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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 [email protected] to c/[email protected]

14 comments fedilink hide all child comments

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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[–] [email protected] 18 points 5 months ago (1 children)

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.

[–] [email protected] 8 points 5 months ago (1 children)

IIRC Nintendo is notorious for pressing charges against copyright infringements.

[–] [email protected] 22 points 5 months ago* (last edited 5 months ago) (2 children)

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.

[–] [email protected] 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.

[–] [email protected] 3 points 5 months ago (2 children)

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.

[–] [email protected] 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.

[–] [email protected] 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.