Just last week, on Tuesday, February 26th, 2024, news broke out about the Yuzu emulator team being sued by none other than Nintendo themselves, with Nintendo claiming that the emulator apparently allowed users to play certain games early (due to street dates being broken) and also allowing...
Although the fact that these programs were named means that Nintendo’s Eye of Sauron is on them - the extra attention makes me nervous. I definitely would have modded it this weekend if I hadn’t already decided to last weekend.
There is no world where these tools exists and Nintendo does not know them. It’s not some deep darknet secret lore hidden behind seven-VPN. Anything that happens online about emulation, all the company knows it exists and how it works. The threat never goes away.
I know, but there’s a difference between “knows they exist” and “is naming them in legal documentation”.
Good point.
Of these, I would only really be concerned about nxDumpTool, nxDumpFuse, and Lockpick_RCM as possible to come after using the same strategy, though. And even then, Lockpick_RCM was already taken down and mass redistributed.
It’s not illegal to modify the hardware you own, and the rest of those aren’t directly interacting with Nintendo’s DRM-protected software. The only one that they could arguably go after is Atmosphère, but SciresM has held a very strong public pro-homebrew and anti-piracy stance which makes it extremely hard for Nintendo to argue that it’s primary purpose is DRM circumvention.
I plan on making offline archives of Hekate and Atmosphère at some point, in either case.