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Nintendo might not need to individually sue emulators out of existence to drive them deeper underground.

Today, GitLab cut off access to Nintendo Switch emulator Suyu, and disabled the accounts of its developers, after receiving what appears to be a scary email in the form of a DMCA takedown request.

“GitLab received a DMCA takedown notice from a representative of the rightsholder and followed our standard process outlined here,” spokesperson Kristen Butler tells The Verge.

Instead, as you can see in the email above — one of several being shared in Suyu’s Discord and published earlier by Overkill.wtf — whoever sent the takedown request is trying to piggyback on how Yuzu allegedly violated DMCA 1201 by circumventing Nintendo’s technical protection measures.

GitLab didn’t immediately answer a question about whether it’s company policy to disable user’s accounts before giving them the opportunity to delete their projects or file a DMCA counter-notice.

About an hour ago, its leader wrote “I’m most certainly going to host a copy of the code.” By that point, another member had already cloned the repository to git.suyu.dev.

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After a first release, GitLab have already pulled down the Nintendo Switch emulator suyu, due to a DMCA hit as a result of it being forked from yuzu which Nintendo shut down.

Even though the suyu team were doing it as a non-profit, with no way to donate, it seems this didn’t matter because it’s based on a project that was already taken down.

The suyu Discord is also no longer accepting invites, probably due to an influx of people wondering what’s going on.

A few people managed to grab the notice that was sent to the suyu team like Mr. Sujano on X:

Since yuzu was open source though, Nintendo will have plenty of trouble fully erasing it, since even a very quick Google search showed up plenty of it still existing on the web across various places.

I’ve reached out to GitLab for more info…will update if they reply.

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While yuzu had a Patreon campaign, and was pulling in somewhat big numbers, suyu is non-profit and does not accept donations of any kind.

That, and not having a lead developer jokingly post in a Discord about user piracy would help too.

The suyu website is a bit barebones with no documentation, so you’re very much on your own with this one for now.

Qlaunch initial integration(buggy/requires further testing; requires V17.0.0 firmware or newer).

Fix for video playback AMD devices.

Enabled more features on AMD proprietary drivers.

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Four other emulator teams tell me they’re optimistic Nintendo won’t challenge them, that they’re on strong legal footing, and that Yuzu may have been an unusually incriminating case.

It’s partly true in how multiple forks of Yuzu (and 3DS emulator Citra) sprung up shortly after their predecessors died: Suyu, Sudachi, Lemonade, and Lime are a few of the public names.

As Ars Technica reported, a forked version called Suyu will require you to bring the firmware, title.keys, and prod.keys from your Switch before you can decrypt and play Nintendo games.

When I ask about the Dolphin Emulator, which faced a minor challenge from Nintendo last year, I’m told it publicly exposes its tiny nonprofit budget for anyone to scrutinize.

“The Yuzu Discord was really careful about not mentioning piracy — they even scanned the logs from bug reports to check whether the people are using self-made copies of games,” one fork contributor tells me.

“They had a metaphorical gun to their heads,” says another, calling bullshit on Yuzu’s admission that it was “primarily designed to circumvent and play Nintendo Switch games” and thus broke the law.

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After Yuzu emulator owners agreed to pay Nintendo $2.4 million USD and EmuDeck also announcing Yuzu and Citra removal right after the court settlement became available on the internet, Nintendo DS emulator DraStic turned free on Android Play Store (previously $4.99).

The developer Exophase wrote “I want to make it clear that I don’t have any kind of financial incentive”, stating that the Yuzu situation made it more urgent for this software to go free and opensource due to the implications that legal case could cause to DraStic.

Quoting the Developer post on DraStic Discord server:

Releasing the source in short order is something I fully intend on doing.

I was already planning on this a while ago so it’s not simply due to the Nintendo stuff, that just made the whole process more urgent which I guess is a good thing because I’m terrible at doing things.

Note that Drastic also has a “Linux” version for Raspberry Pi devices usually distributed with retro-gaming focused distributions like Batocera so, this source code release might be a starting point for this emulator to be ported to other architectures like x86_64.

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The news of the Yuzu team agreeing to pay Nintendo $2.4 million in damages and immediately shut down all operations sent shock waves through the emulation landscape.

Quite awkward for the likes of EmuDeck, who announced that it would no longer support Yuzu or Citra as of the recently released Version 2.1.5.

A massive help for those don’t want to spend time learning how to make emualtors work.

Due to the deletion of Yuzu and Citra from GitHub however, it’s simply not possible for EmuDeck’s scripts to download the emulators.

If you are upgrading from a previous version however then your installs of Yuzu and Citra won’t be deleted.

Luckily if the memes are to be believed it’s surprisingly easy to mod a Nintendo 3DS.

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It also agrees to not delete any other “evidence” that infringes Nintendo’s IP rights.

You can read through the entirety of the proposed final judgment and permanent injunction at the bottom of this story; they have not yet been approved by a judge.

Yuzu has still not publicly commented on the lawsuit at its website, Patreon, or Discord — though a bot is still replying to some Discord users with the following message: “yuzu is legal, we don’t support illegal activities.

It’s not yet clear if this is the end of Yuzu, since copies of both the emulator and its source code are in the wild.

Some online supporters specifically mentioned backing up the code after Nintendo sued two weeks ago.

But now, Nintendo and Tropic Haze are asking a judge to specifically find that Yuzu circumvents its copyright protections by using those keys, even if it doesn’t come with them.

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DOSBox Staging is a modern continuation of DOSBox with advanced features and modern development practices, giving you the great compatibility of classic games with plenty of extras.

A new release is available with DOSBox Staging 0.81.0 and it brings with it quite a number of changes to improve a whole lot of games.

The first major change is the removal of their original CRT shaders, with them being replaced by a much better set of 24 CRT shaders they say are “tweaked to perfection to emulate the glorious CRT monitors of the past, including authentic recreations of Hercules, CGA, monochrome CGA, composite CGA, EGA, and VGA monitors”.

They say you don’t need to know much, and no configuration is required at all, as DOSBox Staging will automatically pick the best one based on the current DOS video mode and viewport resolution but you can turn them off if you wish.

A fix for the “black vertical bars” video corruption issue.

See more in their release notes for the full explanation of each change.

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This was discovered recently by TheZZAZZGlitch, whose job is to "sadistically glitch and hack the crap out of Pokémon games.

It’s “hardly a ready-to-use solution,” the modder notes, as it requires a lot of tuning specific to different source formats.

After crashing a GBA and recording it over four hours, the modder saw some telltale waveforms in a sound file at about the 1-hour, 50-minute mark.

Later in the sound-out, you can hear the actual instrument sounds and audio samples the game contains, played in sequence.

“2 days of bugfixing later,” the modder had a Python script ready that could read the audio from a clean recording of the GBA’s crash dump.

That’s about the halfway point of the video; you should watch the rest to learn how it works on physical hardware, how it works with a different game (an ARM code mystery in a replica cartridge), and how to get the best recordings, including the use of a “cursed adapter” that mixes down to one channel the ugly way.

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For decades now, PC players who wanted to check out Rare’s seminal 2000 shooter masterpiece Perfect Dark were stuck with the compromises inherent in emulating an aging title designed for very different hardware.

Now, over 23 years after its release, Perfect Dark has gotten the full PC port it so richly deserves, complete with graphics and control updates that make the experience much more enjoyable for a modern audience.

The “work-in-progress” port from GitHub user fgsfdsfgs is described as “mostly functional,” with “minor graphics- and gameplay-related issues, and possibly occasional crashes.”

But those are a small price to pay for a version of the game that comes complete with full mouse-and-keyboard controls for the first time, alongside a 60 fps frame rate, support for modern widescreen monitor resolutions, and even the ability to load custom levels.

Elsewhere in the world of N64 decompilation, a project seeking to recreate the code of Rare’s Banjo-Kazooie has been sitting a few percentage points from completion for months with no apparent progress.

Parallel efforts to decompile Mario Kart 64 and Majora’s Mask have been making steadier progress in recent weeks, though both are still a while away from completion.

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