GameCube and Wii Dolphin Emulator set to Launch on Steam Later This Year

erek

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Will this work out or get busted / nailed by Nintendo?

"What is Dolphin?
Dolphin is a GameCube and Wii emulator with high compatibility across the majority of titles for both platforms. It was first developed as closed source in 2003, and as open source since 2008.

What is Dolphin's License?
When Dolphin went open-source in 2008, it was released under the GPLv2 license. However it has since been re-licensed to GPLv2+. According to the license, you may use Dolphin and its source code for any purpose, but distributing Dolphin requires that the source code be released and attribution given.

Who Made Dolphin?
Over 200 people have worked hard over the years to create Dolphin. The list of contributors can be found on GitHub.

Dolphin is not affiliated with Nintendo in any way."

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Source: https://www.techpowerup.com/306563/...ulator-set-to-launch-on-steam-later-this-year
 
This will get shit down so hard so fast, Nintendo won’t stand for it and Steam won’t fight Nintendo on it.

Call Nintendo all the names you want but they have the legal team to back them up and any possible benefits to Valve from offering these up won’t come close to the hurt Nintendo can bring.
 
This will get shit down so hard so fast, Nintendo won’t stand for it and Steam won’t fight Nintendo on it.

Call Nintendo all the names you want but they have the legal team to back them up and any possible benefits to Valve from offering these up won’t come close to the hurt Nintendo can bring.
Not a chance. Emulation is completely legal and judging by how easily their content is pirated, Nintendo's legal team are clowns.
 
Not a chance. Emulation is completely legal and judging by how easily their content is pirated, Nintendo's legal team are clowns.
Nintendo won against Apple on this already and nobody questions Apples legal prowess. Valve doesn’t have the stones to take on this fight. Nintendo will send 2 emails and this will go away, the same way that Valve pulled Tax Haven 3000 after a single sternly worded letter from Intuit.
 
Batocera is great too, its what I use. I also installed on my friends Steam Deck.
ODroid has a few decent handheld units I have it installed on a Go Ultra and it does a good job on what I use it for. The Steam Deck it’s it’s logical upgrade but the amount I would actually use it…
 
This will get shit down so hard so fast, Nintendo won’t stand for it and Steam won’t fight Nintendo on it.

Call Nintendo all the names you want but they have the legal team to back them up and any possible benefits to Valve from offering these up won’t come close to the hurt Nintendo can bring.
If it is such a dead deal why is Steam even trying this?
 
Nintendo won against Apple on this already and nobody questions Apples legal prowess. Valve doesn’t have the stones to take on this fight. Nintendo will send 2 emails and this will go away, the same way that Valve pulled Tax Haven 3000 after a single sternly worded letter from Intuit.
Nintendo and Sony both sued to crap out of emulators and lost. VGS a Playstation emulator for Mac won against Sony.


Dophin-emu is in the Google Play store and has been there for ages.
Pretty sure retro-arch is on Steam as well.
On Linux distros you can get most emulators straight from the repository. Your a few clicks away from getting an emulator working.
 
Nintendo won against Apple on this already and nobody questions Apples legal prowess. Valve doesn’t have the stones to take on this fight. Nintendo will send 2 emails and this will go away, the same way that Valve pulled Tax Haven 3000 after a single sternly worded letter from Intuit.
I still remember this -



Would never happen these days.
 
Easy Steam deck install, probably. Though you can already do that with EmuDeck.
I forgot it wasn't a Windows based handheld. I'm still deciding if I want to get one or not.
If it is such a dead deal why is Steam even trying this?
My guess because their not suppling ROMs or telling people where to get them.
Dophin-emu is in the Google Play store and has been there for ages.
Pretty sure retro-arch is on Steam as well.
I stuck on an older version of Dolphin just so I can finish playing Phantasy Star Online.
 
Nintendo won against Apple on this already and nobody questions Apples legal prowess. Valve doesn’t have the stones to take on this fight. Nintendo will send 2 emails and this will go away, the same way that Valve pulled Tax Haven 3000 after a single sternly worded letter from Intuit.
Nintendo won what against Apple? I'm not aware of any lawsuit between the two companies.

And you can still put Dolphin on your iOS phone.
https://dolphinios.oatmealdome.me/

Nintendo has no legal basis for preventing an emulator from being published on Steam. You can already download all the Nintendo libretro cores for the Steam version of RetroArch.
the same way that Valve pulled Tax Haven 3000 after a single sternly worded letter from Intuit.
This was said in jest by the developer of Tax Heaven 3000. There was never any reason publicly disclosed by Valve for preventing the game from being published on Steam. If Intuit was preventing the game from going on Steam then I'd imagine they would be trying to legally prevent its sale from everywhere. You can still buy it on itch.io and directly from the developer. Unless it's proven that the game is using proprietary code from Intuit then they would also have no legal basis to stand on. If I were to hazard a guess is that Steam is doing this out of caution since the game is asking you for your personal information. It needs to if it's going to prepare your taxes.

https://steamdb.info/app/2363850/history/?changeid=U:37016078
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Wait, Retroarch is on steam? I didn't even know Steam provided emulators. Anywho, I am certain Nintendo will try to cease and desist this. They have no legal ground though, emulators themselves are legal after all, so lets see if Valve has cojones to tell Nintendo to go pound sand and cry a river.
 
Wait, Retroarch is on steam? I didn't even know Steam provided emulators. Anywho, I am certain Nintendo will try to cease and desist this. They have no legal ground though, emulators themselves are legal after all, so lets see if Valve has cojones to tell Nintendo to go pound sand and cry a river.
 
https://www.pcgamer.com/nintendo-se...-block-steam-release-of-wii-emulator-dolphin/

"It is with much disappointment that we have to announce that the Dolphin on Steam release has been indefinitely postponed," the Dolphin development team stated on its blog Friday. "We were notified by Valve that Nintendo has issued a DMCA against Dolphin's Steam page, and have removed Dolphin from Steam until the matter is settled. We are currently investigating our options and will have a more in-depth response in the near future."

The DCMA letter sent to Valve cites the anti-circumvention language of the DMCA and specifically claims that "the Dolphin emulator operates by incorporating these cryptographic keys without Nintendo’s authorization and decrypting the ROMs at or immediately before runtime. Thus, use of the Dolphin emulator unlawfully 'circumvent a technological measure that effectively controls access to a work protected under' the Copyright Act."
 
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Seems the Dolphin emulator left some key behind that is used to decrypt Wii games. They will have to remove it and find a work around to get it uploaded on Steam.

 
Seems the Dolphin emulator left some key behind that is used to decrypt Wii games. They will have to remove it and find a work around to get it uploaded on Steam.


What’s more now is since they used that Key it’s a full proper violation, fingers crossed Nintendo is content just keeping it off Steam and doesn’t go after the project as a whole next.
 
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Seems the Dolphin emulator left some key behind that is used to decrypt Wii games. They will have to remove it and find a work around to get it uploaded on Steam.


What’s more now is since they used that Key it’s a full proper violation, fingers crossed Nintendo is content just keeping it off Steam and doesn’t go after the project as a whole next.
How’d that Key 🔑 🔐 get in there anyhow? How’d they uncover/find it anyway 🤔 🧐 🤨
 
It's not like we didn't see this one coming. Nintendo is super protective of their IP.
 
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sad, sounds illegal
I'm not sure about "illegal" but it certainly falls into the wheelhouse of the DMCA and unlike many claims made under its name this one falls into the spirit of the DMCA not just the wording of it.
 
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Imagine being against game preservation. Nintendo killed the Wii. They don't make any money whatsoever on it or its library anymore. They should have made the keys freely available themselves when they shuttered the Wii Shop.
 
What happened to Dolphin on Steam? The developers lawyer up to release a statement on what happened, legalities, and the future of the emulator.
It's amusing how their article seems contradictory:

> quotes Nintendo's Letter to Valve re Copyright Act

This sounds extremely bad at a glance (and we certainly had a moment of panic after first reading it), but now that we have done our homework and talked to a lawyer, we are no longer concerned.

So they initially panicked then researched and consulted a lawyer.

We're disappointed that so many people on YouTube and social media didn't even consider that maybe the team had done their research and risk analysis before including the keys, and just assumed that now that it was "pointed out to us" we would remove them.

But further down they blame the internet for presuming they hadn't done their research before... despite admitting just paragraphs before they indeed hadn't :p Guess they weren't fond of the loss of face and they feel this is their triumphant rebuttal.

I'm glad for them either way.
 
https://www.gamingonlinux.com/2023/07/dolphin-emulator-devs-give-up-on-steam-release/

It's not coming to Steam after all.

So, after a long stay of silence, we have a difficult announcement to make. We are abandoning our efforts to release Dolphin on Steam. Valve ultimately runs the store and can set any condition they wish for software to appear on it. But given Nintendo's long-held stance on emulation, we find Valve's requirement for us to get approval from Nintendo for a Steam release to be impossible. Unfortunately, that's that. But there are some more serious matters to discuss, some that are much bigger than Dolphin's Steam Release.

And to all the armchair lawyers out there, the letter to Valve did not make any claims that we were violating a US copyright by including the Wii Common Key, as a short string of entirely random letters and numbers generated by a machine is not copyrightable under current US copyright law. If that ever changes, the world will be far too busy to think about emulation.
 
Imagine being against game preservation. Nintendo killed the Wii. They don't make any money whatsoever on it or its library anymore. They should have made the keys freely available themselves when they shuttered the Wii Shop.
Eh, it's their ip to capitalize (or not) on in the future still. Allowing unfettered piracy of their wii games would gut any future remasters or new releases.
 
Eh, it's their ip to capitalize (or not) on in the future still. Allowing unfettered piracy of their wii games would gut any future remasters or new releases.

Eh that’s highly doubtful. There’s really no strong evidence showing that piracy hurts game sales, especially when we’re talking about big games. Emulating Wii games isn’t the most demanding thing in the world but it still requires a level of work that most people won’t bother with.
 
Eh that’s highly doubtful. There’s really no strong evidence showing that piracy hurts game sales, especially when we’re talking about big games. Emulating Wii games isn’t the most demanding thing in the world but it still requires a level of work that most people won’t bother with.
Tears of the Kingdom was playable on PC before the game was officially released and so far the game has sold over 10 million copies and could be the best selling game of the year. You can't get a better worst case scenario against piracy than this.

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