Ryujinx emulator faces takedown following Nintendo's legal action. Explore the implications for retro gaming enthusiasts.
The Ryujinx emulator, a popular tool for emulating Nintendo Switch games on PCs, has been taken down following a request from Nintendo. This action is part of Nintendo’s broader crackdown on emulation and homebrew communities, particularly as the company seeks to protect its intellectual property and revenue streams.
I don't see Federation giving any more resilience than Git itself. When a host deletes a repository, that's reflected everywhere by Federation. Unless you propose disabling the ability to delete repositories entirely, hosts would be sued if they press the "delete but still federate" button when they can press the "delete" button.
UPDATE #3: According to an official statement on Ryujinx's Discord server, developer gdkchan was contacted by Nintendo and they were offered an agreement to stop working on the emulator project, and while the agreement wasn't confirmed yet, the organization has been entirely removed.
This is not a case of copyright infringement, so I feel comfortable linking these source code mirrors:
The commit hashes on both of those mirrors match the official ones at least until March 2024 (v1.1.1217). I can't vouch for the more recent commits that extend through today (v1.1.1403), but the two mirrors do at least match each other.
Warning: A zip file in the ryujinx_202410 subdir of https://archive.org/download/ claims to have the full git history, but the hashes do not match the original source repo. It's possible that the mismatch is an artifact of some accident, rather than malice, but I would avoid it just in case.
It's not "retro gaming" but that doesn't make emulating switch games a bad thing.
I dump and emulate my own switch games off my own switch because they tend to perform better via emulator on a PC. It's really unfortunate to see Nintendo shut down what ultimately is the best way for us to preserve switch games long-term.