Some Thoughts on Yuzu and Citra

[Music] hey everybody this is renal gamecore I came into the studio this morning planning on making an emulation guide like I would normally do but there's been so many things happening over the past 24 hours that I think it's better suited to actually do a check-in video so I want to talk about everything that's happened over the past day or so and where I see things going both for my channel as well as just emulation in general there's a lot to talk about here and I've got a couple bullet points here but otherwise it's not going to be a very fancy video at all I'm just going to mostly talk about some of my thoughts when it comes to Yuzu and Citra and all the things that have happened so without any further delay let's just go ahead and Dive Right In okay let's start with what happened so last week Nintendo dropped a lawsuit on Yuzu that's a Nintendo switch emulator and it was settled out of court yesterday for $2.4 million now in addition to the monetary settlement there was also other stipulations so one of them was that Yuzu released a statement basically saying that they they were going to close down everything because they now feel that their app encourages piracy it was very kind of loyer esque in their wording and everything like that but all of the same the damage was done now on top of that like I mentioned in their statement they said they were going to drop everything and they did so their GitHub is closed their website is down their source code has been removed and those assets have now been seized by Nintendo now the other side of that coin that a lot of us did not see coming is that they also did the same for the Citra emulator that's the 3DS emulator you might be wondering why use was closing down and then Citra was also a part of that and that's because the main developer worked on both and so I think that there was probably some sort of connection there and so yes they've both been dropped all together and so yesterday was a pretty crazy day a lot of people were going on to like archive websites and trying to download the latest versions so that way they at least had the most modern version for their own personal use I think the major damage here is going to be the fact that there's no further development we'll talk about that later but as it stands right now there was just a lot of scrambling happening within the emulation world and and I think there were a lot of people who were just upset that it happened in the first place you know it's kind of taking away their ability to play certain games or whatever and a lot of people were wondering why it happened as well so let's talk about that next now bear in mind there's a lot of conjecture here and a lot of things going on but I think one of the major arguments that I saw on Twitter and social media and whatnot was that this happened because people were emulating a modern console it's okay to emulate something that no longer is available for purchase but something like a Nintendo switch is and so because of that there's just an additional scrutiny to that and I totally respect that I think that a lot of people don't want to touch a modern system because it doesn't feel like Retro Game emulation or game preservation at that point now there are some development teams who have a Hardline in the sand and I totally respect that as well Basera is one of those examples they don't officially support Nintendo switch emulation at all because it's a current console so everything goes up to like Wii U and PS3 with all their software and documentation it is possible to sideload it there are videos out there to show you how to do that at least as of yesterday before Yuzu shut down and so there are ways or there were ways to actually play those on bacera but you had to do it yourself and I think that was a pretty good stance for those development teams so I do agree that with modern consoles there's an increased level of scrutiny specifically when it comes to piracy you know people who are Bad actors downloading these games without owning them in the first place that does cut into Nintendo's profits and that does increase the scrutiny where they're trying to make as much money as possible now it does get wonky when you think about Citra which also closed down yesterday that's a Nintendo 3DS emulator and the eShop for that closed last year so there's no legitimate way to buy eShop games anymore the only way to actually play them is to do it through emulation or to buy a secondhand cartridge neither of those are going to make Nintendo any money in the first place so they've kind of abandoned their own console and so that's a little bit weirder where there's only one real way to actually play these games and even then that emulator closed down too now another example people were giving was the fact that Yuzu itself was making money off their patreon page and this one's also a little bit nuanced and pretty sensitive so I assume people are going to disagree with me about this as well when it comes down to it Yuzu had an early Access program where if you were a patron and I was a patron then you would get early access to the app and all the new development they've been doing on the app and emulator now the thing that kind of made it really kind of weird is the sense that if you think about like tears of the Kingdom for example when that first released the Early Access people had codebase that actually made the game work and so once the game was out you could use the EA version of Yuzu and then play the game if you didn't pay for it and you had just the regular version you had to wait about 2 weeks until the code was updated and so there was like this twoe pay wall basically that if you wanted to play Tears to the kingdom on Yuzu then you had to be a patron and so as a result they're basically forcing you to pay or pay Walling it in order for you to be able to play that game that's only one game in particular for me personally I just like having the most updated things and so that's why I always use Patron that way I could have like the Early Access version for showing all my Hardware demonstrations and so yes in that specific use case I think that Yuzu was profiting off a specific game and their emulator tool now if everything was just free and open source there was no Early Access version for example then I think that that wouldn't have been much of an argument for Nintendo to kind of make but because Yuzu set themselves up like that I understand why they probably were hesitant to try to bring it to court now the third part that I wanted to mention within this section about why it happened in the first place is that I think that content creators myself included are at least partially responsible for this kind of all blowing up in the first place after all we've got these videos out there that show these amazing things you can do with Nintendo switch emulation and I think that encouraged people to seek it out or maybe buy a handheld that could play Nintendo switch now I think there are a lot of reasons why it's exciting to emulate Nintendo switch and I still kind of Stand by that after all I love playing this on my steam deck or any other handheld but I also love the enhancements that come from emulation for example if you have good enough Hardware you can enhance the graphical resolution or the frame rates or you can even Implement sheets using these emulators and the mods and everything else like that and I've always really enjoyed that specifically if we're talking about like tears of the Kingdom or breath of the wild I love the fact that I could use a cheat that would increase the durability of my weapons for example that way I didn't have to sit there and search out a new weapon all the time I could just play the game on my own terms and so I love that idea of enhancing the gameplay experience through emulation now whether or not we should have been doing that on a modern console is a whole different story and I totally understand both sides of those arguments when I was making those videos the thought that I had was well I'm never going to directly encourage any sort of piracy or anything else like that or even emulation in general I just wanted to kind of show it as a hardware Benchmark if you do want to do the thing where you legitimately dump your cartridge and all that kind of stuff again something I never showed on my website or on my YouTube channel then I would show how the hardware would work on specific devices if you had that all set up now I think like with the Yuzu app there is ways that this is also enhancing or encouraging people to two pirate games and so I totally understand that responsibility there and it makes sense you know just when you show off something there are going to be bad actors out there who are going to do something illegal with that information whether or not we should have showed that information in the first place is obviously Up For Debate and I'd love to hear your comments about that down below and I'm definitely seeing that experience Ripple through the emulation community over the past 24 hours for example if you go on like the Odin subreddit you can see a bunch of people saying I was about to buy this thing but should I do it now because I planned on playing Nintendo switch and 3DS games on it so they're people are questioning whether or not they want to get this device in the first place because some of those enhanced features they were planning on buying it for are no longer options at least easily and so I understand why people are hesitant about that and that's part of one of the reasons why I'm making this video in the first place okay now that we talked about what happened and why it happened at least in my opinion let's talk about why this matters in the first place there are quite a few people out there who are expressing grief or loss in the sense that they no longer have these future updates and they're worried about what this means for emulation in general so let's start with the Nintendo switch now I have an Odin 2 and I love playing switch games on it it enhances the experience way over the original hardware for example I can play games in docked mode in a handheld that means I can play them in 1080P they're going to look great and the buttons all feel great as well on top of that I can play other systems on that same handheld so it's awesome to be able to turn this thing on and play Nintendo and Genesis and Super Nintendo and GameCube and PS2 and then also Nintendo switch games on it it's like an all-in-one package I only have to take one handheld with me when I like go on a trip so that has always been something that's been pretty awesome about Nintendo switch emulation on something like the Odin 2 and so for me it does feel like a little bit of a loss in the sense that if there's a future Nintendo switch game that comes out and it's not compatible with the current or latest version of Yuzu then I'm just going to be out of luck and so I get that right but then also there is a bright spot in the sense that you can still play it on original Hardware you can buy these games and play them as Nintendo intends for you to play them so in that sense it's not a huge loss for me because we're not losing these games outright we're just losing an enhanced feature of playing Uzu or other switch emulators on the Odin 2 now when it comes to Citra the Nintendo 3DS emulator that one feels like a more legitimate loss to me if you think about it there were many games that were released on the eShop only which means they didn't have a cartridge made for them you can't buy them secondhand and with the eShop clothes there's no legitimate way to buy those digital games instead you have to use an alternative shop with original Hardware Weare or you have to resort to emulation and Citra emulation was not perfect there were many games that were not fully compatible which means that with no longer having any further development those games may not become more compatible in the future and so there will be games that just are going to be unplayable unless you have the original hardware and you happen to have bought it on the eShop already before they shut it down those are the only ways that you can legitimately play those games and that I think population is going to be shrinking over time now thankfully Nintendo announced their 3DS eShop closure and and so a lot of people saw that coming and from a preservation standpoint they were people who backed up the entire eShop and so as a result some of these options are still out there just not in a legitimate way that Nintendo would actually approve after all they want you to buy with their hardware and then play Only In the ways that they allow but the thing is it's not a very customer friendly way of doing things to give you an example I bought the Nintendo Wii you know back in 2006 or whatever and they opened up the Virtual Console shop like in 2007 and man I spent so much money buying all those digital games at the time I didn't know anything about emulation and so I love the idea of being able to play Nintendo Super Nintendo Nintendo 64 games on my Nintendo Wii now the experience wasn't that great but all the same it was super cool to just have them all together all of a sudden the Wii U comes out they close down the Virtual Console in the eShop on the wiii and then all of a sudden I'm supposed to buy those games all over again if I wanted to play them nowadays things are a little bit different with the Nintendo switch store like you have to have the online service to be able to play those games that they allow you to play play so all the same it's kind of the same thing where we having to Reby these games and it's one of those where it's all on Nintendo's terms this isn't a preservation thing they're just kind of owning it themselves and deciding which games you get to play from your past and which way you can actually play them and at some point I do expect the switch eShop to close and there are thousands of games on that system and so I'm really worried about what's going to happen from a preservation standpoint at that point you know you think about these Indie developers who put these games on the Nintendo ehhop and then all of a sudden if the eShop closes there's no way to buy those games they're just out of luck all that work that they made is just gone into The Ether and so that's where preservation comes into play and emulation as well and so that's kind of one of the things that I see as being like why this matters in the first place in that emulation can be used for preservation where we can keep these games running and everything else like that I would love for my kids to be able to play some random eShop game that they played as a kid as an adult like I do with my NES games you know I think it's super awesome to be able to revisit those memories and I want to have my kids have that same experience you know 20 30 years in the future so yeah I think that's why it matters in the first place so let's talk about where I see things going and what's going to be coming up next there's a few things to talk about here and I think this section will be pretty long the first is the fact that we have other emulators out there for example Ryu Jinx is a Nintendo switch emulator I've never really liked that one as much as Yuzu I think the interface is just not quite as good but it still works okay and I'm really curious to see how this is going to play out in the future in terms of lawsuits from Nintendo and things like that Ryu Jinx is mostly based out of Brazil and so I'm not sure how international law is going to work in that regard but I am curious to see how that works so if you are really desperate to play Nintendo switch games in a legitimate way then Ryu Jinx is still available and is probably going to be further actively developed even their developers have said so there's also a 3DS emulator called Panda 3DS that's been in the works for quite some time I don't think it's publicly available yet but I do expect that to release at some point now it's going to be very interesting to see how this all kind of plays out when it comes to you know Yuzu and Citra being shut down and Yuzu being fined you know $2.4 million how many people are going to want to get involved in emulation at that point with those specific consoles if other people are getting smacked down with monetary issues then I don't see other people like going and lining up to want to develop for the Alternatives because of that fear of maybe having some sort of monetary punishment there's also a Citra 3DS core on retroarc so I'm curious to see how that's going to play out as well again I have no idea how that's going to work but I'm just kind of sitting on the sidelines to see what kind of options we're going to have in the future and like I mentioned you know there are people out there who have backed up and preserved the latest builds of like Citra and Yuzu so those are available for people they're not going to be further developed and Nintendo now has that source code but it'll be interesting to see if there are any Forks that come out out of that you know people talk about like emulation being a Hydra where you cut off one head other heads pop up so I'm really interested to see how that's all going to play out in the future the other thing to look out is going to be the other softwares that are associated with the emulation for example something like emud which pre-installs the emulators for you or like emulation station which is used as a front end allows you to launch these things now emid has already come out and dropped support for Yuzu in Citra on muud so when you try to install muud it's not going to pre-install those for you or anything else like that but they have approached it with a different thing and I think this is kind of unique they're calling it like bring your own Yuzu so for example if you already have your Yuzu copy and you install it the configurations will still work and I think that's a pretty good middle ground where they're not actively encouraging anyone to use Yuzu or anything else like that but the support is still going to be there they're not at least deleting it outright from their app right now now something else I've noticed that I didn't expect and I think this is a result of the things that have happened over the past 24 hours is that drastic the Nintendo DS emulator this is available on the Google Play Store for usually five or six bucks it's now gone free and so this may be something as a result of that where they're like you know what what we should be making money off Nintendo work and so as a result we're just going to make this free and the thing is a bummer about that is that you know these developers should be compensated for their time not necessarily to pay for the app specifically but maybe you know some sort of donation or things like that and so I do hope that there's still a way to compensate these people who are putting in all this time and effort for preservation and emulation and all other kind of stuff and finally the last aspect within this whole kind of what's next section is the fact that we're going to be experiencing what I'm going to call brain drain here in the emulation Community these developer teams who were part of like Yuzu and Citra had spent Years Learning all that stuff the skill set that they had in order to emulate on those systems all the ins and outs so for example when a new C comes out they could figure out okay this is the same problem we've seen with other games and they use that wisdom to kind of move things further and that's all like that kind of knowledge thing and that's going to be a loss because those people are no longer to be working on those apps and so it makes me worried about how emulation development will happen happen with those systems going forward now there are be people who are making Forks of like Yuzu for example there's one called nuu and suzu they probably already been taken down by the time of this video but all the same there are people who are interested in kind of continuing that work but they don't have that background where they've been working on it for years so there's going to be a time where just kind of the development kind of slows and that's that brain drain aspect and so I'm a little bit worried about that and what that means for preservation and emulation in the future specifically with those two platforms we'll see how that goes in the future though okay so the last topic I want to talk about in this video is what does it mean for this channel for retro gamecore in particular what things am I going to change about the way that I make content specifically when it comes to Yuzu and Citra you know these two emulators now first thing is I do not plan on taking down any of my old videos now I don't know if Nintendo's going to go on a rampage and start taking things down I'll have to adapt accordingly at that point but as it stands I don't really like taking down old videos in the first place and so I'm going to keep all those up there is no specific like switch jailbreak video or anything else like that so I think that in general most of my stuff is going to be Hardware performance testing anyway with those specific emulators so I'm not worried about it in that kind of stuff and so I'll be keeping those videos up now I am going to change the links on my websites I have a bunch of written guides and a lot of those will link to like Citra and Yuzu and those links are dead at this point so I'll probably be removing all those dead links I don't plan on removing the content you know like saying hey this is the settings that I recommend for this specific app or anything else like that really I'm just going to remove those links and that's about it now when it comes to Hardware testing this is where things get a little bit weird after all I do a lot of Hardware reviews you know I have a Mini PC or a handheld PC or things like that and so I will use these platforms as a way of showing what the performance potential is going to be for any of those handhelds now Nintendo is not the only system that I emulate on this channel you know I have like Xbox 360 and PS3 emulation all those are different benchmarks you know there are different nuances to each of those emulators so I like to show a little bit of each of them in each of my reviews now I'm probably going to change things up I don't plan on doing like Nintendo switch or 3DS emulation in the future unless we have a viable emulation option that I think is going to be relatively safe to show off both for my channel and for users and I've heard a lot of people saying you know you should just treat it like Aether sx2 that's the PS2 emulator on Android it just stopped development the developer left and we have like a final build and that's the one that I use for all my testing now it's a little bit different when it comes to Yuzu and Citra I could yes use those latest build builds and say okay here's the last build that we have here's how the emulation performance is going to be and I'm still kind of thinking about that but I think there's a distinction between the two Aether sx2 quit because the developer didn't want to develop anymore so it just kind of got stalled right then and there now Yuzu and Citra were taken down by Nintendo those assets were seized by Nintendo and so that is a different story that's me saying like in the face of Nintendo hey these are your apps now but I'm just going to still show them off and so that's a little bit further across Ross the line that I'm comfortable showing and so as it stands right now I don't plan on showing Citra and Yuzu emulation at least directly in my Hardware reviews for the time being but I may think of other clever ways to do that and so if you have any ideas again let me know in the comments down below this is an ongoing conversation at this point now another thing I've been thinking about with this channel just because of this whole Fiasco over the past 24 hours is getting back to Hardware videos about the original 3DS now I did a few videos about that last year including how to jailbreak a 3DS how to play 3DS games you know like dumping the cartridge onto an SD card things like that and then also how to play original DS games on a 3DS as well now at the time I kind of stopped all my video making at that point because Nintendo released a new update for the 3DS that basically broke a lot of the jailbreaking measures and so I paused everything to allow those jailbreakers to kind of figure out a new method and kind of update their own guides and then also I thought well if Nintendo is actively updating this device even if it is just to discourage you know jailbreaking it's still something that I kind of wanted to pause and back off from but I think that now is probably a good time to get back into that and so I do have a couple ideas for that including Retro Game emulation on a 3DS including Game Boy Advance but then also I bought a Japanese region 3DS you know last year and I still haven't really touched it because I wanted to wait for that whole jailbreaking thing to set up and so I think that's another possible video option right there is you know the 3DS's that you can buy from Japan are in better shape and usually are cheaper and then how to show how to get that working in English and other language es so that way you can enjoy that as well anyway that's really about it for this video I just kind of wanted to talk through all the things that have happened over the past 24 hours or past week really and just what that all kind of means for this Channel and emulation in general I hope this was informative in the sense that I kind of touched on some aspects you maybe haven't thought of and maybe there are things that I hadn't thought of either so let me know down in the comments I've said that like 10 times in this video already but I do want this to be a continuing conversation where we all just kind of figure this out together now I get it there are opinions all over the place you shouldn't be emulating Nintendo switch you should be it's better to play him on Odin 2 or whatever I get all those arguments I'm not here to say that one's better than the other what I am here to say is just how are we going to do this how are we going to preserve these games how are we going to emulate these how are my kids going to be able to play these games in the future and how can we set that up right now anyway as always thank you for watching and be sure to like And subscribe if you found this helpful and we will see you next time happy [Music] gaming [Music]

Channel: Retro Game Corps

Views: 108,332

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Id: HfdopSd8MSo

Length: 21min 36sec (1296 seconds)

Published: Tue Mar 05 2024