Nintendo doesn't care. There's been proprietary Nintendo SDK code in libogc (open source library for making GameCube homebrew) for years. And more recently the various decompilation process have made recreations of linked code from the SDK that compile match byte for byte. In practice the legal risk of being sued into oblivion for this is not there. If anything there would be a DMCA takedown / cease and desist.
Right, but they are one of the biggest DMCA abusers. They killed many fan projects. They killed game renting in Japan as a concept. They killed Yuzu (a Switch emulator). And they could change their mind at any time.
> For the record Yuzu included code for circumventing Nintendo's DRM they had on game carts. It violated the DMCA.
It doesn't, this is what Nintendo claimed but it's false. The community learned their lessons from the Wii emulation era and you are supposed to bring your own keys, nothing is included in the emulator.
And yes, they also wrote this lie on their DMCA takedown against Suyu (which also doesn't have any keys), so they officially lied on a DMCA takedown.
There's no "circumvention mesure" in there, the emulator can only read unencrypted games by default. You won't find anything in the source code, if the game is encrypted, it cannot read it.
I disagree, this doesn't break anything, even the comments tell you so. This code does nothing by default.
Also I may mention that the support of external keys is there for you to get games for your own switch, pirates can just share decrypted games anyways.
Do you not see the references to decryption and decryption keys? This code is explicitly written to break the DRM of switch carts. If you mean by default you mean they don't provide a key, that doesn't matter in regards to it being considered corcumvention.
No that matters. As is, the emulator cannot be used to circumvent nor break any protection. Feel free to try it yourself, boot up the emulator, give it an encrypted game and see what it does.
Nintendo didn't want to get in court and also had to basically lie in a DMCA, I think that tells it all on their legal standpoint, they were afraid of creating a precedent.
Don't worry that if they were so sure to win, they would be in court already like they did with the R4 cartridge.
There's also been Wii games rereleased on PC with all debug symbols that cover the Wii parts that were still compiled in. You'd get mostly type names, enums, object layouts and function signatures that way.
It's safest to err on the side of plausible deniability, any proximity to OEM software increases liability if things go wrong.