Although, as a practical matter it provides some protection in the sense that most malware is probably not designed to do that and will, at worst, fuck up the Windows environment created by Wine / Proton. It’s not something to rely on but it is a bit safer than running something directly on your home machine as a practical matter.

(Although I guess that depends what the malware does. If it searches every document on your system for credit card numbers and sends them to Albania, that would probably still work.)

tbh it’s not really necessary today because there are so many ways to share files. Additionally, the distributed network has major disadvantages:

1. No meaningful reputation. If you download software from a file-sharing service you’re taking a huge risk.

2. Ease of use. It’s a pain in the ass to new users, which means it doesn’t thrive the way it needs to.

And the advantages aren’t what they once were. There’s so many sites nowadays and it’s so easy to set one up that being resistant to takedowns isn’t worth the trade-off.

I mean, the alternative is Ryujinx, which Nintendo has for some reason ignored for now.

(Ryujinx’s devs are much more cautious about things like banning any references to piracy in their discord and avoiding anything that could look like getting money in exchange for access, both of which may have given them less legal exposure.)

As the article mentions, they’re releasing the Switch successor soon. I suspect the real reason for this push is to try and scare people off from developing an emulator for that one, at least during the lifetime of the console - it’s a bit late to try and kill Switch emulation given that nearly fully-functional emulators already exist.

Near (the creator of BSNES / Higan, as well as a fan-translator who worked on Mother 3 and Bahamut Lagoon) was driven to suicide. It’s a serious issue. And I suspect the sort of people who work on labors of love are often the most susceptible because they’re the sort of people who want to listen and who care if people say something is wrong with their work.

Doesn’t Retroarch just use the cores of other emulators? It’s more of a frontend. I think that for early Genesis stuff it uses Gens.

They do occasionally ask for money, but their messaging was always a bit weird.

While I agree their communications could be vague in some respects, I feel like the actual issue was that they were too specific in one way. They’ve been clear for a long time that further donations go to buying games from GOG so they can put them on the site (they were clear that they have enough recurring donations to cover the site itself.) The fact that they do this is why they update so much faster than everyone else, since other sites have to wait for games to appear elsewhere and few people bother to distribute updates outside of major ones.

But I think that this meant that there was a lack of urgency that deterred people from donating. If they just said “give us money if you want us to keep doing this” I suspect people would have donated more.

I wonder what happened, though? Something made them change course over just a few days - as recently as March 11th, they were posting updates on their Mastodon account.

Even weirder, the site now has a link to a changlog, listing games they’ve uploaded but which are not available to anyone except people who were invited.

I think that addition is mostly interesting because it shows the mindset of the site’s owners - they feel bitter and put-upon, like they’ve put a bunch of work into the site and gotten little or nothing back. Maintaining the site must be a lot of work. Not that surprising that they’d decide to go private, I guess.

My understanding is that Ryujinx has been a lot more cautious in general. When TotK was leaked, simply mentioning it in their discord instantly got you the pirate role (which means they won’t give you any sort of support), and continuing to mention it got you a ban. Similarly they crack down hard on even the slightest mention of title keys or the like. They’re very upfront that this is done solely for legal reasons, but they’re also extremely thorough about cracking down on any discussions that could expose them to legal vulnerabilities.

They’re more cautious in a few other ways, too. They have a patreon but you don’t get any newer versions or improved features through it, just cosmetic Discord roles, whereas Yuzu offers the latest releases to Discord subscribers first.

Both of these things (Yuzu devs and moderators openly discussing how to get title keys in its discord, and the fact that they profited off the TotK leak by locking versions updated to support it better behind donations) were specifically mentioned in Nintendo’s lawsuit, so it’s likely that Ryujinx being more cautious around potential legal vulnerabilities is what kept them off of Nintendo’s radar, at least for now.

(Of course, if Nintendo does well enough against Yuzu here they might move on to Ryujinx next - but it makes sense that they’d go after the easier target first.)

It’s not a serious suggestion, they’re just using this as a “fuck off” response to the record labels.