miskAnalogue is making a 4K Nintendo 64
AlmightySnoo đąđźđ±đșđŠI donât see how this is going to end well with Nintendoâs unlimited litigation money. Even if Analogue is saying theyâre making a new FPGA to run the games ânativelyâ, that still has the same problem as emulators: Nintendo still doesnât want you to run your games on anything other than their own consoles, otherwise people will just keep buying old games and play them on new hardware will all the tweaks that we can do today: antialiasing, upscaling, custom shaders, bluetooth controllers etcâŠ
Analogue released multiple FPGA based machines dedicated to running Nintendo games already.
olmecAnalogue is doing everything safe though. The products are marketed and intended for you to play your physical cartridges on new hardware. Nintendo isnât even going after emulators, which despite the hoops we try to jump through, are really primarily used for piracy. That is because the emulation developers are avoiding any copywritten work. Even then, the only ROM sites that Nintendo has really gone after are the ones selling the games.
Short of a new law or precedent being set, Analogue is in the clear here.
FlakyThe closest theyâve been in recent times is when Dolphin were announcing their step onto the Steam storefront, to which Valve asked Nintendo about it and all that happened. Dolphin is still free to do whatever, just not on Valveâs land.
AFAICT Analogue has been in the clear for their past FPGA consoles that specifically targeted Nintendoâs, canât see it having isuses here.
InEnduringGrowStrongSold on the store front is a no no, but emulators run great in Valve land (Steam Deck).
I just booted Tears of The Kingdom on my Steam Deck the other day and thatâs probably a much juicier target for a lawsuit / cease and desist.
Theyâre not even losing money though, I bought it on Switch.
But thereâs such poor drawing distance and so much stuttering that I kinda gave up on it.
I havenât played it much on the deck yet because I didnât really feel like starting over, so I donât know how glitchy it is or not.
Own a Steam Deck myself, can vouch for that. Havenât messed with yuzu, though Dolphin and Yuzu are on Flathub anyway so it wasnât like Steam Deck users are missing out from it not being on Steam.
Surely they have a copyright claim on the instruction set, no? Iâm not sure if they will go after it, but surely itâs not as safe as youâre claiming.
What do you mean by instruction set? As far as I remember, Analogue physically looks at the chips under microscopes and recreates that physical design via FPGA (This is because the patents have expired, which is different from copywrite). You could be talking about bios (which I know of the Pocket, for example, they used their own, which included skipping the âGameboyâ animation when you first power on.), Analogue can just write their own BIOS that gets around it. (BIOS would be software, and thus classified under copywrite, instead of patent.)
Iâm being loose with terminology, I apologize. I mean the specific microarchitecture, as in the specific implementation of the instruction set. Just like photocopying an entire book goes beyond fair use, so could duplicating the microarchitecture verbatim.
I donât know the case law here (not a lawyer), but I think ISAs canât be copyrighted because theyâre an API (which is similar to Google vs Oracle), but I could see Nintendo having a case if theyâre duplicating the microarchitecture directly. Emulators are fine because theyâre doing a clean room implementation of the ISA, but directly pulling the gates from the chips could go a step too far and constitute a derivative work.
If Nintendo was going to do something they would of done it years ago when analogue released a Nes, Snes, and Gameboy FPGA console.
If you look at Nintendoâs lawsuits, theyâre mostly centered around their video game IPs. Theyâll target ROM sites, streamers playing their games, and modders. Sometimes theyâll go after emulators of modern consoles, but only if itâs an open and shut case.
That doesnât mean Nintendo canât or wonât go after them, it just means they havenât. I wouldnât feel comfortable running or investing in a company like this without Nintendo approval in writing.