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A new NES emulator was briefly available on the Apple App Store (www.theverge.com)

submitted 5 months ago* (last edited 5 months ago) by nave@lemmy.ca to c/technology@lemmy.world

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Now, clicking on a link to Bimmy shows “This app is currently not available in your country or region.” This time, it wasn’t Apple that removed it but the developer. Over on MacRumors’ forums, the developer said it pulled the app “out of fear.” “No one pressured me to, but I got more nervous about it as the day went on,” it wrote.

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[-] QuadratureSurfer@lemmy.world 17 points 5 months ago

I mean, the most that Nintendo would do is send a cease and desist...

I doubt they would go straight to filing court documents. The cease and desist is meant to save time and costs for them and even then they still haven't officially filed anything in court.

But I understand not even wanting to get on the radar of a big corporation like that.

[-] youngGoku@lemmy.world 8 points 5 months ago

IIRC Nintendo is notorious for pressing charges against copyright infringements.

[-] cbarrick@lemmy.world 22 points 5 months ago* (last edited 5 months ago)

Right. But there is no copyright infringement in an NES emulator, as long as no copyrighted games are distributed.

Emulation itself is not copyright infringement.

~~The recent issue with the Switch emulator was that they were distributing encryption keys along with the emulator. That wasn't a copyright issue (encryption keys are not expression, therefore not copyrightable) but a CFAA issue.~~ See other comments.

None of that applies to the NES.

[-] Bandicoot_Academic@lemmy.one 4 points 5 months ago

Yuzu didn't distribute keys. You had to obtain them yourself. The problems were that:

They distributed software that would decrypt the games once provided with the keys (which is apparently illegal).
They used leaked versions of TOTK to develop the emulator.
They openly talked about piracy in their discord.

Note that I don't actually know for sure. This is just what I saw online.

[-] catloaf@lemm.ee 3 points 5 months ago

Using leaked source code or binary firmware blobs are other common reasons emulators can violate copyright. I don't know if this emulator did any of those.

[-] Nawor3565@lemmy.blahaj.zone 15 points 5 months ago

I highly doubt it. The NES has been completely reverse engineered for decades, there really isn't any reason to use proprietary code for an emulator for it.

[-] kadu@lemmy.world 4 points 5 months ago

The NES is the most basic possible architecture you could imagine. There's no source code to be leaked here, there's nothing you would even call a BIOS.

[-] hahattpro@lemmy.world 3 points 5 months ago

If those emulator is open source, can user build and install themselves ? or they have to wait for some dev to put it in the store (and pay Apple $99 yearly) and charge fee and/or ads.

[-] nave@lemmy.ca 1 points 5 months ago

You can build it yourself but that requires a Mac and you have to resign it every seven days which is a pain.

[-] autotldr@lemmings.world 3 points 5 months ago

This is the best summary I could come up with:

MacRumors reported that the app was described as being for homebrew games but also supported ROMs provided by players.

Unfortunately, when we attempted to download Bimmy, we received an error message saying it’s no longer available.

Now, clicking on a link to Bimmy shows “This app is currently not available in your country or region.” This time, it wasn’t Apple that removed it but the developer.

But their fear is also understandable, given the cooling effect of Nintendo’s recent crackdown on emulators.

The developers behind the Yuzu app, for example, folded after Nintendo sued them, and the Dolphin Emulator team gave up on getting its emulator back on Steam after Valve received a vague legal threat from the company.

Then GitLab took down the Suyu fork of Yuzu after an email from Nintendo.

The original article contains 254 words, the summary contains 133 words. Saved 48%. I'm a bot and I'm open source!

this post was submitted on 16 Apr 2024

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