Taken from bluesky: https://bsky.app/profile/simplyaj.com/post/3mtq6av6yp226
Plus a sidenote from this person on DS games: https://bsky.app/profile/simplyaj.com/post/3mttai4jaz22j
Not sure on the technical details of exactly how long they last, but I've heard similar things several times before.
Always depressing to be reminded of this. Haven't had many fail, but honestly haven't tried a lot of my 3DS/Vita games in a while, so who knows.
If nothing else tho, it's nice to have an excuse to revisit some things. Once you boot it up, you might find yourself enjoying the reminiscing. :)
Nintendo wants to:
Know your location.
Allow / Block? _
It's legal if you own the game.
Nintendo could not physically give less of a shit what is legal and not, they slap people with lawyers and then win even when they don't have a case. They don't need a case, they have money.
Why does Dolphin still exist, then?
They hunt down emulators of their current console (Switch at the moment) as they believe it hurts their bottom line. They don't give a damn about Wii or 3DS emulators
They give enough of a damn to prevent Steam from offering Dolphin on their storefront: https://dolphin-emu.org/blog/2023/07/20/what-happened-to-dolphin-on-steam/
No, they hunt down the ones making a profit, because otherwise they have no legal standing.
They don't necessarily bother with older stuff. The focus is to (unethically) mess with the stuff that is currently hurting their bottom line, which is why retro only occasionally gets shafted when they repack a 20 year old game, unadapted in an emulator, for twenty bucks. Although, rom hacks also get routinely fucked for whatever reason. That stuff can't even be making any monetary difference, so I'm assuming they just choose to be dipshits as a goal in itself.
Ok, so why do Eden and Citron still exist?
They were able to go after Yuzu because Yuzu profited from their emulator.
Technically you're supposed to do your own rip.
You and I might care about things like that but Nintendon't.
Yes, they do. Why do you think they haven't gone after Dolphin?
The reason they were able to go after the two switch emulators is because the creators were profiting from them.
The profit stuff is genuinely shady but they sure aren't just going for those. They've DMCA'd rom hacks and stuff that just weren't doing anything like that
Technically Yuzu was, allegedly, using something proprietary to run properly. I think the same is true of Ryujinx, although not sure. Now I'm not sure if it's true, given they settled out of court, and honestly we do know the REAL reason is the bottom line but legally they can't use that argument. Ironically I don't think it's even illegal to profit off an emulator, lol.
That said, emulators are legal in the same way a bong is legal while weed might not be. It's technically illegal to use roms/isos you yourself didn't rip, even if you have the cartridge or disk (and thus, license) of that game because it's not a copy of your cartridge or disk, but it'd be pretty annoying to prove you didn't rip it yourself as you'd probably need to go into the code to see if there's a unique identifier. I'm not sure if that's ever been tested in court, though I wouldn't want to try it.
Depending on country. For instance, in Germany it's only allowed if you're not circumventing anti piracy measures.
Im not 100% sure on the technical definition, but in general then backing up DS games would be OK but 3DS not.