The rise of the Steam Deck has created a massive increase in gaming on Linux; users can easily install emulators and other programs on the device with a single click by using Flakpak releases. One of the most popular of which being Dolphin Emulator. The Flatpack release of Dolphin, however, is unofficial, as the emulator's team have never made an official build for Linux. That all appears to be changing, though, as one of the official Dolphin devs has gotten in contact with the unofficial build's team, and will be making the repository official, and under the control of the Dolphin Emulator team. A GitHub thread details the process, and notes that going forward, official Dolphin Steam Deck-compatible Flatpack builds will be distributed.

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[ZeroFX]

unoriginal comments like this should be dmca'd tbh

I would go bankrupt, desu.

 

[Captain-Z]

I remember the Dolphin Team consulted with a lawyer who said they don't need to worry about any legal danger because of 17 U.S.C. § 1201(f)(2), which states:

"...a person may develop and employ technological means to circumvent a technological measure, or to circumvent protection afforded by a technological measure, in order to enable the identification and analysis under paragraph (1), or 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."

And 17 U.S.C. § 1201(f)(3) says:

"The information acquired through the acts permitted under paragraph (1), and the means permitted under paragraph (2), may be made available to others if the person referred to in paragraph (1) or (2), as the case may be, provides such information or means solely for the purpose of enabling interoperability of an independently created computer program with other programs, and to the extent that doing so does not constitute infringement under this title or violate applicable law other than this section."

Which means that Dolphin could likely be engaging in fair use by utilizing the encryption keys. If Dolphin was really worried about legal danger, they would have removed the keys and made it so you have to find the key yourself. But they didn't because it's basically a non-issue. The Wii Common Key has been all over the internet for over 15 years now. We all know this, even Nintendo knows it. They just didn't do anything about it until last year because they didn't want it on the Steam Store. After they cancelled the Steam release, Nintendo left Dolphin alone. And IIRC Nintendo hired some people who worked on Dolphin to help develop the official Wii emulator for Nvidia Shield.

To be fair, Nintendo didn't engage in legal action against Dolphin, they simply told Valve they believed it violates their copyright. Ultimately Value made the decision to keep it off steam. "Legal" isn't alway "good for business".

Besides, the yuzu situation has demonstrated Nintendo's position on circumventing TPMs. It's not that circumvention in itself is illegal, rather the issue is that certain applications of circumvention can enable piracy and therefore damage Nintendo. That may sound ridiculous, but the DMCA does in fact give the government power to outlaw programs they consider to be "enablers" of piracy, which is what Nintendo was arguing for.

 

[MrQQ]

It's always ran well on the deck. I'm tempted to wipe windows and just use steamos.

why would you not? windows is trash on the deck for gaming. Steamos has much better performance

 

[K3Nv2]

why would you not? windows is trash on the deck for gaming. Steamos has much better performance

Driver support. Unsure how well it'll perform haven't looked into as much yet.

 

[chrisrlink]

This is one of the two big problems I have with Flatpak/Flathub, it would be nice if more of the packages on it were 'official' or at least 'authorised' by the original devs.

Flatpak isn't perfect, but compared to some of the hassle I've had in the past with alternatives (especially compile from source), I like the overall concept.

yeah i had to build torzu as a flatpak (fucking nintendo) and i uploaded it somewhere for personal use only because it was such a pain to compile