And then there were none, as a Nintendo 'threat' drives Ryujinx offline
Farewell to the second Switch emulator, and with it an untold loss of talent from the emulation community.
Friends, I'm bitter about this one.
Earlier this year the calendar just so happened to put some distance between Nintendo's lawsuit against Switch emulator Yuzu and my ROM issue on the fallout, but this time it feels like we're still mid-implosion as I write this. It's just a few days after Ryujinx's contributors announced Nintendo had "offered an agreement" to lead developer gdkchan to "stop working on the project, remove the organization and all related assets he's in control of." There was some speculation, among onlookers, that this was a friendly agreement — the kind that could involve a tidy sum or a job offer or something other than being metaphorically hung upside down out a 12th story window.
An update in the Discord a few days later explaining that the agreement was "clearly a threat" disabused anyone of this notion. I guess you're technically "agreeing" to something when you gurgle for mercy while Jack Reacher has his elephant-sized bicep curled around your neck, but I gotta say: it stinks, folks.
Bad is using the overly restrictive, corporate-friendly nature of the DMCA and woefully unclear framework of copyright law to bury emulator developers under the threat of financial ruin. Worse is dropping all legal pretense and showing up at their homes to say ??? and make them delete themselves.
Bad is money so often insulating the rich and powerful from legal repurcussions or granting them an automatic win over someone without the same limitless resources. Worse is money meaning they don't even have to bother pretending to play by the rules at all.
I'm currently traveling and visiting family I haven't seen in a year, so I'm short on time and short on words for this week's issue. But I'm still going to write a bit about the end of Ryujinx and hold a little wake for the second Switch emulator to die in the year 2024, at the hands of a Nintendo that has clearly shown it has its claws out for the community that it owes so much. Let's not pretend Nintendo is the company it is today without the retro gaming boom of the late '90s and early 2000s driven by emulation. Would it still be worth a bajillion dollars? Maybe, sure.
But it's endlessly ironic that emulation's greatest enemy has also been one of its greatest benefactors, though they'll sure never admit it. But enough about all that. Let's talk about Ryujinx, and where Switch emulation stands now.
The Big One
1. Ryujinx goes offline as Switch emulation faces an uncertain future
The morning of Tuesday, October 1st, the Ryujinx Discord was business as usual. Contributors to the emulator were checking in code changes on the Github. A small update to the audio emulation enabled a Switch game to boot for the first time. Fans and users were chatting in other channels about the recently released The Legend of Zelda: Echoes of Wisdom and other games.
Five hours later, Ryujinx was dead.
As announced in the Discord, Ryujinx's founder and lead developer had been approached by Nintendo and agreed to an "offer" to end the project and remove all of its files from Github. "This was clearly a threat," developer rip in peri peri later clarified. "gdkchan's 'agreement' can't have been in any way beneficial to him."
Over the years there's been much speculation that living outside the US can make emulator developers more impervious to legal threats and less appealing targets for companies like Nintendo. Suing them is potentially both more difficult and less lucrative. I've made the point myself, with gdkchan's residency in Brazil one theoretical reason why the emulator didn't get the same treatment as Yuzu earlier this year. But the fatal flaw in that theory is that it's predicated on a lawsuit actually having merit. Why worry about trifling details like that when intimidation gets the job done?
The driving force of Ryunjinx very reasonably decided to pick "not having their life ruined" over "ignoring a threat from a very scary company." Unfortunately, that decision involved not just ceasing development themselves, but removing the Github project and all its related material, including loads of unfinished work that had been in development for Ryujinx for months or years. rip in peri peri took to Discord to shout out some of those unfinished contributions, including partially working iOS and Android ports and improved netplay features. There's far more than that that seemingly won't see the light of day though right now it remains to be seen whether anyone decides to pick up Ryujinx's work and continue on with it.
The source code is certainly available, but the project's primary contributors have seemingly taken this as a deathblow, with little interest in continuing on without the person whose efforts were "behind the vast majority of the emulator's greatest accomplishments, its entire existence in the first place, and a big part of most of those unreleased features," in the words of rip in peri peri. It's also hard to see much enthusiasm for jumping on a project that essentially has a Black Spot placed upon it: anyone who does is seemingly just asking for the same threat that gdkchan got.
I think Nintendo true goal in targeting Yuzu and Ryujinx this year was to head off emulation of the Switch 2, which is set to be revealed soon and will likely have a lot of hardware similarities to the original console. My bet is either Switch emulator could, like Dolphin, adapt relatively easily to cover the new system early in its life. And Nintendo really doesn't want that.
This situation and the Yuzu lawsuit have both absolutely driven emulator developers out of the scene, and not just the folks working on the Switch emulators themselves. People are rightly nervous; why contribute to an emulator when doing so could put your job at risk? Let alone work on reverse-engineering the Switch 2 when it's out. It's just too risky when what has always felt like the protection — doing a proper, legally unimpeachable clean room job — seemingly no longer applies.
We'll probably see Switch emulation improve someday, but unless someone picks Ryujinx up in the near future and vows to carry it on, legal threats be damned, it may have reached the end of the road for the forseeable future. And not only is that a real shame, but I'm afraid it means we're in for even more incredibly talented folks deciding to do something with their time and energy that feels safer. I can't blame them, but it sure as hell bums me out.
I do hope, though, that someone takes inspiration from rip in peri peri's list of unfinished features and personal sign-off in the Discord as Ryujinx came to an end:
"I feel that [Ryujinx's] desire for perfection over getting there as fast as possible set us apart as an emulator, but unfortunately it means you didn't get to see some of our best work in action. Just keep it in your heart as a vision of what is possible."
Patching In
I didn't have time to go digging through updates and patch notes this week, but as a consolation here's Bernie Sanders whipping a kid's ass at ping pong:
Core Report
And much it grieved my heart to think, what man has made of man –Yeah, so there's now a working — though still early — Philips CD-i MiSTer core. We don't ask questions like "why" around here. We simply stare unblinking at the horror that is existence.
Neo Geo Pocket Color, more better – Jotego's NGPC core just got some compatibility improvements, most importantly affecting Densha de Go! 2 Kōsoku-hen. I will not be at peace until every version of Densha de Go! is emulated.
Translation Station
Illusion of Gaia retranslated – 30 years after Enix's Illussion of Gaia released in the US with a script deemed "often incomprehensible," fans have come together to hack in a retranslation based on this 2020 Let's Play. It's currently just a beta that only covers part of the game, but after folks test it out I imagine we'll see the full thing arrive in time.
64DDezaemon – Here's a cool one: a shoot 'em up game maker tool called Dezaemon 3D that was the first game to support the 64DD, though that disk ended up never being released. Talk about a real curio. Wanna build a shmup?
Adventures of Lolo, er, maker? – Adventures of Lolo, aka Eggerland, is a HAL puzzle series that only saw a few entries translated and released in the West. One of those was not this one, Eggerland: Souzou e no Tabidachi for the Famicom Disk System, which included a level editor. As described by translator BlackPaladin: "The game features 50 puzzles that Lolo must solve… for no obviously apparent reason. However, what sets this game apart is the option to build and create your own puzzles that other players can solve. (One could say this could be nicknamed 'Eggerland Maker'.)"
I'm just going to say it: Personally I'd rather be playing Eggman Game than building Eggerland puzzles, but we all like our eggs a little bit different, and I think that's beautiful.
Good pixels
In honor of Nintendo's latest legal strongarm, let's take a look at how beautiful its latest Zelda, Echoes of Wisdom, looks at resolutions beyond 720p! 😊