Previously paid Nintendo DS emulator app on Android goes free
www.androidheadlines.com
A Nintendo DS emulator app for Android called DraStic DS Emulator is now free on Android. If you were looking for a way to emulate your games on your
    • ben@lemmy.zipEnglish
      361·
      10 months ago

      It’s silly, all the legal precedence we have for emulators were for commercial offerings. If Nintendo wants to hit you with so many invalid lawsuits that you’re forced to fold then this certainly won’t stop them.

      It’s just bullying and it’s going to keep happening until there’s laws in place protecting it.

      Some of the best inventions in history came from people reverse engineering the work of others. If we want to keep moving forward then we can’t let companies bully people out of innovating. It’s shooting ourselves in the foot.

      • lud@lemm.eeEnglish
        53·
        10 months ago

        If Nintendo wants to hit you with so many invalid lawsuits that you’re forced to fold then this certainly won’t stop them.

        The thing is that we don’t know if the lawsuits are invalid.

        • Grangle1@lemm.eeEnglish
          191·
          10 months ago

          The previous times these types of issues have actually gone to court (Nintendo v. Tengen back in the '80s and Sony v. Bleem in the '90s) pretty much all ended in the same way: the emulator/bypass maker won the suit, but the copyright holder drowned them in so many legal costs they had to fold anyway. And these were larger companies with much more resources than any indie emulator dev can muster.

          EDIT: also, it should be noted that Tengen and Bleem were able to win their cases specifically because their chip/software were complete reverse engineers and did not contain any Nintendo/Sony proprietary code. It’s not to say that if an emulator like Yuzu that requires a cryptographic key from an actual console were to go to court that they wouldn’t still win as long as that key is not provided, but it does give the console maker more leverage, and without a lot of resources, indie emulator devs would likely not want to take the chance.

  • freamon@endlesstalk.orgEnglish
    47·
    10 months ago

    This was always an impressive emulator - it was originally made for the Open Pandora (an ARM-based mini-computer not much bigger than a DS). It’s always been free for that - it’s just, you know, you’d have to own an Open Pandora (I do!)

    • owen@lemmy.caEnglish
      5·
      10 months ago

      Damn that machine seems awesome. and its successor Pyra seems petty damn cool too

      • freamon@endlesstalk.orgEnglish
        3·
        10 months ago

        Yeah it was pretty nifty in lots of ways. Loads of emulators, of course, and doing stuff like compiling apps directly on the device itself was neat.

        Frustrating in lots of other ways too, though. I don’t think the Pyra ever really got off the ground, unfortunately.

        • owen@lemmy.caEnglish
          2·
          10 months ago

          Ahh fair enough. I guess that’s all totally expected with homebrew hardware

  • TwinTusks@bitforged.spaceEnglish
    17·
    10 months ago

    I am always amazed at its official forum. The dev has tight control over it, each post need to be approved by him in order to post, there are many threads that are years old on the front page mainly due to the fact that the dev didn’t approve new response.

    Case in point, there was a update a while ago that moves the default save folder to another location, many user had posted threads asking solution, without any resolution, I have also faced this issue few months back and finally tracked it down, decided to post it and can’t.

  • yamanii@lemmy.worldEnglish
    4·
    10 months ago

    Huh, is this why it was suddenly ported to the Miyoo Mini on the new OnionOS version? Was very surprised when I saw it because I thought it was closed source.

  • PraiseTheSoup@lemm.eeEnglish
    62·
    10 months ago

    Doesn’t work nearly as well as citra in my experience, but I’m using pretty low powered hardware too.

      • CluckN@lemmy.worldEnglish
        14·
        10 months ago

        Nintendo destroyed Bowser’s life when they discovered he was charging for his SD card hacks. Charging for an emulator puts a huge target on your back.

        • SplashJackson@lemmy.caEnglish
          21·
          10 months ago

          He dodged them for a good long while, too. Every time they got close to him, they’d discover that he was in another castle

          • CluckN@lemmy.worldEnglish
            1·
            10 months ago

            I think Yuzu could’ve gotten away with it if the Tears of the Kingdom leak never happened. When gameplay footage was dropping a week early they had to scramble to DMCA a bunch of livestreams and videos.

  • lightnegative@lemmy.worldEnglish
    1·
    10 months ago

    Hey, I bought this back in the day.

    It’s a great piece of software, cool to see it open sourced so it can live on despite Nintendo’s lawyers

    • VinS@sh.itjust.worksEnglish
      1·
      10 months ago

      Well, can’t find it and they talk about open-sourcing since 2019. Not sure it’s still on the works.

  • Teknikal@lemm.eeEnglish
    1·
    10 months ago

    Bought this a couple of months ago myself that said its probably a good thing it’s being open sourced I just have bad timing and bad luck in general when I buy things of the play store.

    Just as an example I bought GTA Vice City and a few weeks later my phone updated to 14 and it hasn’t loaded or even seen an update since. So yeah avoid that one.