After a rough week, the emulation and homebrew scene continues to suffer major losses. As of today, homebrew developer Steveice10's GitHub repository has been deleted. A known quantity in the 3DS homebrew scene, Steveice10 created important tools for the system such as a modified sysupdater, a port of GBC emulator GameYob to the 3DS, and most importantly, FBI title manager, which allows users to install .CIA format 3DS titles and homebrew.

FBI has not been updated since 2020, and was considered feature-complete, with its source code available and the project archived, but it was suddenly removed from GitHub today, along with all of his other projects. The exact reasoning behind the removal isn't known, though the timing implies it may be related to other events happening in the emulation and homebrew scene recently.

Source

 

[J-Will]

https://archive.org/details/godmode9-all-versions

 

[MightySashiman]

Speaking as someone who is currently playing a hacked Wii U as I am typing this (with games installed via WiiU USB Helper), I agree with you. This whole "NiNtEnDo Is ThE aNtIcHrIsT" attitude/sentiment is quite absurd, if you ask me. Do I think that Nintendo can be too heavy-handed in defending its IPs? Yes. However, if you invested significant time, effort, and money into creating something (with no guarantee that it would succeed), would you want people ripping it off/being able to rip it off willy-nilly? Ultimately, it's not about the money--it's about the principle of the matter, something I believe that the whole "nInTeNdO iS tHe DeViL" crowd either doesn't understand, or refuses to acknowledge.

On another note, those who march under the "muh game preservation" banner fail to realize that we are not entitled to even that. This is ultimately a LUXURY and not a necessity. While I do think it would be highly unfortunate if legitimate efforts at video game preservation become collateral damage due to the supposed "war on emulation", as I previously stated--we are not entitled to that.

Regarding the Yuzu dev team, one of the reasons they got nailed was because they flew too close to the sun: their software literally allowed you to play leaked copies of one of Nintendo's biggest upcoming releases. Also, they had a lot of their stuff locked behind a (Patreon) paywall. If you are trying to make money off something that doesn't belong to you, then you're basically waving a red flag RIGHT IN THE BULL'S FACE.

well said. I especially don't understand where that "preservation" entitlement comes from. Stuff drops into public domain after at least 70 years (sometimes even 100 years). It's a pity, it's a shame, it's nervewracking (call it as you wish) to see companies not see more than a revenue stream in their games... but it's just the hard reality of how the world works.

 

[jeffyTheHomebrewer]

I hope not. And oh my god I haven't seen you in a long time. It feels so good to finally see you again.

Have we.. met each other? Because honestly you seem cool but I can't remember ya..

 

[tkhn23]

Bloody hell nintendo

 

[BlusterBong]

Speaking as someone who is currently playing a hacked Wii U as I am typing this (with games installed via WiiU USB Helper), I agree with you. This whole "NiNtEnDo Is ThE aNtIcHrIsT" attitude/sentiment is quite absurd, if you ask me. Do I think that Nintendo can be too heavy-handed in defending its IPs? Yes. However, if you invested significant time, effort, and money into creating something (with no guarantee that it would succeed), would you want people ripping it off/being able to rip it off willy-nilly? Ultimately, it's not about the money--it's about the principle of the matter, something I believe that the whole "nInTeNdO iS tHe DeViL" crowd either doesn't understand, or refuses to acknowledge.

On another note, those who march under the "muh game preservation" banner fail to realize that we are not entitled to even that. This is ultimately a LUXURY and not a necessity. While I do think it would be highly unfortunate if legitimate efforts at video game preservation become collateral damage due to the supposed "war on emulation", as I previously stated--we are not entitled to that.

Regarding the Yuzu dev team, one of the reasons they got nailed was because they flew too close to the sun: their software literally allowed you to play leaked copies of one of Nintendo's biggest upcoming releases. Also, they had a lot of their stuff locked behind a (Patreon) paywall. If you are trying to make money off something that doesn't belong to you, then you're basically waving a red flag RIGHT IN THE BULL'S FACE.

Mob mentaility is too strong, even in some of the messages that came after yours and the other threads related to this shitstorm, the truth of the matter is that Cita was killed because there was no attempt to distance it from Yuzu in terms of the dev team (Tropical Haze), and the person behind the FBI Homebrew was also working with Tropical Haze and thus likely had to comply as well.

Combine this with the fact that Yuzu would have been slammed anyways because of the telemetry (regardless of the consent the user may have gave), which undoubtedly would have outed any pirates who left it on and then the settlement require TH hand everything related to Yuzu and by extension Citra over to the Big N, and thus anyone who worked with the former wouldn't have any reason not to pull anything that could have been had their attention turned to legally.

If only Tropical Haze wern't so brazen with how they tried to get anything off of Yuzu and Citra while people didn't point to Yuzu and the leaked stuff running on things like the steam deck and treat it like gods gift to man while unwittingly doing the legal and homebrew equivalent of the meme of Timmy Turner wishing to god that something terrible would happen because it'd be funny.

 

[dudeguy2022]

Hopefully this didn't attract the FBI.

He got sued on copyright infringement

 

[smf]

This sounds more like something he did willingly to avoid the possibility of future trouble. Also atmosphere is quite literally designed to not allow for piracy by default. To the point where SciresM refuses to include any kind of sigpatching for it by default.

It still violates the DMCA and facilitates piracy, no matter how arms length SciresM pretends to be from it.

 

[Ryab]

It still violates the DMCA and facilitates piracy, no matter how arms length SciresM pretends to be from it.

There is no safer way to handle it than he is though.

 

[Error-1-2435-8325]

Good thing I still have it on my 3DS.

 

[ScaryHobbit]

well said. I especially don't understand where that "preservation" entitlement comes from. Stuff drops into public domain after at least 70 years (sometimes even 100 years). It's a pity, it's a shame, it's nervewracking (call it as you wish) to see companies not see more than a revenue stream in their games... but it's just the hard reality of how the world works.

Absolutely on both yours and Maverick's reply.
We've really taken the emulation scene for granted without considering the legal consequences, to the point where I'd rather it go back to being a more obscure hobby.
The more mainstream people try to jump into emulation and exploit it for money, the more attention it gains and the more likely it is that emulation will be banned entirely as companies will (rightly) freak out over piracy concerns.
The whole "preservation" argument is disingenuous as well. Many companies can and do preserve their games, but the crowd still gets mad because they aren't allowed to play the games the way they want. (I've seen so, so many of these arguments devolve into "I just want to play these games for FREE!")

It makes me less sympathetic about the "preservation movement" and more want to focus only on backing up my own purchases... and mine alone.
I paid good money to get to where I am at now at just the right time. I will do what's needed to preserve my investment as legally as possible, while everyone else screeches at corporations for enforcing copyright law.

 

[smf]

There is no safer way to handle it than he is though.

That is a different argument. I agree that he may have done enough to avoid nintendo suing him, but that doesn't mean that what he is doing is legal.

The suyu developers have a bigger issue, because the lawsuit makes it illegal to distribute yuzu source and binaries. If it was as easy as removing the name and credits then movie pirates would just remove them.

Post automatically merged: Mar 13, 2024

The whole "preservation" argument is disingenuous as well. Many companies can and do preserve their games, but the crowd still gets mad because they aren't allowed to play the games the way they want. (I've seen so, so many of these arguments devolve into "I just want to play these games for FREE!")

That is partly true, though some people are more interested in preservation than playing games. I'm not going to say what the majority is, because I haven't gotten enough data. It could easily be that the majority are only interested in fr33 g4mezzzz!!!!1

 

[auntnadia]

I guess it’s time to go back underground

 

[Bunjolio]

Fucking cuck pussy

tomoko sighting

 

[IGotABIGGGQUestion]

Everyone, the repo is still up, it's just for some reason under a different account, same goes for his other repos.
This is the same repo, https://github.com/PMArkive/FBI-1.
It can be found from going to the archive.org page for the FBI forks going to the fork on GitHub now and looking at where it's forked from.

 

[UltraHurricane]

well said. I especially don't understand where that "preservation" entitlement comes from. Stuff drops into public domain after at least 70 years (sometimes even 100 years). It's a pity, it's a shame, it's nervewracking (call it as you wish) to see companies not see more than a revenue stream in their games... but it's just the hard reality of how the world works.

Absolutely on both yours and Maverick's reply.
We've really taken the emulation scene for granted without considering the legal consequences, to the point where I'd rather it go back to being a more obscure hobby.
The more mainstream people try to jump into emulation and exploit it for money, the more attention it gains and the more likely it is that emulation will be banned entirely as companies will (rightly) freak out over piracy concerns.
The whole "preservation" argument is disingenuous as well. Many companies can and do preserve their games, but the crowd still gets mad because they aren't allowed to play the games the way they want. (I've seen so, so many of these arguments devolve into "I just want to play these games for FREE!")

It makes me less sympathetic about the "preservation movement" and more want to focus only on backing up my own purchases... and mine alone.
I paid good money to get to where I am at now at just the right time. I will do what's needed to preserve my investment as legally as possible, while everyone else screeches at corporations for enforcing copyright law.

I think it's more disingenuous to say that game companies are doing an adequate job at persevering their games. 80% of all games ever released aren't commercially available anymore. There are titles that have never been re-released or have had bad remasters/ports cause they lost the source code along with games that would have otherwise been lost if it wasn't backed up through dubious means (using tools you should be thankful for to back-up your own purchases) Companies have shown they can't be trusted to preserve their own history

I don't blame people who'd rather fire up retroarch with no fuss then wait for Nintendo to release the same 20 greatest hits piecemeal again, only to have to buy them again when they make new hardware that may or may not have worse emulation and with less features