It's a shame ryujinx and yuzu were functionality killed when Nintendo got to the founding developers. There's contributions from other devs but I guess like with a lot of FOSS there's often just one person upon which the entire stack survives. Maybe the biggest projects like Linux and python can survive without their BDL's, but these emulators certainly haven't been able to, and that makes me sad.

I would love to take up the mantle of one of these but I don't know the first thing about emulation programming.

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izacus 620 days ago
> Right but laws are only as good as their capability to enforce.

Enforcement of IP restrictions is built into hardware of all new computing platforms. It's easy to enforce them worldwide now - again, see Apple.

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butterfly42069 620 days ago
Its definitely existential or they wouldn't be trying to nickle and dime everything related to them whilst squandering all their good will in the process.
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