Dolphin Blog: What Happened to Dolphin on Steam?
Dolphin Blog: What Happened to Dolphin on Steam?
Well that blew up, huh? If you follow emulation or just gaming on the whole, you've probably heard about the controversy around the Dolphin Steam release and the Wii Common Key. There's been a lot of conclusions made, and while we've wanted to defend ourselves, we thought it would be prudent to cont...
tl;dr of the statement: Dolphin project is not in any danger but it won't be released on steam.
@nekusoul I want to add that the mentioned Wii keys was always controversial. Dolphin core is part of RetroArch and the RetroArch team never included those keys, because they knew someday it would only mean trouble. That is why Dolphin is still in RetroArch available on Steam. That's why the installation of Dolphin core on RetroArch is a bit more involved, because they do it the safe way. Glad this project will continue to exist.
In the article they actually state they believe it is actually better to have the keys included and not rely on some method of inserting them.
After this situation blew up, we received many requests, and even some demands, to remove all Wii keys from our codebase. We're disappointed that so many people on YouTube and social media didn't even consider that maybe the team had done their research and risk analysis before including the keys, and just assumed that now that it was "pointed out to us" we would remove them. However, we do not think that including the Wii Common Key actually matters - the law could easily be interpreted to say that circumventing a Wii disc's encryption by any means is a violation. As such, it is our interpetation that removing the Wii keys would not change whether the exemption in 17 U.S.C. § 1201(f) applies to us or not.
In fact, we think that offloading decryption tasks onto a potential 3rd party application would make the situation worse for everyone. As such, we believe leaving the keys as they are is the best course of action.
@Creesch Not everyone agrees with this approach. That's why it is controversial. But fact is, it is a risk to include the keys for anyone hosting the emulator, until it's crisp and clear decided by court or by Nintendo. Until then we (the community), or the dev team, nor any lawyer knows with certainty if this is allowed or not. And that is the problem; we don't know.
As expected. There really isn't much to gain to release on Steam given the risk.
I was surprised they did in the first place. Emulators generally want to fly just under the radar
Flatpak works on Steamdeck.
i was surprised that this was even attempted, but i guess someone would eventually try to
I don't know why a few of these emulators require stuff from real hardware in the first place. Bleem didn't and wasn't passing around copyrighted material, yet every other PS1 and PS2 emulators I know of require .BIN files dumped from a real unit. This is the main thing behind Dolphin being taken off Steam; they're distributing a thing that is violating a copyright. Surely there is a way around this Wii key bullshit the same way Bleem was able to operate without an actual playstation BIOS, right?
Did you even read the post? They say that they believe that including the decryption key is not violating anything as its only a small portion of the software.
It was taken off Steam because Valve asked Nintendo how they felt about it - Nintendo obviously didn't like it, so Valve said Dolphin needs to be removed unless they can get permission from Nintendo.
You can operate without a BIOS if you implement a compatible one from scratch. That's how IBM PC clones came to exist.
But an encryption key has to be exactly the same as the original, and although I doubt it can be copyrighted, it is definitely a technological protection measure per DMCA.
DMCA is a horrible law and needs to be gutted.
It's a bit different when encryption gets involved. Unlike the original firmware files, there's no way around putting emcryption keys in an emulator.
@Kolanaki BIOS is software that can be rebuild. It's always better to use the original firmware and BIOS for maximum compatibility. The Wii keys on the other hand are not software you can rebuild. These are key codes to unlock a protection, something like a serial key. So the situation is much different from the Bleem thing.
Would another key work? My guess is no because we're dealing with encryption and not hashing. With hashing you can theoretically find multiple inputs that make the same output. Also I have no idea how many bits the key is. It can easily go from a "get a community driven distributed computing event to crack it" to "have you heard the one about monkeys and Shakespeare?"