#Emulation is preservation

[magichats]

I go onto twitter for one whole minute

and then immediately get blasted with the Nintendo Yuzu lawsuit stuff.

While I am shouting into the void, Remember,

Nintendo isn't your friend

[dragonflute]

for anyone who cares about emulation, unfortunately today we lost both yuzu (switch) and citra (3ds) emulators due to the lawsuit nintendo filed against the management that handled both emulators. this is a major loss for emulation as a whole. if you support emulation i recc downloading emulators that you may want to have in the future in the case that they get taken down in similar lawsuits

[spark-circuit]

me hearing my friends lament that they can't play older games on newer consoles because they're not remade or rereleased yet and may never be brought back:

[itsjustmyunpopularopinion]

[bluegateway]

Baroque 1998

[splinkoplinko]

Things I don't like about Nintendo:

Making games impossible to play again (Vimm's Lair getting raided by a bunch of companies including Nintendo, online stores getting shut down by Nintendo, more than one subscription required for some NSO Virtual Consoles like Genesis, N64, and GBA, lack of regional translations and ports, etc.)

Taking down fan creations (fan games, mods, music remixes, gameplay videos, etc.)

Putting limits on the monetization of tournaments featuring their games (https://en-americas-support.nintendo.com/app/answers/detail/a_id/63433/~/community-tournament-guidelines)

Shutting down online services for consoles that are still very popular and used frequently (3DS getting shut down recently.)

The Switch and a few of the more recent games on it being not that great (Pokemon especially, I'm pretty sure the Wii ran better and it's almost 17 years old.)

Now I know that Nintendo isn't the only one that does this. Microsoft, Sega, and Sony aren't that great with their older games (though some of those are better than others), but Nintendo is much worse and much more strict. Sega doesn't even make consoles anymore, and modding isn't as popular on PlayStation and Xbox platforms due to it being tricky, but their games that are on PC have had plenty of mods, and the companies have no issue with them. I've heard the Xbox Series X/S isn't too good, same with the PS5, though I haven't noticed whenever I used my friend's consoles, and I have an Xbox 1 and PS4. The consoles are also definitely better than their previous gens, which is hard to say with the Switch (hot take, I prefer the Wii U 💀).

[spinifera]

i have a couple aus, but at the moment i don't feel like they're complete enough to be entered into any competitions at the moment! preservation through emulation only has one chapter right now, and i am not spoiling it.

that being said...

i have some recommendations for aus you should check out that are in the @tmntaucompetition !!

Onryō Leo by @aquariumgirls

Broken Trifecta and SheLL (TMNT: Shen and the League of Lesbians) by @genderfluid-envy

TMNT: Chicago Style by @its-captain-sir

Honor Bound by @terrazooid

[dr-yung]

A mini refrence to 3DS cfw and preservation in March 2024, because the misinfo on twitter is insane. It's not dying, trust.

3DS Custom Firmware

The best guide is 3ds.hacks.guide. Follow it EXACTLY. They have mirrors to FBI and such. Depending on your firmware version, you can hack without a computer. I myself hacked my 2DS, using my phone and a microsd/sd adaptor, as for my firmware version, no computer program was required. Some firmware versions may still require a windows computer.

themeplaza.art is where most people get custom themes, each theme on themeplaza is manually reviewed and ensured to be non-malicious.

Preservation

Citra was removed officially, but there are mirrors. Such as this mirror for the mobile version, and this mirror for the windows version.

Keep in mind; emulation isn't illegal, pirating ROMs is. None of what I am putting here is illegal, Citra was only targetted for Yuzu, and using a paywall for extra updates.

Nintendo Network for 3DS shuts down soon, so I recommend setting up a Pretendo account. I did as well. All needed instructions to set that up is on the site. Pretendo also has a guide on how to help them back up the servers to high priority games like the Pokémon 3DS games, or Animal Crossing HHD. Pretendo is open source.

[quietwingsinthesky]

the entire nes library is 287mb. think about that. that’s not even a single gigabyte. in a just world, you could have this on your phone for free, it would just be on there.

[squwooshk]

I wrote this essay for another platform, but I want to share it here.

Capitalism is killing art, in every part of the process. From the creation, the consumption and finally the preservation. In this serious of essays, we'll be looking at the preservation in particular. Looking at the ending of the process, and working backwards, will help give us a stronger understanding of the concepts and powers at play in the production, for the preservation and consumption directly effect the creation. This first part of the series will look into the effects of capitalism, and private property, more specifically intellectual property, on the preservation of art and the methods of art preservation that are at odds with capitalism.

Emulation & Video-game Piracy

An important part of the process of preserving art is making sure that the art work can be experienced by as many people, for as long as possible. When it comes to video-games in particular, there's plenty of fans who are dedicated enough to the art for to make sure retro games are always playable for a more general audience, and with as much accuracy to the original experience as possible. These dedicated fans create emulators, software programs that are able to replicate the functions of older video-game consoles, in order to allow older games to be easily playable to modern gamers.

Emulators themselves, are fully allowed under the law[1], however we do encounter a problem. The data that emulators are designed to read, is often illegal to distribute on the internet. The spread of this software, the actual data of a particular video game, is considered digital piracy, a theft of intellectual property[2]. This is an argument often used by corporations like Nintendo to shutdown websites that host these data files[3]. However, these same corporations often give no good alternatives to emulation, and in extention this piracy.

Many of these companies do not re-release these games, at best they may remake them or occasionally offer a limited selection on their own emulators, which can often have errors or be tied to a subscription service, as is the case with Nintendo.[4],

The preservation of these games often come down to an effort from the fans, an effort that is in direct conflict with the intellectual property owners. Without emulation, many more obscure games, and a good number of games with complex licensing agreements, would be permanently lost to time.

I would like to take the time to look at two examples in particular, Metal Gear Solid (Game Boy Color, also known as Metal Gear Solid Ghost Babel in Japan) and Mother 3. These examples are far from being the only examples worth talking about, but I think they both greatly exemplify the ideas I wish to discuss.

Metal Gear Solid (Gameboy Color) which I will refer to as Ghost Babel for the rest of this essay, for simplicity and to avoid confusion with Metal Gear Solid (PlayStation) which is a completely different game, is a game released in 2000 by Konami for the Nintendo Gameboy Color. The game was a spin-off of the Metal Gear Solid series. The game has never been re-release.

This is primarily due to the lower sales of the release brought in compared to any mainline Metal Gear Solid game (all of which have been re-release and remastered many times) and the little market demand, especially in the AAA gaming world that Konami is a part of, for 2D stealth action games. There is little profit to be found in porting over Ghost Babel to more modern systems, so it just isn't done. Art that isn't profitable is cast aside by the capitalist.

The only way to play this game, and comply with the laws of a capitalist society, is to own a Gameboy Color, Gameboy Advance or a DS (but not a DSI or 3DS) and an original physical copy of the game. All these items are no longer being produced, they are all in the second hand market, and as the supply will never rise, the prices can tend to get high pretty quickly.

Not only is pricing an issue, but these objects will not last forever. The cartridges used to store the data of Gameboy Color games have batteries that will one day die, preventing saved data from being written on them[5], and the electronic parts in these systems, and in the cartridges, will one day fail as any other machine will without constant maintenance. Preservation through the ownership of the original hardware is limited in scope, and is doomed for failure.

The only method of preservation that solves all these problems, the problem of limited supply, high prices and degradation of hardware, is digital emulation and piracy. This is however, in direct conflict with the intellectual property of the capitalist. The capitalist wishes to actively suppress these acts of preservation in the name of preserving their intellectual property[6]

Mother 3 is a video game created by Nintendo that has never been released outside of Japan. The reason for this is once again a profit one, Mother 2 (know simply as Earthbound outside of Japan) did not sell well at all when it first came out and Mother 1 was never released outside of Japan untill way later, where it got a digital release, do to the growth in a western Mother Fandom. The Mother series has a very particular style and humor, that doesn't always sell as well with western audiences, making localization a process that yealds little profit, thus the localization is never made.

For anyone who lives outside of Japan, the only way to play this game is illegally. You must rely on fan translation and emulation. No one other than Japanese people, or people who know Japanese, own a Japanese Game Boy Advanced, and have a copy of the game, can play it without going in direct violation of the interests of the capitalist and violating their intellectual property rights.

Music preservation and Intellectual Property

Video-games are far from the only art from that's preservation is at threat from capitalism. Music is another art form that has been plagued by intellectual property. From songs that quote passages of other songs, to song that uses samples with licensing issues, so much art has been altered, limited or destroyed by capitalism. I'll be looking at three different examples.

The Gun Song by Car Seat Headrest has two versions, the original version of the song, and the No Trigger Version. The differences between these two versions is pretty simple, the no trigger version is what you'll find on streaming services, and the original thay is only available on the Bandcamp version of the album. The reason for this is a lyric change due to copyright issues.

The original version of the song end with the lyrics "Down by the river, I shot my baby" sung with the same melody as the song Down by the River by Neil Young. Do to the shared melody and lyrics, this caused copyright issues. All releases of the song, other than the original independent release, have been altered to cut this part out. This song, as it was intended to be heard, has become difficult to access for most people.

The album Everything is a Lot by Will Wood and the Tapeworms was drastically altered when it was remastered, because all the samples used in the original ran into licensing issues. This lead to the more accessible version of the album (the only version getting physically releases) missing important parts of songs, in particular, the vocal send off on the track "Thermodynamic Lawyer" which originally opened with a sample from the movie Liar Liar, but now just opens immediately into the song, removing a lot of the punch of the original

The Faces mixtape by Mac Miller has faced a similar treatment to that of the Will Wood album, but on a more severe scale. The version of the album available on streaming has been gutted of many of it's samples (at least 9).

Intellectual Property & Profit Motive

Now, it's time to talk about how all these issues are an intrinsic part of capitalism. Capitalism as a system prioritizes one thing above all else, capital. Capital is itself a form of private property, and intellectual property is an idea or artistic expression turned into private property. The property holders will defend their right to profit off this property using the violence of the state, using the power of law to punish those who violate their property.

This become a problem for art when the profit motive gets involved. Profit is the driving factor behind all of these anti-preservation decisions we have discussed here today. With video-games, companies want to continue to indefinitely make a profit off of their old creations, but fail to offer an adequate way too, and often prioritizes only the cash cows. When the public tries to take this into their own hands, out of the love of art, they get punished. Their preservation is a threat, because they allow all games to be preserved and experienced freely, even the cash cows that corporations don't wish to abandon.

As for music, record labels (and in some of these cases film studios who own sound bites) want to profit off of royalties. When a song uses a sample, a good bit of the profit made on that song goes to the owners of royalty licenses, despite the fact that their intellectual property often makes up only a fraction of a truly transformational work. When they can't make their royalties, they leave the work to die.

Conclusion

Capitalism, primarily through the medium of intellectual property, a form of private property, actively disrupts the preservation of art. It seeks to destroy methods of preserving art that would eat into the profits of capitalist, without offering a viable alternative except when it seems financially beneficial to the capitalist.

Bibliography

1.https://scholarlycommons.law.northwestern.edu/njtip/vol2/iss2/3/

2.https://www.howtogeek.com/262758/is-downloading-retro-video-game-roms-ever-legal/

3.https://kotaku.com/nintendo-orders-rom-site-to-destroy-all-its-games-or-1847487357

4.https://www.tomsguide.com/opinion/nintendo-switch-online-is-terrible-and-its-only-getting-worse

5.https://forums.atariage.com/topic/193374-battery-life-of-old-game-cartridges/

6.(to actually gain access to this you'll probably have to prepend it with 12ft.io/) https://www.scribd.com/document/709016504/Nintendo-of-America-Inc-v-Tropic-Haze-LLC-1-24-Cv-00082-No-1-D-R-I-Feb-26-2024

[robotmieser]

In light of recent events I made this

[megamanofnumbers]

Posting this in full because I feel it deserves to be more than just a reblog

I am extremely disappointed that Resetera (normally a progressive site with a brain) is suffering under the cognitive strain that some morally right actions can also be legally wrong.

Going to bat to defend a corporation who doesn’t need the money just because they’re attacking a legally dubious operation that is bettering the average consumer.

Meanwhile those defending emulation are attacked for being involved with said illegal thing. Because it preserves and helps.

The truth is: “video game preservation is one and the same as piracy”.

The game has been rigged from the start. Preservation means big companies can’t profit from forcing you to buy new versions of their old games. Of course they would make it illegal, it’s within their financial interest to do so.

“But what about indies and small companies?” In that case then and only then is it not ok to pirate. This isn’t a one shoe fits all situation!

As long as they’re not committing a hate crime, it is always morally correct to stand up for the little guy.

[macmanx]

So, you just downloaded Delta, the first fully featured game emulator in the Apple App Store, now what?

🤷‍♂️ IDK, good luck! Just, whatever you do, don’t click this link:

[frostfangalphabitch]

Yo, have you played older armored core games, which ones would you recommend, and how would you recommend one goes about playing those games?

I have played the older games! I adore this series, and it's been a favorite of mine since I was a kid. I started with Generation 3, so that's going to be my recommended starting point, but there are a few places you could start.

Here's the TL;DR: The games from Gens 1, 2, and 3 are good, Nexus and Last Raven are excellent. All of those use a very different energy system from AC6 which might take some getting used to. Gen 4 is also fantastic and has extremely fast-paced combat. Gen 5 isn't terrible but is not looked upon fondly, and these entries are kind of only half a game without the online features. Also, pirating is illegal! But if you already own the discs, you can get the images off Vimm's Lair.

As a rule, I'd suggest going from older to newer. The original game used L1 and R1 for looking up and down and didn't start using the second stick for look controls until Nexus, which is in the middle of Gen 3. With that in mind though, here's my general guide to the games.

Generation 1 (AC1, Project Phantasma, Master of Arena) is a decent starting point. The games are unforgiving but still play pretty solidly even now. If you're willing to go back to PS1 games and don't mind failing and starting over until you finally figure out how to pilot your tank-controls mech, Armored Core 1 is a great place to start. Generation 2 (AC2, 2: Another Age) is also pretty good and is where the games transitioned to PS2. The games are a little more forgiving than Gen 1. Mostly.

Generation 3 expands on the formula from the previous games with plenty of quality of life improvements and more parts. AC3 is the first entry in this generation, and Silent Line is basically an expansion for it. If you liked 3, you'll like Silent Line.

The games past Silent Line are considered Generation 3.5, and this is where the games really start to shine in my opinion. Nexus is the first game where they make use of the second stick for look controls, and they started experimenting with new mechanics as well.

Last Raven is my favorite game from gens 1-3 and probably my 2nd favorite overall after 6. This is the first game in the series that has branching paths and multiple endings. The story is really engaging and you need to get all 7 endings to really get the whole picture of what's going on. Now that I think about it, this is kind of a prototypical version of modern FromSoftware storytelling. The only problem with this game is that it is extremely difficult compared to previous games, even AC1, and they were fully expecting you to make use of the feature that lets you transfer your schematics and parts from Nexus or Nine Breaker. If you're looking for a challenge, this game is really great! It's tough but rewarding and a ton of fun. Under no circumstances should it be your first entry into the series, though.

Formula Front and Nine Breaker can be skipped. Nine Breaker felt like an inferior Master of Arena, and Formula Front is just... weird.

AC4 and 4 Answer are the first games on PS3/X360, and they shake things up a lot. Brand new parts, new guns, new mechanics. They're the first games where you can boost forever, and the gameplay is extremely fast, easily the fastest in the series. If you're good enough, you can move so fast your camera literally can't keep up. 4A is my third favorite game in the series, but the whole generation is worth playing.

Gen 5 (AC5 and Verdict Day) are... I mean they're fine. They have good mech designs, the core gameplay is still there, and they slowed the gameplay way down after Gen 4, but they also focused really hard on multiplayer, which is now dead unless you're lucky. A lot of the gameplay revolves around online missions, so they're kind of just half a game now.

As for how to play the games... Unfortunately, they weren't super popular in the West, so copies that exist go for more than new AAA games these days on eBay, especially with AC6 out. Now, despite how that sounds, I'm not gonna say you should emulate without a legit copy of your own, since that'd be illegal. You should also stay away from a place called Vimm's Lair. You can download the discs there, but only if you own the discs themselves! That said, if you do happen to have legit copies and want to emulate them on your PC, Duckstation, PCSX2, and RPCS3 will be able to run them. But ignore that sentence if you don't own the games legally!

Generation 5 won't emulate properly no matter what, though, so you really will have to buy a copy to play on your PS3 for those.

...Damn, I did not mean to write a post this long. Then again, AC is one of my special interests.

[cringywhitedragon]

”Let the rage consume you”

So the whole Yuzu situation just had to hit Citra. Nintendo you are really walking on thin ice with this shit rn

But a message to the people, just because of this bullshit doesn’t mean we have to comply. Citra and Yuzu aren’t truly dead even if the devs cut off the official download.

Save your source code, save your versions of both. Keep circulating the emulators. Do not comply and let them get lost in the fire.

Justice for Citra 🍊🍋

Justice for Yuzu

[sm64mario]

Hello Mario! how do you feel about:

Emulations?

My'a lawyers have told me not to comment! Yahoo!