The team behind the upcoming Steam version of the popular GameCube and Wii emulator Dolphin says it was banned by Nintendo, and one emulation expert believes Dolphin is at fault in this case.
In a short statement about Dolphin siteIts creators wrote: “It is with great disappointment that we have to announce that the release of Dolphin on Steam has been indefinitely delayed.
We have been notified by Valve that Nintendo has issued a cease and desist DMCA inference against the Dolphin Steam page, and we have removed Dolphin from Steam until the matter is resolved.
“We are currently examining our options and will have a more in-depth response in the near future.”
It is often said that emulators are legal and that using ROM images for games (which contain copyrighted data) is illegal. Using this argument, some claim that emulators can be perfectly legal in some circumstances, such as playing homebrew games.
However, in the case of Dolphin, a Twitter user @tweet He suggested that the emulator itself is at fault because it includes the Wii Common Key, an encryption key used by the Wii to decrypt games.
This has been supported by the developer and simulation expert Modern classic gameswhich explains in a new video how the Dolphin emulator may not be legally protected, given that its inclusion of a shared Wii key means the software is actively circumventing anti-piracy measures.
LuigiBlood quoted a portion of the Nintendo DMCA takedown which states: “The Dolphin emulator works by combining these encryption keys without Nintendo’s permission and decrypting the ROM at or just before boot time”.
The user also confirmed that the statement was “objectively correct,” adding: “I just checked, the Wii shared key is in the emulator’s source code.”
Quoting the DMCA: “The Dolphin Emulator operates by combining these encryption keys without Nintendo’s permission and decrypting the ROM at or immediately prior to boot time.”
… This is objectively correct. I just verified that the Wii public key is in the emulator source code.
– Yakumono (@LuigiBlood) May 27, 2023
in own video Summing up the situation, Modern Vintage Gamer shows Dolphin’s source code (blurred, to avoid getting DMCA removed himself), and indicates the location of the Wii shared key.
“You can see that these secret keys are pretty much basically hard-coded in the source code,” he notes.
Now, that’s something Nintendo obviously went through and said ‘ah, these are ours, these belong to us, these are in our copyrighted BIOS files. This is not your property, and that is enough for us to now issue a DMCA takedown request.”
Modern Vintage Gamer also suggests that the Dolphin creators may now have to figure out a way around the issue in other versions of Dolphin software currently available, since they all use the same process and are therefore all vulnerable to potential actions by Nintendo.
“To be completely with you guys is a huge loss for Dolphin,” he explained. “They really need to deal with the situation and address this very quickly.
“I’m a little surprised that this only leads to Dolphin being removed from Steam or removed indefinitely, and not the actual GitHub repository because, again, having things like this is a big deal.”
Nintendo recently issued multiple DMCA takedown requests to GitHub to remove a homebrew tool designed to allow Switch games to be played on an emulator.
Lockpick is a tool that allows gamers to dump the unique encryption key from their Switch so it can be used to run backups of Switch games on PC emulators.
While some gamers claim it’s legal to create their own backups—something Nintendo nonetheless disputes in its takedown claims—one of the steps for playing pirated Nintendo Switch games involves downloading someone else’s encryption key, a number of which are available for download online.
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