General Emulation Discussion

Has anyone tried the recent Road Rash Improvement patches? - https://www.romhacking.net/community/2797/

Good lord, talk about transformative. The frame rate is significantly improved, the input/handling is now sharp & responsive, and to top that, you can pair them up with CD-Audio tracks. There's a fantastic author called Dean Harris:

^^ His tracks go tremendously well with the game levels. His site is here - https://deanharriscomposer.com/videos/

The game really feels now what it could have been, or should have been, like on the Mega CD. To emphasise though, the changes to the handling are beyond transformative, the game is so much more enjoyable now.

Also compatible with original hardware too I believe. I spent the morning grabbing the audio and patching the entire series of games for the MD & Mega CD...absolutely delighted to have them, and look forward to playing them now too.

The Dolphin Triforce builds are seeing some love again!

I just tried F-Zero AX there, the real version, not the one on the GX disc that you can unlock...plays beautifully

All of them are done, 1 to 3 and the unique Mega CD version. They're brilliant, way better than original versions and work on real hardware too

MS seems to have nuked emulation capabilities on the Xbox under Retail mode there a few days ago. Still available (with blessing from MS for the moment) under Developer mode, but there's some restrictions I believe in this mode. Seemingly it has been said unofficially, that Nintendo were the primary reason (Dolphin) for the decision, in conjunction with security concerns (permissions needed for certain emulators.). There was also the Xenia release, which basically ran a fair amount of 360 titles outside of the backwards compatibility program.

Unrelated, but I have wondered how long it'll take Nintendo's lawyers to spring into action with Dolphin now released on Steam, and the Steamdeck being almost a better Switch than the Switch itself thanks to emulation. I've absolutely no interest in using Steam for emulation, and I do wonder are the Dolphin team going a step too far here. I know it's a fully open source and legal implementation of GC & Wii emulation, but Nintendo have very, very deep pockets to challenge these things....

We know that, the Dolphin team know that, even Nintendo know it....but it wouldn't be the first time a company has abused the legal system to drown out a smaller player.

The recent Internet Archive case feels like the spearhead of a wave of this kind of crap.

I don't ever see a time when Nintendo brings MS to court. What I could see though is the Dolphin/Yuzu/Ryujinx teams being hit with DCMA's and the likes, and not having the deep deep pockets that Nintendo has to fight any challenge off.

Certainly in the case of Dolphin, it's a fully open source clean room software, absolutely gold standard stuff....but proving that in a court, would likely cost a lot of rupees.

As good as the Dolphin dev team are, I really didn't see any other conclusion other than the below to Dolphin being on Steam

Source

I've said it before here, but Nintendo have upped their already DCMA-happy game this year. I know they've to protect their IP's, but I can see them pushing and pushing knowing they've enough coughers to shut down anything they don't like, regardless of whether it's infringement or not. The carry on of them with Youtube footage was bad enough, but an open-source clean room emulator being DCMA'd? Not liking the sound of that tbh, sounds more like an abuse of the DCMA system (unless there's something genuine to the request...but Dolphin is Dolphin, whether on Steam or not...so why would they only target the Steam release?)

Undoubtedly the widespread appeal of the Steamdeck, coupled with the ease of use of running and using Dolphin is the reason....my question is though, on what grounds can Nintendo invoke the DMCA system is the Dolphin emulator is completely open sourced, and uses a completely legal clean room reverse engineering approach to development? There's only two possibilities, 1) Dolphin isn't as clean as is claimed, and 2) Nintendo is abusing the DMCA system to protect its IP. Until shown otherwise, and given the nature of open sourced software, I'm inclined to consider option 2 here the most likely, in the absence of any further information.