Comment about Did You Know Gaming's video "Price Hikes Could Cost Nintendo Big Time"
For posterity, I made a YouTube comment for this video, and I want to copy it here. You can watch the video here... if you want:
I hate this video. Not because it tries to debunk the whole "it was not cheaper in the past" argument because I'm really glad we're on the same page and I think this argument was never really good to begin with.
I just hate how this video is essentially shilling Iwata and Yokoi all throughout with tons of dishonest cherrypicking and insane shortcuts.
I'll just deal with the most egregious parts regarding Iwata:
The whole "Respect The Value" thing is something Iwata pretty much said in clear words. And I don't remember people agreeing with him about that.
You guys are talking about how after Iwata Nintendo started putting microtransactions on mobile… are you guys conveniently forgetting Miitomo? Are you guys forgetting Pokémon Picross, Pokémon Rumble World and Team Kirby Clash Deluxe in 2017, known for their microtransactions, projects that were mostly under Iwata?
Why putting the current president in the light of "he's not doing Directs anymore" as if it is such a good argument, if he's not down doing it, shouldn't we respect that?
Now the other parts in how you guys kept going about Yokoi way of things:
The Nintendo DS and Wii were perceived as pretty high tech. They weren't necessarily powerful in terms of specs, but I sure do not remember using touch screens before the DS, and certainly not motion controls before the Wii. They weren't necessarily use of old tech here, they were tech that were still getting matured over time.
This might be wrong but I remember the Wii dropping off like crazy after 2008. I don't remember most people cared after that point. The fad moved on, so I don't know if this blue ocean strategy has paid off as much as possible.
The failure of the 3DS was not just because of the price, the game lineup was also very bad, and the Nintendo eShop wasn't even online yet! It was not very good all around. The 3D might also have been a factor in how most people probably didn't care.
I refuse to think the Wii U's failure was just because of the initial reaction. People laugh about the name but I still believe the name Wii U could have sparked curiosity from the casual audience.
But I think comparing DS and Wii with Yokoi's strategy is also pretty unfair:
I consider that touch screens and motion controls were actual gamer dreams. As in before the DS and Wii, I totally remember having thoughts of how cool it would be to play games that way, and I highly doubt I was alone on this, else the DS and Wii wouldn't have caught on. For me this wasn't necessarily a "revolution", it was an alternate path for evolution and you all gobbled it up as a revolution. I totally believe these things would have happened no matter what: Case in point, these things are now "normal" on Switch 1 & 2. They didn't go away.
The Wii U dabbled in the idea of what if the controller had a screen, which I totally think was something gamers were dreaming about in one way or another as well, but it didn't catch on as much because we still understood it's kind of like the DS in the end. I think they went overboard with it, and in the end tablets were a thing too.
And I believe the Switch was the least revolutionary console of the bunch, but it did what I believe to be the final gamer dream: Bridging together home console and handheld. It was definitely a dream to have home console games on the go. The reason why I say "final gamer dream" is mostly because VR and AR already happened elsewhere… to more or less success.
And then somehow… you guys are asking Nintendo to do a "revolution" again. And I'm like, what can you do from here?
The only thing I can think of are playing games with your brain, and I don't know whether I want to live in a world like that.
But other than that… what else can you come up? I've tried coming up with ideas all the time, I see it in a point of view that Nintendo should "redefine gaming" but honestly… what does that even mean?
And there's one other thing that truly bothers me:
Can't you guys just let Iwata and Yokoi die in peace instead of invoking them as a trojan horse for your arguments? This isn't just this video's problem, I think it's the problem of way too many people talking about them. Move on. They're not your friends, you seriously shouldn't feel for them as much as their family and friends, and I think that's a true sign of disrespect about people.
Direct Link to the comment: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=n025Gxn5GEM&lc=UgwRd72FInBF5GuuTsN4AaABAg
Oh boy. I have a lot to say regarding the Switch 2, how Nintendo is handling it, and how people are handling it.
When it comes to the Switch 2 system as I see it, I am actually fairly content of what it is. You can criticize certain aspects like the HOME Menu, the games actually speak deeply to me in general, it would definitely be a system that I would very happy with as far as I'm concerned.
I will speak mostly as someone from France, so expect a lot of prices in euros here, rather than dollars.
This post has the potential to be dated over time. This might have been written too much in haste, and it's entirely possible that I would just change my mind on some of what I said.
Switch 2 Pricing
Now the elephant in the room: Yes, the pricing fucking sucks, especially in Europe. I absolutely will never pay the games at the suggested retail price. I can see some people being like "yeah you're just a Nintendo fanboy you'll pay full price anyway," even though on Switch throughout its entire life I never really paid actually much of anything at full price. A first party Switch game is usually 60 euros here, but I pay them at 45, day one, brand new, just from the store. It's not so bad for the experience that I get out of them.
The system itself is also very very expensive but I'll be honest, considering what the system is capable of, my initial prediction of 400 euros definitely felt too low. However I did not really expect the price of 470 euros. Too close to 500 for comfort for a single system like that. It sucks. But at least I pay for a system mostly once, I ain't those collectors who buys systems and collector's edition by the bulk. I can reasonably afford it, I just need one, and even then, to be fair, stores would lower it, I saw the price of 440 euros, which I think is at least more reasonable. It's still 500 for the Mario Kart World bundle, but it's not so bad, it's still paying a lot less than the game on its own regardless of physical or digital.
When it comes to Switch 2 games, Mario Kart World's price is 90 euros physical, and 80 euros digital. Donkey Kong Bananza is 10 euros less for physical and digital. My personal limit is 70 euros for a single physical game, because I'm still willing to pay at least the current full price for a game, but anything above that, I will absolutely aggressively pursue ways to get those cheaper. When it comes to France, where I live, physical Mario Kart World is 70 euros in stores, and Donkey Kong Bananza is 60 euros. It's still a bunch, to be honest, but I'll still try to get some of them further down if I can, but it's more reasonable than these insane "intended" prices from Nintendo. I sure still ain't paying full games digital yet.
But let's be clear here: You shouldn't support these high prices. It sends a message to the already pretty greedy game industry, who will absolutely take notes.
Also, to anyone who dares using the argument that games used to be way more expensive back then as an excuse: Fuck you. Straight up.
This isn't an argument, this is an information. Yeah sure it was like that back then, but that isn't a reason to be this submissive and just accept this bullshit. Not at a time when the game industry is feeling a huge crisis when everyone gets fired, now we have to deal with that industry filling their pockets even further with even more of our money to make up for it? Fuck no. This isn't just about Nintendo here.
Game Key Cards
Just to be informative: Game Key Cards are Physical Game Cards that requires you to download the full game to play them.
This part was blown out of proportion. Personally I don't blame Nintendo on this, because third parties would have figured out how to do it even if it wasn't a properly defined thing. At least this is straight up clear on the front of the box, with a clear definition of "required download". This is just something that happened for a while on Switch 1, even other systems, and it's just basically a type of game cards to know about.
However people seriously misinterpreted this to affect every Switch 2 game, and I'll be honest with you, people are just straight up stupid. Imagine saying in the Nintendo Switch 2 Direct that there are new Switch 2 Cards, in red, that benefits faster read speeds. They straight up say that, so then to say now that they don't have game data, yeah nah that's just a straight up misinterpretation and I don't think it was hard to interpret it right. If I had that page in front of me I know I would just think that it is not affecting every game.
Mario Kart World and Donkey Kong Bananza DO NOT have this Game Key Card banner on the box art, while some others like Street Fighter 6 and Bravely Default do; this is clearly just for third parties who decided to cheapen out like crazy and fuck us all.
Nintendo Switch 2 Edition Game Cards
This is a recent development, where apparently a Nintendo UK Customer Support person said that NS2 Edition physical releases includes the upgrade pack as a code instead of being in the cartridge.
I'll be honest, this is strange and confusing to me. Game Key Cards bothered to mention what makes them different straight on the front of the box, but NS2 Edition box arts absolutely don't, they just say they include the game and the upgrade pack, but there's zero evidence that the upgrade pack would be a code, regardless of english or french.
I would straight up say IF this is true, then Nintendo is lying by omission, and I would be really mad about it. But the only source is a person who took a screenshot of an email, from a customer support person, from which I don't necessarily 100% trust on its own, even if it's an official source, but I still haven't found out what is the real source of this information, as in, who took the screenshot.
I would say to tread wisely before taking conclusions, because, well…
Misinformation is everywhere
People are just bad at reading. Frankly you should maybe do yourself a favor and stop trying to understand every aspect for the time being.
Nintendo is far from saying everything yet, I'm definitely frustrated at the lack of certain information especially for those who preorders. Though honestly, you should not preorder. Seriously you shouldn't do that so early. The preorders I do are like, at most a week before release? And I can just buy games from the store myself the day of release if I feel like it.
But people are so speeding up over any information that they just forget how to read. I honestly want to call names to anyone who does spread bullshit like that. I know it's easy to hate Nintendo, but you don't need to come up with bullshit to do it. If you wanna hate Nintendo, at least know what you're hating at before I make fun of you. It's not hard.
Tariffs
The fact that tariffs in the US finally got some "gamers" actually aware that politics can affect them is simply ridiculous. Cool that it happened for some, but it pains me to say this but it's so late. I ain't forgetting the bullshit. You should have been more involved before that. Politics isn't just stupid people you don't like talking bullshit, they decide shit for you and you should speak up and THINK.
Fuck Trump, and Fuck Nazis.
Switch 2 isn't innovative?
Personally I remember when people complained about the motion controls of the Wii. When they complained about gimmicks in general. Now we're getting a console that doesn't seem straight up outdated hardware wise, and accumulates the most amounts of gimmick I've ever seen from Nintendo.
But now I see some people sad that Nintendo isn't innovating. But what else do you want them to innovate on?
Instead I get the answer of "surprise." That answer is too easy to me. I'll bet you that whatever hardware surprise Nintendo comes up with you wouldn't be happy with it right now. I personally see gaming as basically a solved thing in terms of how we play. I still seriously think we peaked a while ago.
People respond with touch screen, motion controls, but frankly, those were stuff that we dreamed about from a technological standpoint. Gaming has always been tied to technology, and Nintendo was simply the one who said "let's bring some of them" instead of competing for power. The only thing I can see is like, more accessibility features and tech for more people to play.
I also saw mentions of how the Switch 2 is essentially a Switch Pro. It's the same thing again, even with games. I can tell you the exact same shit with Sony and Microsoft, just saying. I sure wasn't excited by the PS5, I personally feel like a lot of games could have worked with a bit less fidelity on PS4 and I wouldn't have batted an eye. I don't believe the graphical upgrades on PS5 are this impressive. I got impressed by the Switch 2 personally because it's almost like going from PS3 to PS4, since Nintendo was essentially a gen behind for a while. I think the games are actually way more worth the gen upgrade in terms of framerate.
In fact I dare say I could probably play on PS5 and Switch 2 for 20 years. That's right, I think we don't need hardware upgrades anymore. I think we're already good. PC is just shit, and everything is super expensive for barely any upgrade from hardware from 5 years ago. 4K is straight up overrated if you don't have a big enough screen, like I can't tell the difference unless it's real big. I personally prioritize framerate, and now I get told about 120 FPS which is something I don't have any idea of what that seriously feels like as someone who never had the opportunity of this kind of screen in the past.
I don't believe any hardware upgrades will feel impressive graphically anymore. Everything is about graphics, and at Nintendo I see a game with insane terrain destruction freedom that isn't voxel that I totally believe would not even run that well on Switch 1. That's the real shit I get excited about.
Nintendo Switch App
Why the hate on the Nintendo Switch App actually? It's just extra stuff.
Voice Chat was the only thing that seriously sucked in it and was a stupid feature of Nintendo Switch Online on Switch 1. It's like you guys forgot why you hated that app to begin with. I actually like what Zelda Notes is doing on it.
I think Splatoon 2 & 3, and Animal Crossing were handled pretty well on it too. Smash Bros. Ultimate however, I think it's very badly done, and it should have existed on web. The fact that it's not even a NSO requirement anymore at least for the app itself is cool, and at least adding friends with QR codes in the future is pretty cool and handy to avoid using friend codes.
I asked if I should write a post with my dreams about the Switch 2, because really, if I wrote about predictions, I'll be honest, it'd be some of the unexciting things you'd read probably everywhere so I will actually avoid them. We're here for cool things, not 200% predictable stuff.
And unlike a lot of people: When I say predictions, it's not me putting a dream thinking it would be real.
Video Clip Editor (Dream)
Once Nintendo teased the Mouse feature for the new Joy Cons 2 (that's how I'll refer to them), quite a few ideas went to my head.
This is something I stand for and would work great to have people doing a lot of things: A video editor.
Recording video clips from games is one thing, but just like the PlayStation 5, if the Switch 2 has that, while also being made easier with mouse support, I think it can do a lot of cool things, and of course you could have a few effects in the process, really a simple video editor, possibly simpler than what Super Smash Bros. Ultimate contains (do you remember that it has a video editor in there?).
There's a lot of potential for this, you could make compilations, but you could also potentially make like, actual movies using games with this.
An extra prediction is that Nintendo MIGHT actually leave you a way to record longer video clips while playing.
Limited Social Hub (Prediction)
NOT Miiverse. This is more of a prediction though.
I personally think that when Nintendo removed direct posting to Twitter on the Switch, that they felt it as a serious hit to their feature set. Easier screenshot and clip sharing was one of the biggest points of the Switch, and let's be fair, ever since that change, it's likely that people have been posting a lot less of that out of laziness.
You could definitely get those screenshots and clips out of the console in several ways, but those are really extra steps and you really feel them.
As with Nintendo Today! app kind of shows how Nintendo wants to bypass current social media, then my prediction is that Nintendo instead wants to make a service where you can upload your content, but any aspect of sharing will be done by yourself, aside from having an activity log of your friends, so on the system you could see your friends' screenshots and clips in a timeline, and you'll have access to a website that works on every device including PC where you can access your clips.
This might seem lazy, but Nintendo really basically wants to avoid too much moderation like they did with Miiverse. Because else Game Builder Garage would have a hub to share stuff in and that's clearly not something they might be too interested in.
To add to the injury about sharing: Nintendo did say that Facebook posting will be removed in the future.
Whether that means the feature will be replaced is still a question mark, but if there's a moment to talk about it, it would be during the Switch 2 Direct.
Mario Paint 3 (Dream)
To be honest, I would sum it up as Mario Paint 3 for most people unaware of Mario Artist, but it may very well not be exactly that.
For those who don't know, Mario Artist is a suite of creative apps for the 64DD, a Nintendo 64 Disk Drive addon. I wrote a bunch of posts about those in my blog, so feel free to read about them, but to sum it up, it had a drawing suite, 2D animation, 3D modeling, and the first public attempt at Miis (but way more detailed) and with those, an actual movie editor with a lot of options.
I would actually consider this as an extension of the video clip editor, because when combined together, it could do really cool things.
I can see Nintendo sort of selling each feature kind of piecemeal, a part where you can just have a full 2D drawing app, a 3D modeling app, a music maker, and then, perhaps, a full on Mii Maker, as detailed as Miitopia on Switch or as the next Tomodachi Life title, with a proper movie maker.
Come to think of it… the next Tomodachi Life could have some of that in…
It would be a breath of fresh air for people who wants to make art while having simpler art software, no AI bullshit to consider.
And of course, it would be one of the best uses of the Joy Con Mouse feature outright.
New features for retro games for Nintendo Switch Online (Predictions & Dreams)
I actually think SNES NSO will get working SNES Mouse support, alongside Mario Paint, Mario & Wario… and Sound Fantasy (Dream). I could seriously imagine the power of use of Mario Paint with the video clip editor, and clearly, it has actually been a focus of the SNES emulation development team lately. As a reminder, late last year, I datamined revamped SNES Mouse emulation in the emulator. Here's hoping for Zapper & Super Scope support too, but I haven't seen anything about that...
Another prediction would be NES and SNES NSO getting up to 4 and 5 players support. This was also a decent development, the NES emulator started to support the Four Score accessory, which allows to play up to 4 players on NES. If you are wondering about Multi Tap support on SNES for up to 5 players, just know it was supported in the emulator the entire time since the launch of the SNES service, despite actually releasing 6 Multi Tap games so far on the service.
This is unfortunately a dream, but it's a sad one: NES and SNES NSO still doesn't have European localizations of games, and I really hope this update would actually add them in the future. I do not understand why they're still not on the service while every other app actually has them, it's seriously a shame here. There are zero technical limitations preventing this.
Another kind of dream but on which I have zero actual hopes for: a good Nintendo 64 emulator. If you don't know why, I wrote an entire post about it before, feel free to read it, but since then, F-Zero X runs even worse now. Banjo-Tooie seems well emulated at least, good on them, but that doesn't fix the emulator for other games. I'm still having a huge distrust of it.
You can also add my dream of having Satellaview & 64DD games on it, but I also don't have hopes for it.
New retro consoles for Nintendo Switch Online (Predictions & Dreams)
Now, a prediction: I actually think GameCube will come to NSO. Now how far would they go with the library is another deal entirely, but at the very least GameCube NSO would definitely make access to fairly underrated titles more easily.
To anyone talking about the file size of games preventing it: You guys don't know what you're talking about, I'm tired of this argument being considered legit, as if Nintendo is so stuck to one way of handling old games when the framework has always changed per system in more ways than you would think.
Also Nintendo would sell a wireless GameCube controller to NSO subscribers because they WILL.
I also think Nintendo DS games will come to it. Those games would be a lot messier just because of the touch screen (the microphone is on the Switch 2, you can actually see it in the reveal video), a lot of people think the mouse would be enough but frankly, it's not really good for that. I've played DS games on PC before, and mouse isn't the best option you'd think it is.
It won't beat an actual touch screen, and so I would actually think Nintendo might offer a way to play the Switch 2 in vertical mode as well, and I know Nintendo has experimented with that themselves. And yes, it means to play certain games better, you need the console undocked, but frankly, better that than nothing. I saw some people saying it's worth NOT putting it for that reason, and I say fuck no, the more choice the merrier, we want MORE, NOT LESS.
Now we could talk about Virtual Boy games. I actually want them on the system, unlike what Angry Video Game Nerd or other angry YouTubers might make you believe, the Virtual Boy is NOT that much of a piece of shit with games.
Some games ARE bad but honestly is it really worth exaggerating about it? You probably haven't played them. I don't know whether to put this as a prediction though, because I really did not expect Nintendo to have such a focus on that system in the Nintendo Museum. It really makes me think that Nintendo is maybe down even just for the heck of it, to make them accessible in some way and make a Virtual Boy emulator. Just offer a black & white mode though, I ain't standing on the red & black all day.
Dev Planet (Prediction)
This is how I see the name of what's behind Nintendo Switch Online - Playtest Program. Let's be fair, people know what it is. It would be accessible to any Nintendo Switch Online user for free.
Many didn't understand this but, sorry for the word I'm about to use: This is the closest thing to a Metaverse that we got for a brief moment. But without the Blockchain/NFT bullshit.
In this game / experiment, people could just claim their own land as they discover more parts of the planet, and is straight up a MMO. We could build stuff (with less intuitiveness than Minecraft), make up costumes (that's behind a test and microtransactions), you could even put text and screenshots. The gameplay is also deeper than you think, there's many unsuspected interactions between gameplay elements.
What I suspect is that this CAN be sort of the Miiverse replacement, except people will take over land, and build whatever. There are a few limitations that definitely make people frustrated a little bit, but I can see a possible function where you could do kind of a hyperlink to a place in Dev Planet, either for friends, or outright promotion uses, like for example Nintendo could just remake Luigi's Mansion in it when they release Luigi's Mansion 4 and anyone can access it, and then get some little cosmetic things and additional help.
This could also possibly get a little more integral to the Switch 2 OS experience, at least to some extent.
You'd think this would be kind of redundant with the Limited Social Hub from earlier, but not quite, this is a Switch experience, rather than an ecosystem thing.
It is absolutely a weird game, and I am curious of how it could feel like if way more than 10k people can access it at a time...
Super Mario Maker 3 (Prediction + Dream)
To be honest, just the Mouse support would make this better than Super Mario Maker 2. My belief is that one of the best aspects of Super Mario Maker on Wii U was how streamable the level design process was, while still being intuitive to use. I believe the sequel just wasn't intuitive and pleasing to use, and they should seriously solve that for the 3rd one, while also putting Super Mario Bros. Wonder as a game style.
But I think that Super Mario Maker 3 might try to have 3D game making at this point, to stand out, and a mouse would definitely make this easier.
Not just that though but I think Nintendo would add something more to it that I probably cannot predict. Not necessarily something huge, but a little something you might possibly cannot live without once it's there.
Creation is a Theme of Switch 2? (Dream)
As you can kind of tell, a lot of my predictions and dreams are on very creative stuff. Because I think that's the thing that Nintendo just wasn't really able to capitalize on, despite attempts. Those attempts failed, but I don't think any of the software made were failures of their own, they were just not given the right environment to make it successful enough.
I don't know whether I'd call that a prediction, but it's kind of a dream of mine. However they will definitely spin it in a way that makes Nintendo able to not overdo it like with Miiverse.
I could see Game Builder Garage 2, but in my opinion, Nintendo should try to bring things in mostly the same banner, with some exceptions. For example the next Mario Paint could also be a Wario Ware DIY 2 kind of thing, as all-in-one, or something that doesn't have any IP to it (which I think is a mistake).
Lightning Round (Dreams)
Puzzle League 99 / Panel de Pon 99 (why isn't it a thing yet it's so obviously a good choice)
Super Mario Bros. 35 (i still stand for this game)
New Localizations of Japanese Classic Games on NSO Expansion Pack (yeah that's a little bit dialed back)
New F-Zero game
New Pilotwings game (possibly more like a mix of SNES and 64 to be honest, I think Resort wasn't THAT great, it's still good, but not great)
New Kirby game (it'll happen but I still wanted to mention it)
It might not seem much, but honestly with all that I'd still be very content.
Virtual Game Cards, a detailed explainer, and other thoughts
As of this writing, we're a few days after the March 2025 Nintendo Direct, and a few days before the Nintendo Switch 2 Direct of April 2025, and in the last Direct, Nintendo announced a new optional feature that will apply to Nintendo Switch 1 & 2 systems starting late April 2025.
This feature is the Virtual Game Cards. Many people got confused about it, and to be honest, so was I initially. The video is not really well thought out, though, after watching more than one time, you might get it, but still, it's not a very good explainer from Nintendo, so first of all, we need to set things straight for anyone who doesn't get it and reads this blog somehow.
I also want to talk about what it means for the future, and my personal impressions of it.
The Current System
For explaining what this is about, we need to dispel one notion that I saw a few times: This new system has NOTHING to do with your physical game cards, and ONLY has to do with digital games and nothing else. And no, this is not evidence of Nintendo putting physical game cards away. Stop.
Now we need to talk about the current system that we've been using for playing digital games to this day, because many people can take quite a few things for granted. This system is also in place for PlayStation and Xbox consoles.
All digital games are owned by an account, and for the sake of explaning things, I will refer to that about your account and your games from there on.
There is a concept called the primary console, and it basically means the main console linked directly to your account. It has several benefits:
Your digital games can be played without an Internet connection to boot them.
Other accounts on that console can play your digital games.
If you buy a digital game from Nintendo's webpage, your primary console would automatically start the download.
Meaning, if you have a second, third or however many consoles you own with your account in them, that it doesn't have those benefits, you would require an internet connection anytime you want to boot your digital games, and other accounts on those consoles cannot play them.
That's the old system.
Virtual Game Cards
Now that we got the old system out of the way, we need to explain the new one. Now forget the old system entirely, this new system is a completely optional replacement, with its own completely different logic with different pros and cons compared to the old one.
The goal of this system is for accounts to use more than one console at a time, without a huge dependency on an Internet connection at all times, and I really wish Nintendo pushed these benefits in their video.
With this new system of digital game access, all of them would be considered as Virtual Game Cards that can only be inserted in one console at a time. Your account can only have up to two consoles linked this time around where you can access your digital games.
Because Nintendo insists on this system to not be abused: You would need to link both consoles locally (+ online for security), only the first time though. After that you can just freely manage what digital games you want access for on each console, and you can even use a website for that, so an internet connection is required to transfer games around both.
When you have access to a digital game in this system (as in, the Virtual Game Card was inserted), an Internet connection is only required the first time you boot it up. It won't be required in subsequent plays.
And all accounts on that console can also play it freely. This means it gives basically the same advantages as a primary console, but per digital game instead.
And then, on top of that, you can lend one of your digital games to another account in your family group (this is not just a Nintendo Switch Online thing, it's a free feature of your Nintendo Account).
Pros & Cons
To sum it up, here's the pros & cons of the old system:
Pro: You can have as many consoles linked to your account as you want, and access your digital games on all of them.
Pro: (Unintended?) You can share your account to another person to let them access your games.
Con: Only one console (primary console) can let other accounts have free access to your digital games.
Con: Playing a digital game outside of your primary console requires an Internet connection no matter what.
Now, the pros & cons of the new Virtual Game Card system:
Pro: On any console where the Virtual Game Card is inserted, the digital game can be played without an Internet connection.
Pro: Likewise, the digital game can also be played by anyone else's account on that console freely.
Pro: You can lend your digital game to another account from your family group...
Con: ...for 14 days, only locally, you cannot lend to anyone in your family online.
Con: You can only link up to two consoles (only locally) with access to your Virtual Game Cards.
Con: Extra Steps? You would need to virtually eject and insert digital games everytime you wanna use a different console to play the same game, and an Internet connection is required for these actions.
Con: (Intended?) You cannot share your account to anybody else to share your games without changing linked consoles.
As a reminder, you can choose between both systems, but they're really completely different systems.
The catch?
As you can kind of tell, it would look like the Virtual Game Card system has more pros than before, but that's kind of the catch here.
For me, this new system actually solves some problems I currently have, but this would bother other people with different needs. That said, I believe Nintendo is still right in assuming one person doesn't need more than two Switch consoles. I don't personally see the use of having even more, unless...
Unless, that is, you're sharing your account with friends to share your digital games. This system is totally made against this use, and I'm sorry to tell you: Nintendo completely forbids this.
And maybe, this is happening too much for Nintendo's liking. So instead of banning people, they devised a system that punishes this use, without making everyone have an entirely worse system, solving other problems that the old system had in the process.
So let's be clear here: this kind of system proves how much Nintendo doesn't really trust their userbase to not abuse the system. But do I really blame them for that?
At this point I just have two questions:
Is the Switch 2 forced to have this Virtual Game Card system?
And how long until this new system is no longer optional?
If you're having a home console, and then a console to play on the go, this can solve the problem of the overreliance on Internet when you're outside of your home. The difficulty of doing a portable console is that you have to deal with the possibility of not always having an Internet connection, and this is clearly a response to that.
What this new system implies can also be the complete removal of the concept of "secondary" consoles. I feel like there would be only one primary console for an account, and linked locally to a secondary console, which, obviously, is supposed to punish those who does account sharing.
The good?
I spent a lot of time talking about the catch, but there is still I think good things about this.
On a personal level, I have two Switch consoles: One of them is purely for myself, the other one is for my mother/father. I could have made the other console my primary console and solve this problem, but for convenience, I would rather want my personal console to be my primary console. Also in this home, it happens that I get power outages or/and Internet outages (sometimes no mobile network in the slightest), so I'd like a solution that doesn't really punish anyone when it happens.
So this new system actually have some convenience for me. I could just switch games between both of them. And on top of that, I can lend my games (and viceversa) with my brother who has his own console. For family users, I think this is nice stuff.
Many people have compared this with Steam. I had to look up the new Steam Families system which replaces the old system I knew:
Nintendo's system is clearly worse than Steam's. Steam just lets everyone in the family freely share their digital library with everyone in the family, and now, there's even less Internet dependency. There's still the idea of only lending one digital copy at a time (meaning if two people in the family owns the same game, two copies can be shared across the family to play together), and it doesn't seem to have a limitation of how many PCs can be used. Steam probably trusts their userbase way too much but it sure is the most consumer friendly of the options.
On consoles, this kind of system doesn't really exist. Sony and Microsoft definitely doesn't, and Nintendo is essentially doing a small dabble, which is still nice, let's be fair here.
Conclusion
It's really hard to say if this system is better or worse to me, overall. It depends on your needs, but I think this is a clear attempt to prevent account sharing, first and foremost, while attempting to give a concept of digital game access in a sort of tangible way, while not requiring a permanent Internet connection.
This is already the beginning of a new Nintendo that will represent the Nintendo Switch 2, and I don't believe this is the only big "change."
I know I shouldn't be bothered for this, but seeing reactions from press and people just somewhat made me angry. There are definitely things to say in how Nintendo may not have revealed enough for sure, like, don't get me wrong about it, I think that's the part that could be debated the most, but I think it's not really worth debating about that too much.
I don't think we are all meant to be marketing video reviewers. Nintendo has showed what they wanted to show, and as far as my reaction is concerned, I think it was okay. Sure they didn't show too much, but I'm still happy to see a Switch 2 that's way more practical than what's currently going on with a clear comparison point. There are things hardware wise that I'm pretty excited for.
But if there's one reaction that I would understand a lot better than "disappointment" it's "nothing", more of the reaction of not really feeling anything because your interest is not on the hardware, it's on the software. You wanna hear about the games instead, and how it would change from the previous system (or not, even), and I think that's way way more understandable and acceptable to me.
Where's the surprise?
But disappointed because nothing was a surprise? I learned all of the leaks, I knew just about everything about the hardware already, and you don't somehow feel some sort of relief of having a proper look?
Personally I was pretty content with it even if they didn't show too much and that's the one critic I could repeat many times and would 100% agree with. If that's also the excuse, then here's my question to the press: Why do you share all these leaks all the time?
I am still critical of whole "surprise management" myself. I love surprises too, but what I am interested in is more long term. I personally do not understand how people are suddenly "oh it's just like the leaks" and then somehow that means no reaction? Because the reaction came before the announcement and somehow you don't react when you see it officially? Come on. I don't think this is sane. We're not talking about the plot twist to a story, we're talking about marketing.
The hate was there from the beginning
Also uh… remember when a lot of people hated on the Switch 1 after its reveal? I sure remember the journalists and the tech nerds hating on it. Taking into example the Wii U because that was the last thing around from Nintendo at that moment, but it's happening again with Switch 2, now taking the Switch 1's success as a reasoning. I don't think the previous console was ever a real factor.
Meanwhile a lot of people who were more like me, just gamers enjoying games, were very fans of it and we were certain of its success, and that Nintendo took lessons from the Wii U very darn well.
And now people are rewriting history and saying most people were hating on the Switch? Really? Should I remind the absolute success it was at launch? The sales don't speak in their favor.
Nothing has changed. You're dealing with the overarching vision of "experts," which are nothing more than a minority thinking they're the majority.
Where's the revolution?
Sometimes I see a comparison with the Switch 1 Reveal but I just think it's dishonest and really misunderstood. The Switch 1 reveal video was brilliant in conveying us the point of the concept: Having a system that can go between TV, tabletop and portable, with quite a few ways to play. What did you expect from Switch 2 to continue from that? Another revolutionary way to play?
Maybe I am totally missing something, but I always thought of bridging together handheld and TV gaming in one was like, the final gamer dream. Some may say there's more, and that Nintendo should have been able to do something, but for what? For you to complain about the weirdness and also complain for Nintendo to maybe not make much use of it overall? Nintendo has abandoned this way of doing things entirely. I don't have a dream beyond what the Switch did aside from more fancy things that in my opinion aren't required, but I am just happy with what's on my plate too.
Personally I think the Switch is an admission of defeat of the DS and Wii days in retrospect. So they mixed every single relevant technology into one system: We have the regular controllers, we have the accelerometer, the gyroscopes, the touch screen, we still have the weird Nintendo with the IR camera (even though there's almost always something IR in almost every Nintendo system when you think about it for a second), but none of it is forced on you anymore. Everything is now a choice from the devs, and you.
Personally after a lot of analysis I got excited about the Joy-Con Mouse mode. Because I'm weird. I see potential here. More than most people think. I don't think anyone knows the potential of having two mice for a single game. But that's a topic for another time.
Where's the weird Nintendo?
I also heard some worries about the weird Nintendo not really being around but it was never gone in the first place. During the Switch we had many opportunities to see it: Nintendo Labo (we got 4 of them!), Game Builder Garage, Ring Fit Adventure, 1-2-Switch.
The obscure side of Nintendo even peeked a little more than usual: Another Code Recollection, Famicom Detective Club got remakes and even a new game after decades, Endless Ocean Luminous (even if it's apparently not good).
And don't forget the Nintendo Switch Online Playtest Program which showed a very strange concept that I never thought Nintendo would do. And then you add the Alarmo that released a few months ago for NSO subscribers. Don't forget that. Just because it isn't always to your liking, it doesn't mean it's gone.
Probably not the final post in relation to the N64 emulator on Switch, but we did get a bunch of new information thanks to a new leak of iQue emails not too long ago. Somehow the gigaleak continued, it seems.
There's a ton of emails in relation to game localization of first party Switch games, but I won't talk about those, there's also tons of stuff in relation to Wii U VC and the Pokémon 3DS GB rereleases, instead I'm gonna focus about the early development of emulators on Switch.
GameCube Emulation for Wii U?
I don't know where to put this, I found this in the leak, but I'm sure some people would have been interested to know: iQue was working on a GameCube emulator for Wii U in 2013. I have no reason to believe this work was used by NERD later, I believe they fully did their own thing later.
For explanation: CAT actually means Wii U here. CAT-DEV is the name of one of Wii U development kit. For context the same emulator framework would use CTR (3DS) and PC (well… Windows PC).
It absolutely did not work like Nintendont, I saw evidence of JIT code recompilation. It would join the unreleased GBA emulator for 3DS by the same developers.
(For those who might ask: No, Nintendo did not use a GBA emulator for the 10 GBA games that came out on 3DS, it relies on the 3DS's GBA backward compatibility mode. Yep, they did that on the hardware level and somehow they still wanted to make an emulator for it.)
Switch Virtual Console (Clipper)
Yes, Switch Virtual Console was originally a thing!
It was codenamed "Clipper", development seems to have started around 2015, and continued from there. It was seemingly a collaboration between iQue and M2, possibly others like NERD but they get barely mentioned so I can't be certain.
Do you guys actually remember the original announcement of Nintendo Switch Online's retro game service? It used to say this:
Subscribers will get to download and play a Nintendo Entertainment System™ (NES) or Super Nintendo Entertainment System™ (Super NES) game (with newly-added online play) for free for a month.
This, for me, is the relic of what it used to be. I believe the original plan, was basically Virtual Console, but with one free monthly game for those who pay for NSO. It was confirmed it was paid games after that, at least by the press.
iQue took their NES emulator from the 3DS, which was okay, it wasn't bad, and N64 would continue from Wii U N64 VC, which already had terrible reputation.
If you started a game on Switch VC in CRT mode, you would see an animation where a CRT TV would be turned on, complete with TV noise, and even caring enough to record the sound of the power button for both the Famicom and NES seperately. Nintendo cared to have a very descriptive animation.
There was actual testing for NES Switch VC, listing tons of the usual first party game and also third party games such as: Final Fantasy 1 & 3, Mega Man 2 to 6, Ganbare Goemon! Karakuri dōchū, Star Luster…
I don't know whether it was going to be part of the final product, but they seemed to test games with different game speeds (Slow, Normal, Fast), and they do report bugs in relation to that so I don't know.
Also they did make it important to have online netplay in it, with different ideas for implementation. One of the ideas that was given as a fun mode was a way to automatically shuffle controllers between up to 4 players every 30 seconds, with a countdown until it says "SHUFFLE!", as well as premade messages (such as emojis and "thx", "sry", "plz", "cya").
For SNES, I saw a mention of "Street Fighter ZERO 2". I don't have the full context but it sounds like M2 was responsible for SNES Switch VC initially? M2 was very involved at the very least.
I did see a bunch for N64, but a lot of focus were on Wii U VC, specifically for games like Banjo-Kazooie (yep), Blast Corps and Ogre Battle 64.
A bit of off-topic in regards to Ogre Battle 64: It seems they tried to fix a bug that also happened on original hardware, which also happens to lock up the entire system. Unfortunately fixing such bugs isn't easy.
And then around May 2017, I don't seem to see too much about Clipper. And that would make sense, because in June 2017, Nintendo announced a change about how they would deal with classic games on Nintendo Switch Online, with what was originally called "Classic Game Selection."
Nintendo Switch Online (L-Classics)
This is where the project that we know about, codenamed "L-Classics", would come to be. There's a lot of back and forth between iQue and NERD, where NERD explained why Clipper was cancelled in favor of L-Classics:
Previously, when shipping Virtual Console titles on new platform, Nintendo relied on extensive testing for each emulator (NES, SNES, N64) on each new platform (3DS, Wii, WiiU). This approach is no longer possible, it is just too costly. Besides, players were annoyed that previous Virtual Console titles were not available at lunch on the next platform, and they were angry that they had to buy again the Virtual Console titles they bought on the previous platform.
This and other factor lead to the cancelling the Virtual Console single-title approach, and the new L-Classics multi-title project. Now, the goal is to:
- ship many titles (30+) on short schedule
- maintain all the titles in the “long-run” while still adding features
- ship everything very quickly and for a very low cost on the next hardware
There were a lot of talks about code recompilation, as NERD was very busy on doing that for their GameCube emulator, while iQue was also doing this for their N64 emulator.
The NES emulator would be replaced with the one used on the NES Classic Mini developed by NERD in 2016, which was after development of the Switch Virtual Console started, or at least was concurrent with each other, frankly I don't understand why Nintendo has like 3 NES emulators for Switch now. Clearly, during 2016, after the development of DS Virtual Console emulator, NERD started to have some real influence on emulation within Nintendo, to the point of having NES, SNES, GB, GBA, DS and GameCube emulation today… and maybe more? For real though, NERD seriously cooked there, like, I feel like they did almost everything at the same time.
The initial idea was to have a version of retro NSO to contain NES, SNES and N64 in one app, so the approach that I quoted about was very serious on having easy to maintain but also future proof emulators for long term development. Obviously though, this did not happen in the end, probably for similar reasons of cost, as it could just be easier to develop and test when it's seperate.
One of the key things that NERD made a point on was to automate testing with controller replays to make sure nothing has regressed in testing after updates. I don't think this is a bad idea, actually.
(In retrospect, seeing SNES Mouse replay feature in the latest SNES NSO update from September 2024 is actually pretty positive because it means it is considered as a serious feature now.)
NERD also makes it very clear that L-Classics is absolutely long term and really insists on this aspect:
Finally, and this is the most critical issue.
We must make sure the whole L-Classics application, with all the emulators, can be supported and maintained for the many years to come. We want to be able to quickly add new features, new games, new emulators. We should make sure that all emulators are well integrated. For example, we should avoid duplicating code as much as possible. And when possible, we should refactor each emulator to have similar behavior.
We understand that it may require a lot of work on your side. But, it is NERD opinion that this initial time investment will have a very positive impact on the future of this project.
So if there's anyone worried about the future of the retro games on Nintendo Switch Online, this really seems like a project that Nintendo takes very seriously. This is kind of reassuring that finally, everyone is on the same page, and not just doing their own thing, there's a lot of back and forth between teams.
I'd like to do the reminder that Nintendo had literally THREE DIFFERENT NES emulators running on Switch:
iQue's NES emulator which almost happened for Switch VC
NERD's NES emulator from the NES Mini and powering NES NSO
Intelligent Systems' Wii U NES VC emulator powering the english translation of Fire Emblem NES and even Luigi Bros. in Super Mario 3D World on Switch.
Can I comment how very poorly planned this was?
I even suspect the NES emulator on the new Mario & Zelda Game & Watch is a different one again, though, that one is a lot more understandable in terms of hardware and optimization required. It's only since the planning for the NSO that we know that they finally started to stop making a mess (though Fire Emblem NES… ugh).
The development of Nintendo 64 emulation on Switch
Considering that all we have is only iQue's side of things, Nintendo 64 emulation is basically all we can talk about, more or less.
Maybe I need more context on top, but I'll be frank, I'm not gonna be on the side of the developers here. I tried not to be that way, but seeing these leaks, with discussions with other people on the matter…
I really think N64 emulation should have been managed by people with more experience. I am really sorry if I become seriously harsh on this section.
To make their Nintendo 64 emulator from Wii U to work on Switch, there were several issues that stemmed from the Switch, here's the most important ones:
The CPU JIT recompilation performs worse on Switch due to security reasons. (Small explanation: JIT basically means real time recompilation as you play, "Just In Time")
The graphics rendering needed to support another graphics API as on Wii U, it used another unique one. So they looked into Vulkan API, which was the brand new one that could work everywhere.
To sum up the CPU JIT topic, there was a lot of back and forth between iQue and NERD about the specific topic of basically recompiling the game in advance and rely less on real time recompilation for performance.
That's something NERD has done to GameCube emulation and was honestly pretty easy to do in advance because the overall GC architecture made this easy to automate. You can't really do this on N64, so iQue opted to basically "record" recompiled parts and put them alongside the game, doing real time recompilation for stuff that they didn't precompile. There's not much else to say about it, it's really not the part I'm going too wild about.
To me, the biggest failure of N64 emulation is not that it is unaccurate in general, to me I think full accuracy is kind of unnecessary. I don't really like MVG's focus on timing emulation on his latest video about N64 emulation, I think it's not the main issue. However, I believe graphics can be emulated a whole lot better, and that's the real failure for me. It was really obvious in the launch of N64 NSO, but to me, it's still that way now.
A lot of the problems were already there on Wii U Virtual Console. You can speak to Zelda Ocarina of Time speedrunners about that. But instead iQue chose that they should port their renderer to Vulkan. And that's not me saying it, here's iQue's N64 emulation schedule development from March 7th, 2017 outright saying it.
Translation: Vulkan port (provisional, expected work time 2 months)
N64 emulation currently, unofficially speaking, owes a whole lot to Vulkan. We wouldn't have a performant highly accurate renderer that is parallel-rdp without Vulkan. It was literally impossible without it. RT64's hackless approach to graphics rendering also wouldn't exist without DirectX 12 and Vulkan.
And considering how at N64 NSO launch, the bugs were still there, or, should I rather say it, even worse, to me it shows that they just ported their work and did not do anything to make advantage of Vulkan's specifics to make N64 emulation even better from here.
In a later description of how they handle graphics, from September 2017, I see this part:
This seemed to have been emulated correctly even on Wii U, so I'm not gonna be picky about this. But I will still be because sure, dealing with stuff that is more of a result of a bug is annoying when you're an emulator developer. Well the thing is: This happens a lot. This is pretty much part of your job to deal with the mess of old game devs. This isn't unique to N64, and at least, if I deal with something like this, well, you can complain all you want, but what you do is perform specific tests on the actual system to understand how it works.
When people talk about "Nintendo has all the documentation but they can't figure out N64 emulation" to me they don't know what they're talking about. The amount of times when official documentation can outright be lying to the developer, the times where you deal with a highly specific bug that could happen to the hardware and isn't explained at all, one of the things that I think is that you should NOT trust the documentation, you should trust what the original hardware is actually doing. And many emudevs I know stick to this adage.
Remember Sloop? The leaked GBA emulator demo build that we got years before the GBA NSO launch? Well I remember writing two posts about it especially when I talk about how it shows the use of a GBA flashcart where they can go back and forth with real hardware save states and a homebrew to test the screen output, as well as a ROM that performs tests.
Well that's the proof of actual dedication to the craft. They're paying attention to real hardware tests. They might even write some of their own tests.
Well that's what I hoped for when NERD received a N64 flashcart in 2017. A few people may remember that I said this around February 2017 in some places. I hoped NERD developed a N64 emulator alongside the rest which showed a lot of promise. And then it seemed like they didn't make one… or did they?
Introducing "Mushi"! It seems NERD has worked on an emulator which I am not fully certain it is N64 to be perfectly honest, but I don't believe it is GameCube, which is called "Hagi", and within the context of it, I believe "Mushi" is NERD's N64 emulator. It uses software (CPU) rendering for graphics, on which iQue's developer noted for its accuracy (this is not really evidence that it is accurate though). That's all the info I have about it, unfortunately.
Anyway, from there, iQue's goal was clear: Make all of the Wii U VC games work on Switch (including unreleased ones like Smash Bros., Banjo-Kazooie and Blast Corps, yep), and look into other games later. They also looked into rollback… and an Android and iOS port?
Yep. I don't know where the idea of iOS and Android port came from.
When it comes to rollback, I think considering the way N64 emulation works in general across everything including unofficial emulation, it's pretty hard to do, and could just fill your RAM extremely fast + save state processing time could prevent things to work as well as they want.
There's also talk about Nintendo wanting to put N64 emulator development to Panasonic Vietnam for September 2019..? That is honestly curious and apparently has put some iQue employees wondering about why this was put into consideration. NERD was also talked about as having high technical skills and capable, but "not good at mass production process". That last part may seem confusing, but I believe they're talking about more like the process of putting the work required for software for public hands.
Personally though, I don't believe N64 emulation was ever given to Panasonic Vietnam in the end, I still have reasonable belief that iQue is still around for it, for reasons that I cannot invoke. Or, if Panasonic Vietnam is involved, I think they're mostly just a support team helping across all of NSO emulators, one of which is confirmed to be GBA.
And now?
And that's about it, really. All info ends at around March 2018, so anything that happened past that is still very much a secret.
I'm sorry that I'm still giving iQue developers not a pretty good look from me. I expect that we're still missing a lot of context, I would have certainly loved to look at the internal discussions that happened after the disasterous launch of N64 NSO. To me I still believe that Nintendo hasn't done a good job about N64 emulation, especially when the emulator was truly in constant development for 10+ years. But as much as I'm not an expert on Nintendo 64 hardware, I still have some understanding of it as a modder and as a 64DD emulation developer.
If Nintendo truly wants to do something long term, then having emulation that does good enough accuracy (aka not what's in N64 NSO) with legit performance tradeoffs should be their goal. The goal is to respect the legacy of their games. The least they could have done is at least good graphics emulation. I'm not even asking for super accuracy, this is not possible on Switch, but at least to actually use the technology at their disposal to do it well, and I consider that they did absolutely not.
When it comes to Switch Virtual Console, I know a lot of people would have wanted that instead, but on a personal level, I never liked Virtual Console since the Wii. And what I've been seeing about Switch VC was none other than a continuation of it but with online play added to it, well… I'm not interested. I believe that playing retro games shouldn't be a niche thing, and I'm sure Nintendo would think so.
But it sure is interesting to have a glimpse of how it was like with some details here and there. I like development details like this, and I hope this was an interesting read.
Really disappointed about F-Zero GP Legend on GBA NSO
Today, as of the writing of this post, saw the addition of F-Zero GP Legend & F-Zero Climax on GBA NSO, two great games, and one of them finally officially available worldwide, even if untranslated.
Putting aside the annoyance that F-Zero Climax is untranslated, on which I still think Nintendo should seriously consider translating some of their retro titles, I want to talk about a real disappointment surrounding F-Zero GP Legend.
The hype before release
Before the release of the GBA NSO update, Nintendo's japanese blog showed that F-Zero GP Legend would actually have for the first time the inclusion of the 20 e-Reader courses, expert ghost data and machines. The Wii U Virtual Console release did not have those, and that's genuinely cool of them!
The original American and European releases of GP Legend actually included the e-Reader machines as unlockables, after they probably knew that e-Reader was just out of the question, however, they never included any of the Ghost Data, or the 20 extra courses (the equivalent of 4 cups in this game).
But for some reason, the American and European NSO releases of the game does not include the e-Reader content. You can probably excuse this as like, the game simply didn't have any support for them and therefore they couldn't hack them for it, but... that's just kind of bullshit actually.
How much effort did they make?
Guy Perfect, who you might be familiar with their recent work of BS F-Zero Deluxe, which is a hack of F-Zero that includes all courses and machines from the original game and the Satellaview BS F-Zero Grand Prix 1 & 2.
He made a few years before the e+ Complete patch for all versions of F-Zero GP Legend:
F-Zero GP Legend had e-Reader support in Japan. Cards included bonus content such as new courses, ch
This patch includes all e-Reader content, all 20 courses and all ghost data for all versions of the game, and unlocked machines for the japanese version.
Why do I mention this? Because this patch was possible because all versions of the game, including the American and European versions still had functional e-Reader support, it's just inaccessible.
Now, I want to say this, Nintendo's modification of the japanese version of the game is still pretty well done, just like the patch I've linked, Nintendo did a similar thing in a different way, where they actually managed to include all 20 e-Reader courses in the same menu, bypassing the limitation of 5 courses, a limitation caused by the limited save space as, yes, the cards actually included the custom course data in them, no unlocks.
This might have required as much effort as Super Mario Advance 4's e-Reader levels which also bypassed similar limitations.
After asking Guy Perfect about the work that was done towards the American and European versions of his patch, it turns out Nintendo didn't need to do that much more to do it on them, porting the modifications from the japanese version would actually not require that much effort, because the e-Reader code is still just there, fully functional, and could just be enabled relatively simply.
To say it simply: Nintendo already did the work for the modifications to add e-Reader content to the game and it would have needed basically almost nothing else on top to make it work on the American and European versions.
The fan patch is not actually doing a lot of code changes to all the versions, proof that it is really not doing that much to add these courses, and that's just sad.
The European could need maybe some translations, but as it is, it doesn't even need any significant work, like, just translating "Card e-Reader+ Cup" is all that's essentially needed, and even then, they could have left it as is and you would just see it in English regardless of the language, it would have still worked and no one would probably bat an eye...
It's just disappointing, you know, this was so close, not much work was needed, it's not like I'm asking the impossible here, the work is already there and could be ported very very easily to the other versions.
This is not an outcome I can easily accept, I can accept a lot of technical reasons for not doing things at times, but not this one.
In the meantime, I guess either use the e+ Complete patch, or just use the japanese GBA NSO app if you really want to play those legally.
F-Zero 99 is the best thing that happened to Nintendo Switch Online.
I'm not gonna say it any other way, it's been a bit more than a year, and I have 153 hours. This game is top 2 of my most played games (just under Splatoon 3 which has 253 hours).
I was one of the people who was down for this idea since the moment Pyoro teased it and when Nintendo announced it in the September 2023 Nintendo Direct.
This game received 6 content updates since its debut, and most of them are major updates, and as of October 2024, the latest update was 1.5.0, with the addition of the Ace League, making it the first time that Nintendo has ever rereleased Satellaview content in any way, worldwide.
I gotta be honest here, this game keeps on giving, Nintendo Software Technology, the team behind this game, not Arika anymore, is doing a great job.
I'm gonna talk about how I felt about this game, but also a bit of an history of datamining, about the game's future, but spoiler: I don't think this game will die anytime soon.
Happy One Year Anniversary to F-Zero 99!
Oh, and, to everyone saying this game is pissing on F-Zero's legacy as I've definitely seen a few: Go f**k yourself.
Online Quality
To anyone who loves to mock the online quality of Nintendo, you cannot do it to this game, or even any of the games of the "99" series. If you have online problems, the problem is on your side. 100%.
Either your connection's terrible in which case I cannot do anything for you, but most of the problems that I had with the game, it was all solved with either a fix of my internet connection setup (cables, Wi-Fi setup, etc), or by rebooting the Switch system entirely, this is most likely what you need to do the most.
It's not entirely perfect of course, but for the entire year of its existence, I have legit no serious complaints to make to the game.
Datamining The Future
Now... let's go over what we originally datamined at first.
I'm not gonna go over what was clearly experimental content such as a 3D Mute City I map or other things like that.
Extra Modes
We found code and references to 2 modes that have yet to be added to the game since launch:
Arcade Mode
It is believed to work similar to old arcade racing games, where you have a limited time, and you go through Time Gates (also datamined) to add more time to your counter to let you either finish the course, or run out of time and rank out.
Survival Mode
We found some references to it for the schedule file, but also what is feeling like to be a circle plane. I speculate it to maybe work like a battle royale where the playable place reduces in size, but it's hard to fully understand how it works at this point in time.
I have no idea when these modes would be added, if ever, actually, it's still subject to interpretation.
Extra Courses
We also found references to 4 placeholder course files:
Sulfur Swamp
Volcania
Fungus Swamp
Forest
Three of them uses recolored Mute City I and a custom but clearly placeholder background. But the inclusion of Forest placeholder was definitely an odd one.
It was actually hard to say what it could have been, but Forest is actually the name of a course in BS F-Zero Grand Prix 2 on Satellaview, and more to that, it's the name of a course that we never actually had recovered until the recent BS F-Zero Deluxe hack that used tons of tools in an attempt to reproduce them. We still don't have the original data yet, though. The bounty for that is still up, by the way.
I did definitely get my chances to suspect that maybe, NST was looking into Satellaview tracks, alongside brand new tracks, but maybe that Forest was just also a placeholder name.
But considering the inclusion of Ace League now, I doubt it is a coincidence. Especially when they bothered to have pretty creative names for the others, Forest just sticks out from the rest for being a pretty generic word, an argument that I had already used back then.
But I also noticed something odd, though, on this one I will DEFINITELY give an update if they ever fix this, but the Ace League's best machine ranks are not saved in the stats. This is odd, I don't know if it's a bug, or if it's actually voluntary... because IF it is, then I think the Ace League will change in the future to include the rest of the Satellaview tracks alongside a new Joker (?) League.
UPDATE from October 16th: F-Zero 99 1.5.1 update just released, and they did fix this so I was just doing copium. Not that I didn't expect it, it was a very shaky thing.
In one of the updates, before the inclusion of Secret Tracks, we had seen what was named Death Wind I Remix, which was the Death Wind I + White Land fusion. It's not unlikely that in the future, we will receive what would be called Remix tracks, for possibly entire leagues, but we might need to wait a while before we get those.
Incoming Event?
As NST is definitely aware of datamining attempts, they have been actually pretty busy scrubbing every unused files related to future content especially.
But then they missed a file in the latest 1.5.0 update that added Ace League:
It seems they are looking into doing a Mario VS Donkey Kong Festival Event in the future, including a Mini Mario League, and 4 Star Rivals called Mario, Mini Mario, Donkey Kong and Toad.
There's not much else to it, as it is just text. This text was not localized in most languages from English.
If I had to guess though, I don't rule out that this event might happen for the anniversary of the Mario VS Donkey Kong remake in February 2025. Mario VS Donkey Kong was also the baby of NST, ever since the first of the series on GBA, so it might just be meant to be a fun thing they wanted to do.
I would expect the Mini Mario League to contain either brand new or modified existing tracks to a newer style related to Mario VS Donkey Kong, new music, possibly new machines, and, definitely to me, new emotes to unlock.
I expect that to be a limited time event like the others, though what you unlock will definitely stay to your workshop, like previous events, and possibly Training mode if there's indeed new courses to play that they care enough to let us play after the event.
I wouldn't be surprised if we have to collect Mini Marios or something like that, but either way, it seems NST is trying to be a little more daring to F-Zero 99 and possibly follow the footsteps of Tetris 99's themes.
Depending on the situation of the Ace League machine stats, I might have to update this post if I really somehow went too far with my suspicions. (UPDATE: Yes I went too far, they fixed the bug with 1.5.1.)
I do expect more updates related to Ace League for sure, as I do think we'll get Classic versions of the Ace League tracks, and possibly Mirror versions too.
...but oh my god though there's freaking Satellaview tracks in F-Zero 99 omg omg omg we just need the 5 left now
I figured this stuff should be part of a post because I think it's an interesting thing to talk about.
As of the last few updates, I started to notice some changes to the NES and SNES emulators specifically, particularly related to emulation of accessories.
NES Four Score
If you don't know what the NES Four Score is, it's an accessory that allows you to play the NES up to 4 players.
I had actually never really datamined the NES emulator that much but at one point I randomly decided to give it a real shot for the July 2024 update (version 6.9.0).
Then I got actually surprised to notice code for playing using the Four Score, so I eventually went versions back, and found out it was a recent addition of 6.6.0, back in September 2023.
However, it is a little weird, it doesn't seem to be really accurate (to be more exact it only implements one ID for the second controller port, if you know, you know), but it seems functional. In fact in the 6.5.0 update (June 2023), it seemed to have been actually forced on all games, for some reason.
I couldn't notice any code regarding the NES Zapper or any other accessories however, but something that kind of gets me is that I don't notice any code for the Hori 4 Players Adaptor, which is like the Four Score but for the japanese Famicom, and it has some differences on a technical level.
My suspicion is that this was worked on when they were looking into Rare Studio titles, and R.C. Pro Am 2 is definitely a game that uses it.
That said, there is one game on NES NSO already that supports the Four Score, but you cannot use it: It's Downtown Nekketsu March Super-Awesome Field Day!, which is kind of a sports games with various sports. (For some reason Nintendo is not using the newly localized ROM and that's a shame.)
SNES Super MultiTap
This is not new, this was part of the SNES emulator's code the entire time since launch, but considering we just talked about the Four Score for NES, I figured it it would also be a good time to talk a little bit about it, and bring you up to speed.
On SNES, there is the Super MultiTap that can let you play up to 5 players on the same system (it plugs into the second controller port, where you can plug 4 controllers on that, plus the first controller on the first controller port on the system).
There are actually 6 games that can use the Super MultiTap on SNES NSO as of right now, but you cannot play more than 2 players currently, BUT I confirm that it actually does emulate the accessory regardless, just that the application does not let you go past 2 players, but the games do recognize that the device is plugged.
Those games are Super Puyo Puyo 2 (actually available since SNES NSO launch!), Natsume Championship Wrestling, Amazing Hebereke, Kunio-kun no Dodgeball da yo Zen'in Shūgō!, Smash Tennis, and The Peace Keepers.
I figured it would be worth mentioning, because I don't think the addition of Four Score to the NES emulator is just an experiment, it might be possible that SNES NSO might get a major update too regarding the ability to play up to 4 or 5 players for a limited amount of games in the future... especially because of...
SNES Mouse
Like the Super Multitap, the SNES NSO emulator actually contained code to emulate the SNES Mouse the entire time since launch. However, there has been a new development as of today.
I already talked about this in one of my posts, but I'll just do a roundup of what we datamined in the past:
Initially, the SNES emulator checked for specific game identification to enable the SNES Mouse emulation, and looked for 3 specific games.
We don't know what those games are, but considering the limited amount of games, I believe it is reasonable to assume they were limited to games on SNES that only worked with the SNES Mouse and nothing else, in which case, we can assume the following games:
Mario Paint
Mario & Wario
The problem however... those are the only SNES games that released that requires the SNES Mouse to play. You'd wonder what could be the 3rd game that could be best played with a Mouse, but I have a list of what could be it:
Mario Paint (PAL version)
Sound Fantasy
For a few reasons however, I don't believe the PAL version of Mario Paint would be likely, and it leaves the unreleased Nintendo game Sound Fantasy as the other option, we know it was actually completed, and it required the SNES Mouse to play. I won't delve too much on that game, but think of it as a mix of Mario Paint and Electroplankton on DS together, but back in 1994.
In later updates, they removed code that refers to the game identification and relied on game metadata instead. That was done fairly quickly in its life even.
That would have been the end of it if it wasn't for today's SNES NSO update (3.10.0), where a major rework of SNES Mouse emulation was done:
They added the ability to emulate the SNES Mouse on both controller ports, it used to be only on the first controller port.
Internally they can now do input replays of SNES Mouse devices.
There's code for configuring the behavior of the SNES Mouse between either Original, or something else.
This is actually rather interesting, this was added in the emulator between February and August 2024, so this is a legit recent development.
The mention of the SNES Mouse behavior configuration is also interesting, because it means they're looking into ways to support the SNES Mouse in different, possibly more accessible ways than using a USB Mouse.
The fact that they can also emulate the SNES Mouse on both controller ports is also potential evidence that they're looking further into other games than just SNES Mouse only titles, as some games did use the mouse on the second port instead, while leaving the first SNES controller plugged.
To this day, I haven't seen any code for the Super Scope just yet, or the Satellaview for that matter, unfortunately.
Conclusion
Just as a bit of a tl;dr for people who don't like reading:
They secretly added support last year for the NES Four Score to allow 4 player multiplayer, but isn't used yet.
They secretly had SNES Super Multitap support since day one to allow 5 player multiplayer, but isn't used yet.
They secretly had SNES Mouse support since day one, but today (18 September 2024) they released an update that reworked it significantly.
The developers seems to be busy adding or reworking accessories as of the last year. I gotta be honest, I find this a little suspect. We might be going onto something major soon that reworks the NES and SNES applications for multiplayer and more.
I hope so much that would be sooner rather than later.
...also, please, add localized ROMs to NES and SNES NSO. There's no reason not to have them.
Emio - The Smiling Man: Famicom Detective Club (Review)
I finished Emio. It's definitely a Famicom Detective Club game, through and through, for the good and the bad. If anything the 18+ is almost a red herring on what you might think the game is like if you never played those remakes.
The 18+ rating is definitely warranted, but it's almost unfair how it might make you think the game is very mature when it's still very light hearted but serious when it needs to be. If you are sensitive though, there are definitely moments you will definitely feel bad about.
I dunno however if the story is better than The Girl Who Stands Behind, to me. It's still good, and there are definitely good ideas in there. It's very good at giving you the clues to figure out what's going on before the end. Maybe a little too good, but maybe that's on me.
However, you really need to be caring about stories and characters, because else you wouldn't really enjoy it, and you need to be methodic in the menuing because it's just that, after all. If you're a sucker for sad stories though, this gives you that. It's a mood killer for sure.
I did notice the game can be different depending on how you play it, but I need to look further about that, but I'm not really in the mood to look at let's plays of that to see how different it can get.
If you didn't play the remakes, or at least The Girl Who Stands Behind, I highly suggest you should. Nintendo should seriously take the time to localize those games in more languages.
By the way; yes, the music is very good.
I just got reminded how Emio was sometimes summed up as a "horror game" because of the teaser, but it is definitely not that.
For some though, the teaser was definitely felt like a betrayal, but it makes for a good teaser in a roundabout way to convey the base urban legend.
I have been very critical of Nintendo 64 - Nintendo Switch Online since the beginning, not only the very noticeably broken graphics emulation was certainly a case that everyone understood, but it did certainly make me completely avoid the Expansion Pack subscription entirely for a year because that was genuinely shit in 2021.
Now how is it in 2024? Well, it's not that much better. They did fix a lot of problems during that time for sure, and that's something that we do need to acknowledge to do at least something resembling fair criticism.
Current context
That one Dark Link room in Ocarina of Time was fully fixed, as the fog and even transparency emulation was just outright broken, somehow worse than its Wii U Virtual Console counterpart (which was already not very good), it also affected other games like Super Mario 64 where the fog was actually not correct, but oddly enough, it's not as much of a problem in Super Mario 3D All-Stars, and I'm not entirely sure what happened between that and Nintendo Switch Online for it to have such a massive emulation downgrade.
I've done some analysis of the software, though not a ton because I don't have that much time to waste reverse engineering emulators. Through that, I found out that iQue was responsible for the Nintendo 64 emulator on Wii U and Switch, because of the emulator framework, named "TRL," being 100% identical to their NES and GBC emulator for 3DS, confirmed to be iQue through leaked source code among other things, and the debug menu is seen on Wii U if you have more than one game ROM in the folder, and it's just like the 3DS one.
The Wii U Virtual Console N64 emulator was already seen as worse than its Wii VC counterpart, mainly due to the dark filter, but that thing has nothing to do with the emulation quality it was providing, aside from apparently some additional slight input lag on top of the already massive input lag which I find mindboggling, the graphics emulation was already considered worse than on Wii, a lot of issues that people saw on NSO were already on Wii U VC, which turned into a massive mess of complaints because, yeah, it turns out the Wii U was just not successful, but the Switch is, making obvious complaints very much more important.
The Dark Link room just happened to be using a bunch of graphical features at once which made it very noticeable when they don't work as intended. When I discussed this with other people, I couldn't help but feel terrible at the answer I get: "It's good enough."
This response annoys me to no end, but in truth, yes, the games are playable, nowadays graphically you probably wouldn't tell the difference from the real N64 with an untrained eye, and in fact, so am I at times too. But the problem is that it now becomes an actual history rewrite of how the game actually was, and you could still say that you would prefer the N64 games now than before with better framerates, better resolution, all that.
Better performance is always better?
Now this is still more of an opinion piece so here's my opinion about better framerate and better resolution: It's fucking misguided. Doing better framerate and better resolution works a lot better for games after that generation than the 32-bit and 64-bit era of the mid 90s to 2000, because the graphics looks a lot better for it and the standards are closer to the current era that we're in.
For N64 however, simply running the game better does not work as well as it should most of the time, and, frankly, seeing big polygons in 720p does not work as well as it should for most games. 2D games especially suffer from this and get some really weird filtering that just bothers me, especially in games like Yoshi's Story and Harvest Moon 64, where the emulator seemingly can't decide whether the graphics should be almost pixel perfect, or become vaseline.
Speaking of vaseline, where's the anti-aliasing?
The N64 is very much known for its blurry anti-aliasing!
While I'm pretty much immune to aliasing myself, I can still see it's not really respecting the original N64 very well about that, and it only deepens one of the biggest history rewrite of the N64 nowadays, where most people is more likely to look at badly emulated footage of a N64 game than seeing the game running on the original system, and this really bothers me that when you have every single other system on the service to care about this to the point of having a CRT screen filter, and even outright and pretty faithful reproductions of the Game Boy series' screens, N64 is the only one that forces you to play in its uglier HD resolution with no actual option to play games in their original resolution with some CRT filter or not, and that is just a real evidence of a lack of care to me compared to the rest of the systems.
When it comes to better framerates however, as much as I love that (Pilotwings 64 on NSO is actually one of the few experiences I can recommend on it), a lot of the games' speed are tied to the framerate, potentially making games harder than they should due to its speed being more accounted for the actual system, and sometimes, causing actual desync problems that iQue had to implement ways to manually slow the framerate down in specific moments of games just to account for it, but this only works for games that can run faster than intended. A lot of games sometimes have their framerate completely capped and doesn't run any faster.
But emulating the N64 lag is genuinely complex, and it's a problem that's not fully solved to this day even on unofficial N64 emulation, because there's way too many factors to take into account that it would probably take too much performance to figure out where it should take more time to process or not, so, on this one, I have a bit of sympathy about that as a developer, but it is still possible to roughly approximate that, even if the result can be weird; but I don't seem to notice any legit attempts about that.
Besides, a lot of people would be annoyed about the N64 lag and bad framerates, but to me if you want better framerates, in my opinion, it would be done differently, and unofficial emulation absolutely can deal with it in ways that isn't intrusive to the game's performance:
If you played the N64Recomp PC port of Majora's Mask, you would know this, as RT64, the new graphics plugin powering this port (and hopefully emulators soon), actually handles interpolation between frames, allowing better framerate without sacrificing the game's performance to be better or worse than intended, and it makes for some real impressive results while still being relatively low in cost. For me this seems like a potential avenue to attempt to ease in comfort with N64 games.
Is N64 emulation really that hard?
…frankly, if you asked me this question 10 years ago, I would have said yes, at least to my understanding back then, but also now.
But if you ask me this same question now, the answer is no, mainly because of brand new standards that actually makes a huge difference in how to handle N64 emulation in current systems, even through unofficial emulation.
I know it's very easy to mock unofficial N64 emulation as relatively hard to play, and this I would agree with, but this problem is purely user faced now. The old problem of unofficial N64 emulation was mainly that not many people were doing work on it and their time is just not infinite, but that is very much changing nowadays.
The Nintendo 64 is actually a well understood system, additional research are still being done, but for the most part, we can understand the N64 to a decent degree. The actual bottleneck of N64 emulation was actually how to emulate it on current systems, when we were stuck to older graphics API standards like OpenGL and DirectX 9.
However, a shakeup happened since with Vulkan and DirectX 12, allowing deeper GPU control. This, is actually one of the most important events of computing that actually unlocked bigger N64 emulation potential and finally get rid of problems that plagued N64 graphics emulation and it started with an adaptation of THE most accurate N64 graphics plugin as Parallel-RDP, and its extremely good, but its pretty much asking on performance and requires a decent GPU (no need for the latest stuff though).
Unfortunately, not much happened since on that field, due to as I said before, a lack of developers, but now RT64 exists, and is made to be extremely performant, and especially made to be accurate without relying on any game specific code for it, which is extremely impressive and shows a lot of potential for the future, while providing tons of new features that allows enhancements like frame interpolation and more. RT64 was fully enabled because of Vulkan and DirectX 12, else it would simply not exist!
Now why did I talk about this stuff that's seemingly unrelated to NSO?
Well remember that Majora's Mask PC port I talked about earlier that uses RT64? I saw that thing running on Nintendo Switch, seemingly perfectly fine, with enhancements as well.
This makes me look at N64 NSO differently, and with even more criticism than before. Instead of making good graphics emulation through Vulkan, they seemingly instead just ported the graphics emulation from Wii U VC's GX2 API to Vulkan.
That isn't without effort, but it is quite frankly lazy, and means that whatever they're doing, they're not using the technology at their disposal to the fullest, especially since Vulkan is a standard that applies to pretty much every current GPU under the sun now, whatever the work is done here, it would likely work on the long term, especially the next systems after the Switch. Why Nintendo did not allow that is just sad, and a waste of time. RT64 was done by mostly a single developer, and while it took many years to be developed, these years could have been reduced a lot more if it was handled by a team fully dedicated to this, with possibly even more cutting edge to it. The ingredients are there, but the recipe was just botched.
Genuine trust issues with the quality
But aside from all this stuff I just talked about, if you didn't understand much of it, hopefully this part should help you understand other issues that I have with N64 NSO.
Remember that the first version of N64 NSO was graphically buggy, and while they did fix that over time, new games sometimes were outright buggy and possibly game breaking:
When they added Paper Mario to the service, while the game did actually receive some improvements over the Wii U VC emulator, the game, somehow, was more prone to crashes. If you game over with Watt as a partner, the emulator crashes, and you lose your progress. If you have the curiosity of hitting trees with your hammer, one of them in the snow town actually crashes the game too! Thankfully both were fixed, but you still needed to wait months! If you had no idea why crashes could be caused as Nintendo just never warns about that stuff, that is genuinely inconvenient.
When they added Kirby 64; the western version actually had a game breaking bug that makes you softlocked if you get hit in a particular way underwater. That is genuinely a terrible bug that could affect just about anybody playing the game. Thankfully, they fixed it the next week, but that REALLY shouldn't have happened to begin with!
There's also the smaller problems like Yoshi's Story's boss, Inviso, where the point of the boss is to be invisible. Except he's very visible at all times making the point of the boss moot and any respect to the original game gone. For some fucking reason, they took more than a year to finally fix it, and that's just a huge shame.
There's also how Jet Force Gemini had a worse widescreen mode and somehow thought it was good for release, thankfully fixed 2 months after, but you still had to wait 2 months!
And then F-Zero X still has genuine framerate problems to this day where the game just runs worse over time. That game is known to run a perfect 60 FPS on the original system, so there's no excuse here.
I could also mention Goldeneye and Perfect Dark, but just look up Graslu's videos on them, he has done a full comparison, showing what's wrong with them with enough detail.
For these, I just mentioned the glaring issues plaguing several games, but a lot of times these issues just comes on their addition to the service, and then only gets fixed months later; and for me, that's an actual disrespect to the player.
I understand the developer is doing their best here, but frankly, what that looks like to me is a legit constant: they visibly seems just scrambling to get games to work to a "good enough" state. I am NOT accusing iQue of this, however I accuse Nintendo to not have taken any measures to stop having these kinds of problems to begin with.
To speak better of iQue, they seem to be good at reverse engineering, as they do patch games to fix issues, or sometimes just modifications like anti-epilepsy measures or other kinds of hacks.
The controls
I had some really bad things to say about the controls, but it got partially invalidated when I played Perfect Dark on the service to see how bad it got. I think I simply overthought about it.
Now I have an opinion about the controls of Goldeneye and Perfect Dark that will not please people: They're… fine. The default controls I mean. I know people have some real aversion to FPS that doesn't use a double stick, but frankly I dare say those controls didn't age as badly as you'd think. Some people say it's best played on a N64 controller but I don't agree about that, it's also okay on a regular Switch Pro Controller.
Turok however, oh boy, the default controls can be a double stick FPS… except it's reversed. That's where the ability to remap controls would be very useful here, or possibly just one moment where better forced control setups would be actually nice here.
Or how Pokémon Stadium has minigames that uses actually both the D-pad and the Stick, it could be great if the right Stick acted like the N64 Stick at that moment on a Pro Controller instead of the C Buttons!
Instead, I sometimes get told it is an excuse to get the (frankly expensive) N64 controller. Fuck no. I should not be forced to buy that, and I actually dislike using that controller, and I played tons of N64 games through emulation with different controls without having serious issues either, so for me, this isn't an excuse. Wii U VC also provided button remapping!
The forced use of ZL as the N64 Z button, and L for N64 L button for every game, also bothered me. I know they care about consistency, but then, I got actually curious to check how they handled Z and L on Wii and Wii U VC… and holy shit. They handled it right from the start. On Wii they actually just used the L button for the N64 Z button! But, the N64 B and A buttons do correspond to the B and A buttons on the current controllers regardless.
Though, on that one, for most games, it's not as much of a bother, but if you're playing games like, let's say Wave Race 64 or F-Zero X, this is particularly worse.
F-Zero X has the use of strafing left and right, so I'll let you imagine how worse that sounds if you use ZL and R. NOT ZR, that's for C Buttons macros on the face buttons.
It feels horrible and unintuitive, but also there's how the B and A buttons on N64 are vertical, and you just use your thumb on both buttons, making it easy to boost or to soften bounces on waves in Wave Race 64, which is a pretty darn important thing to understand, but instead you have to handle it on horizontal B and A buttons, making it a slight bit more annoying to your thumb, physically speaking. It just feels unintuitive and actually bad for your thumb, frankly.
It's where I wish games would actually make either ZR or R buttons to be swapped depending on the title, to be the R button and C button macro, and also offer an option to rotate the face buttons so that B and A would be placed on Y and B instead, corresponding more to the actual feeling of the N64 controller.
Sin & Punishment is oddly enough the only game of the bunch that comes with slightly custom controls, more adapted to the game, and I'm sorta glad that they bothered.
Just to go back to the N64 stick emulation, I also wish the sensitivity of it was managed better on current controllers. It really seems like when some games run faster than intended, added with the fact the stick isn't reproduced faithfully, some games are a lot harder to play, especially with Joy Cons if that's your only and basic options, where for example, turning the camera is way faster and you just keep wanting to reposition all the time.
Missing features
Man, imagine emulating the Controller Pak for the ability to save in games that only uses it instead of battery backed save memory in the cartridge, but then, literally never use it, ever.
Well that's what happened to Wii U VC and N64 NSO. iQue has actually emulated it, but for some reason, they never use it, and I just do not understand why, especially in games where the Rumble Pak isn't supported.
Speaking of the Rumble Pak, it is emulated, but there's one thing I just do not understand: Why isn't there code to automatically swap the Controller Pak and Rumble Pak?
They have the best ways to actually handle this in ways that is pretty transparent and unobtrusive, but somehow, they don't bother with it, and it's just very strange. I know the N64 games are weird about it, but some outright allow to swap them, sometimes they even bother to remove the No Controller Pak message in Winback, but in other games they don't even bother removing the Rumble Pak swap message. It's just inconsistent and weird.
We don't have Transfer Pak emulation unfortunately, but that one, I can partially understand, it's definitely a bit messy, but it would still have been cool to play Mario Tennis and Mario Golf with your GBC characters and to level them up on the N64 games. Instead, in Mario Tennis GBC, you actually get the Transfer Pak content unlocked from the start, which is still pretty cool of Nintendo to care, and a mere reminder that they do care about these details in other apps.
But in Mario Tennis on N64 NSO, the Transfer Pak courts are yet to be unlocked.
Then there's the wish to see 64DD emulated, which they initially did some work towards that back on Wii U VC, but then simply never touched in years, and then removed the code after I noticed they tried to support the fanmade cartridge ports of them.
It's probably just for testing though, I don't really care that they do it like that, but I would think it's particularly crass had they used them officially on the app. This has yet to be seen again, so I don't have my hopes up. Here's hoping the Nintendo Museum made them care though, considering Doshin The Giant 64DD actually showed up there.
The future
I think I pretty much said what I wanted to say the most in one place. It might have been a little hard to read, but I really wanted to make my points very clear.
When I look at N64 NSO vs the rest of the service, I just cannot help but see how worse it is in general, I have genuine trust issues as it is very badly managed as games get added but then doesn't run properly, only to get resolved, if it does, only months later.
It just makes me want to put off for later any time I wanna play a N64 game on that service, and I really want to love that service, I want to recommend y'all the biggest N64 library so far that Nintendo has given us that surpasses both Virtual Console libraries on Wii and Wii U, but I just can't.
Unfortunately, I don't see the future to be that bright. I see no reason to believe Nintendo has done any big efforts to allow a better N64 emulator, and of course, Nintendo has never really addressed complaints, and I partially blame the "good enough" feeling.
When I read ArsTechnica to make an article just to complain about the borders after the N64 NSO ordeal, it just makes me feel like no matter what, this bigger complaint of mine across all of N64 NSO just cannot be seen seriously. It's a much bigger problem than borders (though, I agree, they should allow more, including pitch black borders).
I don't see any reason for Nintendo to read this either, but that's my full impressions of N64 NSO so far. Nintendo 64 NSO is just shit, and disrespectful to the legacy of the N64.
I outright accuse it to force people to buy a N64 controller just to play it correctly, which definitely worked as it definitely was out of stock several times, but if that's truly what they aimed for, then it's an app that doesn't know what audience it wants. If it aimed to be played by casuals, they'll be put off by the controls. If they aimed for the hardcore, they'll find problems, no matter what.
And it really cannot be helped when the emulator is clearly designed for the developers to manually fix problems per game instead of having a better emulator overall.
So a bunch of patents from Nintendo recently got published and got my attention: They are related to the retro Nintendo Switch Online service and how it works and it brings a bit of an interesting view of it, with features that are DEFINITELY not inside the apps as of now.
As I went through them, I decided to also go back a little bit to earlier ones.
Just in case, for every reader:
At no point this describes the future of NSO! Let that be clear!!
Unlike most people who reports on patents, I actually will LINK the original patents.
US11003312B2 - NSO User Interface
You can find this patent here: https://patents.google.com/patent/US11003312B2/en
This seems to be among the earliest ones, it's from 2018, right before the launch of NES NSO that happened in September 2018.
This is an exact description of how the NSO UI works, where each image (or box arts, as they are usually used) are scaled roughly equivalent to each row so it always fits perfectly.
They had planned initially for details to be basically on the box art, thankfully they changed that completely for a full window in the final version.
They also had Special versions / Extra versions also nailed down already at that time, which are just games with preloaded save states, which the patent does explain. And the whole NEW thing where a new game is packaged like a gift and you just open them as you select them, that's already in the final app as well.
But here's something cursed:
This is a full vertical version of the user interface, which we've never seen so far.
US20240165505A1 - GB/GBA Multiplayer
This patent can be found here: https://patents.google.com/patent/US20240165505A1/en
This existed since late 2022 in Japan, but got a US version the next year, then published this year.
This patent explains how multiplayer works for GB and GBA NSO, as in emulating multiplayer between different linked systems, whether through LAN or online.
It gets complicated to read, but it's really about different ways to handle emulation of multiplayer, from one way where each player run their own emulator on their systems, to what I believe to be actually used: Running up to 4 emulators on each player's systems at the same time and keeping them synchronized through each player's input, but only display one of them corresponding to each player.
I believe this last way is used because all data sent through link cable is expected to be instant, you cannot delay this data, because this is asking for constant lag, but emulating all consoles on each player's system does solve this problem.
There also some quick algorithms in there about how to handle connections, disconnections and so on, but at this point it's not too interesting to explain because it works just like the apps.
US20240181342A1 - NSO User Interface (Save System)
This patent can be found here: https://patents.google.com/patent/US20240181342A1/en
It's dated just like the previous one, actually.
It might sound like the first one, but this one is more than meets the eye. Some articles talked about this as like, new Switch OS UI which is just bullshit (hi GameRant), or as GameCube NSO (wtf are you smoking to think of that straight up), but this one is actually about saves!
This image is actually having the main game on the left side, and everything to its right are all save states! You can see 2 saves for the first game, and 5 saves for the second game, it even has two rows for a single game which never happens on NSO apps. Of course, each save are just essentially having a screenshot of when the save state was taken at that moment.
This can very well be an alternative way of things, as I think this looks quite a bit cumbersome in how much space it uses.
But what's interesting is the Auto Save feature, which is not a feature of retro NSO currently. It is explained that the auto save can be enabled or not, and can happen anytime, including within a repeated time interval. This would be very nice in case of crashes.
And then, the elephant in the room: Yes, this looks like you could do more than 4 saves, with a peek of the suspension menu with a way to scroll through saves, the first option being to create a new save, without necessarily having to choose a numbered save state ID.
US20240173627A1 - Mission Play Mode
This patent can be found here: https://patents.google.com/patent/US20240173627A1/en
Now, this one is really sad because this shows an actual mission mode for retro NSO apps with objectives and rewards!
This has a new mode included called Mission Play, and you are provided with a mission that you can enter.
In this case it's about hitting enemies, keeping a count for a mission, but also even keeping a count of every single player in a region, and then the world!
This is really cool! I really think they should be doing this, but it seems Nintendo World Championships: NES Edition might do it instead.
That said, this being planned for retro NSO systems is definitely not entirely news for me, because I had noticed a long time ago that the SNES NSO emulator definitely kept track of specific game information as you play, it wasn't necessarily sent anywhere, but they were thinking about it, for several SNES games.
Funnily enough, these are real examples of detections for Super Mario Advance 2 specifically. This is pretty much how the memory and code looks like for the game.
I want to insist though: These are patents, these are for ideas, so this patent might have been publicly published because of Nintendo World Championships: NES Edition, but through experience, most of the time, as much as they describe stuff for illustrative purposes, it is usually describe a real example that was in development at one point or another.
Again, though:
At no point this describes the future of NSO! Let that be clear!
But it gives us a view of what Nintendo and NERD had in mind for development. And, at least, I actually give links unlike a few who loves to tease bullshit through those.
I'm going to semi-retire from the game preservation scene.
This is by no means a decision that I took on a whim. I am genuinely sad that it came to be this way, I've been involved in this stuff for a genuinely long time, I've seen many things, met many great people, also the bad and stupid dramas, which shouldn't really be discounted either, even though this was not the kind of thing that affected my decision.
I have no regrets on how I handled my job and I wouldn't have it any other way. But I just don't have the heart anymore. For roughly a year as I'm typing this, I started to seriously resent any attempt at public releases and contextual research.
This kinda sucks for how I want things to be treated with respect. I blame myself for giving myself too much responsibility and was not able to successfully pass down some of it to other people. This definitely did not help as it took a toll mentally speaking. But despite trying to change this, I found out how I just stopped caring about details, and just wanted to move on. I gave myself a little more time to ponder about it, and my final decision is that, yeah: I need to quit, I really don't have the heart anymore for it.
That doesn't mean I want to stop everything though, there are still things I need to do, and still have interests with, like with Satellaview and 64DD, but I want to gradually move away, and eventually pass the baton to people who still has the fuel. But I don't intend to disappear.
I still have a burning passion for the obscure parts of Nintendo, that's not changing any time soon, but the work I've been doing really just felt like a chore, and it was a job I've been doing for years.
I've been involved with Satellaview since around 2008/2009 with my Hello World SNES homebrew adapted for BS-X. The technical knowledge of the Satellaview was just very limited. I've started then a project to at least reveal how the satellite signal worked, and I got it working (then nocash did even further work that shouldn't be discounted, but he's really just too fast at this). It was my first reverse engineering project, and it was very formative, and shaped my knowledge of computer science like never before. I've then worked on emulation and preservation, managing quite a few dumps of Satellaview content.
Then in December 2014 I've had my first version of the 64DD Disk Dumper, done with help from the N64 scene people, on December 31st, all commercial 64DD titles were dumped, then I worked on 64DD emulation for a bunch of emulators, based on the works of Happy_ from MAME, and eventually was able to write my very own emulation code from scratch and higher accuracy than before on Ares. This year will be 10 year anniversary of my 64DD Disk Dumper.
So I've been doing this stuff for like, 15 years at this point, and now... Aside from the fact that I haven't been as into it as I used to, I also got older. I'm at an age where I'm sorta thinking if I want to do other things with my life, but in that case, other things have to be put on the wayside, to an extent.
I can't say what I will bring in the future, I have tons of ideas, and besides, I'm still gonna be behind a few game preservation works here and there, but my involvement will be limited from now on.
Also, Nintendo: Don't think I'm done datamining your NSO apps lol
You still have so much shit that we don't have and I'm not gonna give up on having hints.
In sort of a response to the Ubisoft director of subscriptions where he said that we need to get more confortable not owning games...
Well, reading that interview from GamesIndustry.biz, turns out he never really said that. It's more of an observation of the gaming subscription services, and comparing different views. It's actually a pretty interesting read.
But the negative response to the more clickbait part where the gamers went very much against this from the get go was something that particularly striked me as how I really just didn't feel like I was part of those who responded like this.
I do not care about owning games that much. I may be a owner of retro consoles, games, and about 50 Switch physical games, but the reasons ranges from passion to just practical and economical.
Taking the example of the Switch, what currently makes me attached to physical games are more of how it's usually cheaper in my country (like, first party games day one tend to be 25% off brand new), and the practicality when you live in a household with 2 Switch systems, it's just easier to share the games that way with your family.
If I could just buy digitally with the same advantages, I'd just do that.
This view on game ownership has mostly to do with my past of a guy who pirated games and movies like crazy before we got a little more comfortable paying for stuff.
But this past also comes with a deeper importance on the presence of data locally. Cloud gaming is something I hate on passionately if the industry keeps going on that as a means to play games exclusively. It would be the kind of thing that would make my heart broken about modern gaming as a whole, but thankfully we're not even close to there, and I suspect we'll never be.
But I could also not need to pay for the games, I don't really see a lack of ownership as a problem on its own. The only thing that matters is if it's practical or not, and that's the part that feels like it tends to be skipped when explained. That's how it went about movies and music.
That practicality is critical, and that is the part that's the most in danger. The big reason why is how companies can decide on a whim what is accessible to suit their needs. That WILL be completely in the process of enshittification due to how companies have to keep growing until it makes no more sense.
You don't even need to look very far to understand this, video streaming services are already very good at doing absolutely this, but I also dare say the Game Pass and PlayStation Plus are on a similar boat to a different extent, though.
One of the recent examples of how bad shit is HBO Max's removal of a huge amount of content just for a massive tax write down. There is financial incentive to fuck us all, and I consider the future to do absolutely that in the long term for gaming.
That kind of thing SUCKS. That is what we're actually scared of as a consumer. I hate seeing art being considered as a throwaway product.
I even saw a french article that was so complacent with this and kept saying complete bullshit things like "oh if they remove that game from the service, just take it as an opportunity to play another one" just, fuck off. That's not how I see this kind of service.
I love Nintendo Switch Online, despite a lot of its flaws, and hate on Virtual Console's overall legacy personally. I'm all for ways to allow discoverability and pick the curiosity of people. That's the kind of shit that I love in having some ease of access to catalogs, despite not owning them.
Wasn't it the dream to just access to everything with less money though? Don't tell me otherwise because I wouldn't believe you.
I do think there's something nice in this kind of service, but we also need to figure how to keep companies from the inevitable enshittification that will ensue on the constant need for growth beyond any reasonable sense.
Some thoughts about Nintendo Switch Online retro games since last time
This is essentially going to be not much of a post but I guess I could talk about a few things about its future since with all the updates that we got since last time.
We'll talk about UI code, Pokémon, NES, Fire Emblem and N64.
UI code upgrade
Literally the next day since my last post about it, on March 16th, Nintendo added new NES, SNES and GB titles. Under the hood, they did do a massive change to the user interface programming, bringing pretty much every NSO app to the latest user interface codebase that GB and GBA NSO had.
That said it brings absolutely no visible changes, NERD has just made sure to bring everything up-to-date. This is just more stable and probably easier to program and manage UI code.
Pokémon Stadium 1 & 2
On April 12th, Nintendo released Pokémon Stadium to NSO + Expansion Pack, and with no Transfer Pak support.
Of course, what did I even expect since there's no old mainline Pokémon titles yet (if ever?).
My opinion about Pokémon on NSO is that it will get stuck to only spinoffs. My worst case realistic scenario (aside from no rerelease) is Pokémon Company selling the old gens at $15 piecemeal (yes, $5 more than on 3DS Virtual Console).
Personally I expect Pokémon Company to be very strict about Pokémon management, and those games are highly abusable with glitches, honestly and are kind of region locked, too to some extent especially between japanese and international players, but they still bothered to rerelease them and supporting them with a way to transfer your Pokémons out of the games.
It's also abusable if you supported the Transfer Pak in Pokémon Stadium titles since they also work like extra boxes for your Pokémons and those support save states, which was explicitly removed out of the 3DS Virtual Console release...
They did also release Pokémon Stadium 2 this week, also without Transfer Pak support.
I did look at the emulator really quick and did find that they added new functions for Lua script hacking for the games, and it does kinda look like they rebuilt the entire thing from a new version at least.
I'll speak more about N64 emulation later.
Mystery Tower
Fast forwarding a bit, on June 6th, Nintendo added more NES, SNES and GB titles. One of them was Mystery Tower by Namco.
This bothered me, because I knew what this game was, but the title did absolutely not sound right. Turns out this title is actually brand new, they had this title in their collection, the original title was "BABEL" which is interesting since this means it is a first case of title change hacks on NSO. That said I did eventually find out that Japan also had a title change to "The Tower of Babel", which was also done in collections, but also the Wii U Virtual Console release!
Anyway please try this puzzle game, just keep in mind the direction and how you can turn around stuff based on how you face it.
Fire Emblem
On June 23rd, Nintendo released Fire Emblem for the GBA NSO app. But Japan also had Fire Emblem: The Binding Blade, the actual first GBA Fire Emblem title, as we only started to get these games since the second GBA title.
I'll refer to them as FE6 (The Binding Blade) and FE7 (Fire Emblem) from now on.
This update was interesting for a couple reasons.
It just so happens that the japanese version of FE7 can link to FE6's completed save files to unlock a couple things in the game.
So now, when you go into multiplayer, after the first player selects FE7, the second player is allowed to select either FE7, or FE6 for "Link Cleared Save Data" (official english text). Another player can simply share their save files to another player.
This also means that the GBA app now has the ability to load different games for each player depending on the choice of the first player who serves as the host.
(This screenshot is me messing around with the functionality.)
However this is not the only noteworthy thing to happen, because it wouldn't feel fair for a single player to not being able to transfer their own FE6 saves to FE7. Well, they did actually implement a hack for single player too!
They actually reimplemented the linking process inside the emulator just to avoid emulating a second GBA for it, and it would seamlessly transfer the save data just fine.
If you're wondering about what it unlocks, a quick read made me figure out that it skips Lyn's story, and add new scenes to the epilogue and other small additions as well.
Those new epilogue scenes are available in the US version by default, but not in the EU versions for some reason.
They can also be accessed in the JP version without a save transfer by finishing the game 9 to 11 times (what the heck).
This functionality working as it is really cool, honestly, and it makes a process less painful to do like it was back then, and it did make me feel confident in the transfer of data between games like with Golden Sun & Golden Sun: The Lost Age or the Zelda Oracle games... speaking of...
The Legend of Zelda: Oracle of Ages/Seasons
Those two games ended up randomly coming at the end of July this year. They are known for being two parts of a fuller story if you link each of them from whatever order you start them with.
And that's where my disappointment came in to remind me of the terrible reality that is Nintendo Switch Online.
It is doable for two players to share their save files to each other through multiplayer, but if you wanna do the games yourself on your own in single player, you'll have to input the password you get from the other game.
That is kinda sad considering it's the first player who selects the save file from the other player, it could have been very easy to setup in a way that's easy to use without needing to implement any specific user interface, but that didn't quite happen.
I hope they'll bother for Golden Sun considering the tiers of password this game can have with Golden Sun: The Lost Age, but I am starting to think if the game does offer a way to transfer without needing any additional work, they wouldn't do it. In the case of Fire Emblem, this way of save transfer was the only way to do it.
I did not mention much about this, but Oracle of Ages/Seasons are also known for having exclusive content if you play those games on a Game Boy Advance. After looking into it though, it does not seem like we're missing much, but it's kinda sad that they're not really in their most definitive way to play them.
Pokémon Trading Card Game
Two weeks after those last two games, Pokémon Trading Card Game and Pokémon Stadium 2 were released.
The cool thing about this game, is that they emulated the infrared communications.
At least, Card Pop does work, for sure, which does require emulation of the IR communcation... or does it?
Upon a quick inspection of the emulator code, I found out that the emulator does indeed patch the game ROM's functions, and thanks to the disassembled Pokémon Trading Card Game offering me a lot of information, I found out that they absolutely don't emulate the IR communications at all and outright replace the IR functions to point to a invalid 0xDD opcode (opcodes are small commands that CPU executes)... which probably points to a function in the emulator to specifically manage this.
Ain't that funny? In any case though, they do at least let all IR communications work just fine, and that's what matters.
(For the nerds who wants to look this up, the emulator keeps SHA1 hashes of the ROM you can easily search for, then points to a struct of 100 bytes original to compare, 100 bytes to patch, address, size, and something else I don't get.)
I ended up looking this up as someone pointed me to this video:
It turns out in the original game, one of the cards, the Phantom Venusaur, is impossible to obtain due to a mistake in the calculations of the odds, on which this video explains very well in detail.
This is the reason that motivated me to look at how the emulator might patch the game, and see if they fixed this issue: They did not fix this problem, I see no patch for any of the relevant code for this.
So, NERD, if you're reading this, look at 06:5D92, you can definitely fix this in one way or another.
N64 emulation
So... the Pokémon Stadium 2 release at least updated the emulator in some way, because they added new functions for the Lua scripting for N64 game hacks, and some of the UI engine stuff got shuffled around.
Then I tried some of the games, to see if some things got fixed:
F-Zero X did NOT get its framerate drop fixed.
Goldeneye's Dam level has texture tiling fixed. Interesting.
Since I noticed this last thing, it was pointed to Graslu00 who knows the game in and out and already compared the emulation of the game on NSO and Xbox... to a disappointing degree.
Here's his thread about the fixes... or rather the lack of:
https://twitter.com/Graslu00/status/1688994099477528576
The update did also some additional fixes to Pokémon Stadium 1, though I don't really know much about it other than it relates to rendering and soft reset in some way.
Unfortunately the N64 emulator is still not up to snuff, but I think the most annoying thing is still the controls. The default controls suck, let us change them in the emulator, per game! Offer also better stick emulation!
It still pains me to rely on the Switch OS remap feature, it's not good for this, it messes too much with some of the macros, it sucks!
It annoys me when I see the text "Change Control Method" in the emulator files too, you guys clearly thought about it! Why isn't it a feature after months with nothing?
Future releases
There's still a couple N64 games left that were explicitly announced for 2023, such as 1080° Snowboarding, Excitebike 64 and Mario Party 3.
That said Japan also had plans for release of Harvest Moon 64 (which I see no reason why we can't get it now that Harvest Moon SNES got released since), but also Goldeneye 007, on which Japan has it on the highest age rating (CERO Z).
Considering how the plans are going and how lazy everything is (sorry devs, I'm sure you guys know already, but most of the results of this just don't impress me and don't fill me with confidence aside from GB/GBA somehow), I just think N64 NSO will randomly get a 18+ rating and put every N64 game under parental control bullshit out of nowhere with no warning for Japan.
Also, where's the alternate languages for NES and SNES games?
An interpretation of the Dolphin on Steam situation.
As a reminder, Dolphin, the GameCube and Wii emulator, had announced a release of a Steam version using features from Steam like cloud save, Steam Deck native support and all.
A couple of days ago, Dolphin's Steam page was pulled down, then Dolphin's official blog mentioned a DMCA takedown, and PC Gamer reported on it, quoting the DMCA. Then we all went a bit crazy over this, then Delroth, a former Dolphin member, talked in a bit more detail, and debunked a misunderstanding.
You can still read this from Delroth here: https://mastodon.delroth.net/@delroth/110440301402516214
EDIT: Delroth has made one more very interesting post on Reddit about encryption keys in emulators here:
https://www.reddit.com/r/emulation/comments/140b7x5/are_dolphin_devs_special_in_bundling_decryption/
All in all, the situation was misinterpreted from all sides, and to sum it up, according to Delroth: Valve asked Nintendo about this, and Nintendo said they don't want this, and quoted the DMCA's set of laws. In fact, not only Delroth says this, a lawyer contacted by PC Gamer essentially says the same thing in the updated report here.
One more preface: I am NOT a lawyer, legal text is very hard to fully grasp, this is only my own interpretation of the situation, what I am about to say may be VERY VERY WRONG. Got it?
The Digital Millennium Copyright Act is a copyright law from 1998. It is made of several titles and acts. The first title contains the anti-circumvention part which we'll get to later. The second title contains the takedown process part.
DMCA Takedown
I'll get to the second title first:
To sum it up, this is the part where you can do a copyright infringement claim, a "notice and takedown" process. This process also includes the ability of a counterclaim.
NONE OF THIS HAPPENED ON DOLPHIN ON STEAM. Nintendo did not use this process. They just told Valve a reason, and it was Valve's decision alone that got the emulator removed, and they notified Dolphin of the reason.
I won't really debate much on this, it's not really interesting.
"Anti-circumvention"
Now, the anti-circumvention part, the meaty part. There's a lot of legal text, but I will translate to the best of my abilities to you, don't worry.
This is the part where I feel the least comfortable about, and again, this is an interpretation, but let's start again from that quote that I had (from PC Gamer, by the way):
the Dolphin emulator operates by incorporating these cryptographic keys without Nintendo’s authorization and decrypting the ROMs at or immediately before runtime. Thus, use of the Dolphin emulator unlawfully 'circumvent[s] a technological measure that effectively controls access to a work protected under' the Copyright Act.
The thing is... I only said that indeed, the Wii Common Key, required to decrypt everything, is included in Dolphin's source code. It's... not necessarily the problematic point of this, as I tried to read more into it, and I will go back to the Lockpick_RCM actual DMCA takedown.
Lockpick_RCM is a Switch tool that gets a set of keys from your Switch console and puts them into an easy to read file that could be used in conjunction with other Switch tools. They're required to decrypt pretty much everything about the Switch, from games to other packages.
The use of Lockpick with a modified Nintendo Switch console allows users to bypass Nintendo’s Technological Measures for video games
A thing you read a lot is "Technological Measures"... turns out this has a bit of a definition in 17 U.S.C. §1201... or rather, in that text itself, here's the very first thing you can read:
17 U.S.C. §1201 (a)(1)(A)
No person shall circumvent a technological measure that effectively controls access to a work protected under this title.
The wording "circumvent a technological measure" happens to have a definition tied to it:
17 U.S.C. §1201 (a)(3)
As used in this subsection—
(A) to “circumvent a technological measure” means to descramble a scrambled work, to decrypt an encrypted work, or otherwise to avoid, bypass, remove, deactivate, or impair a technological measure, without the authority of the copyright owner; and (B) a technological measure “effectively controls access to a work” if the measure, in the ordinary course of its operation, requires the application of information, or a process or a treatment, with the authority of the copyright owner, to gain access to the work.
It's a somewhat precise definition, actually, and purely relying on it... this makes pretty much everything Wii, 3DS, Wii U and Switch a very dangerous situation.
The "technological measure" also has a definition:
17 U.S.C. §1201 (a)(3)(B)
a technological measure “effectively controls access to a work” if the measure, in the ordinary course of its operation, requires the application of information, or a process or a treatment, with the authority of the copyright owner, to gain access to the work.
Basically it just means a DRM (Digital Rights Management) process of sorts.
A lot of people loves to talk about the previous lawsuits on emulators, but note that I never mentioned the emulation being the issue here.
Nintendo is NOT arguing, on a legal level anyway, that emulators are illegal by being one, their communication team does by stifling innovation in their public arguments.
According to 17 U.S.C. §1201 (a)(3)(A), just having encryption is enough to consider that they're protected, and just decrypting is already illegal... this affects a lot more than you think, it's not just Dolphin at this point, it seems we misunderstood a lot of things about the DMCA.
To sum it up more bluntly: I don't feel like the encryption key is the main argument, it's actually about what you do with it that they argue against.
So even if Dolphin removed the Wii Common Key, if they still include the decryption process, even if you provided the key yourself from your own system, EVEN your own Wii dumps, the argument here implies that since you're still decrypting the Wii dump data, this last part is argued to be illegal. This ain't right.
Now apply this to everything else, even if you decrypted the game beforehand so that Dolphin doesn't even decrypt anything, the problem would be moved to the dumper or the decrypter tool doing it. This applies to a lot of systems.
Considering the definition I showed earlier, this seems hard to argue against, however, notice that I never said anything as fact, and insisted that it is Nintendo's argument, legally speaking, I believe this is an important distinction to make.
Exceptions?
The law also explicitly defines exceptions to this, but please read carefully, because this is where I start to really interpret from here:
In 17 U.S.C. §1201 (a)(1)(B), my understanding is that when the protection itself prevents legitimate use, then you are allowed to break it. That said, and this is important: The later subparagraphs defines these paragraphs as something that CANNOT BE USED AS A DEFENSE. This is only there to shield the Library of Congress from any attack, and to allow them to research the various impacts that the protection does and determine rules. Their ruling is also explicitly not allowed to be used as a defense in the text.
After reading a lot of this, I only found one thing that, very honestly, I find quite unclear. Subsection (f) about Reverse Engineering, is particularly showing how much they're not well versed in computer science.
17 U.S.C. §1201 (f) basically says if you're trying to understand how the program works, you are allowed to circumvent the protection, under the idea that you're doing analysis, or...
17 U.S.C. §1201 (f)(2)
for the purpose of enabling interoperability of an independently created computer program with other programs, if such means are necessary to achieve such interoperability, to the extent that doing so does not constitute infringement under this title.
In the case of infringement, I believe this is about copyright in general, as the law suggests this does not affect copyright laws in any way.
So what is interoperability... well let's take the definition from there:
17 U.S.C. §1201 (f)(4)
For purposes of this subsection, the term “interoperability” means the ability of computer programs to exchange information, and of such programs mutually to use the information which has been exchanged.
So we're talking about the ability for a program to exchange information with the work, in this case, a game for example.
...what is this? Programs exchange information all the time. That's even the basis of a computer. Maybe there are other definitions, but frankly I can't be bothered to read even more legalese right now.
With just this, and not taking into account anything else, I feel like this allows emulators to work, they don't really modify the game, they try to run it within a sandbox, where a lot of information is exchanged to make sure the program runs as intended.
Oddly enough this would still make the ability to run those games on a modded Switch still illegal though, while emulators could be allowed to do this.
But make no mistake: This is not a legally tested argument. I need to repeat: This is an interpretation.
Lawsuits literally work with lawyers interpreting information and the laws, and argue. The whole idea of laws being unclear is not necessarily a fault, it's specifically why lawyers exist.
Why now? And what now?
Honestly, as much as Nintendo argued, for the time being, they have not shown any intention to take down Dolphin as a whole.
They could just argue as a scare tactic to prevent Dolphin to reach an even more mainstream status. I doubt Nintendo didn't know about Dolphin for that long.
Until I see an actual DMCA takedown, or worse against Dolphin itself, I'm going to assume Dolphin will stay up for a long time.
Removing the Wii Common Key from Dolphin will not change the situation, as it is the whole decryption process that the argument is about.
Whether Citra, Cemu, Yuzu and Ryujinx could have included the keys or not, the argument would still be the same here.
TL;DR of the complicated part
About the takedown itself:
Valve asked Nintendo about Dolphin on Steam, and they argued that Dolphin is illegal because it decrypts Wii games, and Valve, on their own accord, took down Dolphin from Steam from this.
(Note: GameCube does not use encryption and cannot be impacted by this.)
An actual lawyer also takes this as a warning from Nintendo to Valve according to PC Gamer.
About the argument that Nintendo used against Dolphin:
Encryption Keys are NOT the main point of contention, because...
The encryption itself, as a whole, is argued by Nintendo to be a protection measure.
This means that decrypting the game outside of the intended way by the copyright owner (Nintendo, on a Nintendo Switch) is argued to be illegal by default.
The law, as in how I interpret it, goes in that sense, but for some reason you are allowed to make an additional program that can "interoperate" with the protected works in question and explicitly is allowed to break the protection. This is a vague part, and could be used in defense of Dolphin, potentially.
The final answer can only be answered in a courtroom.
So I spoke recently of a datamine I made from the GBA NSO 1.1.0 update that added Metroid Fusion, and due to my lack of communication skills, I did not really put all of the information that should be known, so let's talk about it a bit better, and while I'm at it, talk about Link Cable support in general in those apps.
Link cable is already working!
First of all, Link cable support is already there and fully working for both GB and GBA NSO. That's how multiplayer (both local and online) works for all the games, they did not hack the games to add online support, instead it's just a smart way of doing it:
The link cable is a way to exchange data in an instant over the wire between at least two Game Boys. The problem is that this data is fully expected to be received by the systems in an instant, there's no way to introduce lag here, meaning if you actually send link cable data over the network (even wireless local), things can go sour really quick and slow down emulation because it really needs this data to go on.
To make multiplayer work better, they most likely resorted to emulating all the players' GB/As on every Switch. As in like, if you play with 4 players online on GBA NSO, all 4 players's Switch would have 4 GBAs being emulated at the same time, all synced beforehand with each player's data to ensure that everything stays, well, in sync, and only manages the player's controller inputs. You just don't see the 3 other players' GBA but they're there. This allows much more stable online (as in giving more latency when needed without lagging behind).
So when I see people getting surprised that Pokémon exchanges worked when other people modded the apps to include different games, it's just that the link cable emulation already worked, it's literally required for multiplayer to begin with, it does not do anything special or different than other games' use of the link cable!
Link cable instructions!
Most people definitely don't notice this (because you guys don't like to check menus!), but when you play multiplayer (local or online), when you press ZL+ZR, you can see this menu.
The middle option, "Starting Linked Play" is where the instructions are, and they are very detailed, on every aspect, from Multiplayer to maybe other features such as Ghost Data exchange for Mario Kart Super Circuit. This feature was available since launch for both GB and GBA NSO!
For GBA, if you are not the first player, you can even press - to go in Single Pak mode and actually play games as if you were playing without the cartridge! The instructions even change if you do this!
I think this is a really cool feature, and very detailed.
Datamine time.
Now that we're on the same page in terms of features, let's talk about everything I found for these apps when I looked into them.
One of the first things I noticed is how the game database file works.
Every game (on both GB and GBA NSO) keeps track of which game they're compatible with in terms of link cable support. Currently, every game either just lists itself, or include "SinglePak" to mean that they're games that can work with the Single-Pak multiplayer mode where only one player can have the cartridge, while the others can actually play multiplayer without needing the cartridge, since they do actually support this in GBA NSO it is definitely important keep track of.
This can get interesting once the compatible titles start to include different games, such as, as I recently found...
Metroid Fusion's compatibility with Metroid: Zero Mission.
Within the japanese app of GBA NSO, in the 1.1.0 update that includes the addition of Metroid Fusion, these 3 screenshots, in this order, are included and are named accordingly for the use of the link cable functionality instructions. Now, there's no instructions to be found here, only these screenshots which are clearly left over.
If I had to guess the instructions, the first screenshot might be the GBA logo screen where you might have to press Start + Select to enable the Multi boot mode so that Metroid: Zero Mission can send over a program over the link cable.
The second screenshot tells you to access the option menu in Metroid: Zero Mission, and select the "Metroid Fusion Link" option (as it is named in the english version), and then proceed as instructed...
And the third screenshot shows a successful link where the option becomes "Metroid Fusion Gallery".
These are instructions from the Metroid Fusion side, hence why they are included alongside Metroid Fusion, but I bet Metroid: Zero Mission might get similar instructions as well.
It is definitely obvious that Metroid: Zero Mission would eventually be part of the library, for me it's just a given, I doubt that it would be soon however.
What I find interesting with this is how they're seriously considering link cable features for games... even for games where the only bonus is just a gallery and literally nothing else. And I dunno about you, but that is honestly interesting.
This are for link cable instructions for a single player game. What about the link cable features between Golden Sun and Golden Sun: The Lost Age, where you can transfer cleared save data between them, such as characters' names, levels, Djinns, stats, items, and so on. You could transfer them with a password... except you have three types of passwords that can transfer more or less things... between 16 characters long... to a whopping 260 characters long!
I don't know about you, but it would be great if you didn't have to do this and just use the link cable feature to start with, don't you think?
Also, The Legend of Zelda Oracle of Ages and Seasons has a feature where if you link one to the other, the plot would be actually connected, like, this is a real feature where actual story changes do happen if you do it. You don't need to do the games in a specific order either. You could also input a password, but doing via link cable could be also faster. If they allow you to do this on your own, it can be legit nice. (And it can get even better if they hack the games to enable GBA Mode... while keeping the GBC colors intact.)
This is the kind of thing I'm excited to see when I do these kinds of finds, this kind of detail that I appreciate in terms of features that I do think are worth it, because I consider if you could do that back then on real hardware... then you should be able to do it with emulation now.
