Yeah I believe taking donations was the legal downfall of some otherwise legal emulators on the market.

It was, it's so stupid and morally illegal to ask donation for stuff you don't own

johnnyanmac a day ago | parent | next [-]

I don't know. You're not asking for donations to keep maintaining a product you don't own. You're asking for donations as someone who put their services to work.

Consider a tricky grey area: you have a patreon for your youtube channel and expect most people to be donating so you can keep making videos (you get maybe, $50 a month). You also make random mods on the side. One of your mods blows up, and you get a bunch of attention. Which includes donators giving you hundreds thanking you for the mod. Are you now taking "blood money" because your tip jar for youtube content now has financial incentives to make more gaming mods?

I personally treat the tip jar as such. As long as you're not saying "pay me this much and I'll make X mod", I'm donating to a person, not a potentially morally grey cause. Maybe the Nintendo lawyer disagree with me, but that feeling has always been mutual.

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Crabber a day ago | parent [-]

What is the service here though, if it's not just "here's a way to play a copyrighted game without paying"?

I'm sure this project took a lot of work and effort, but legally/morally speaking that's beside the point of where the value is and who should be charging money for it.

Would this website still be popular if it was just an online emulator that was capable of playing NFSU2 in the browser, in theory, so long as you uploaded your own legal copy? I'm not sure so many people would be visiting it or posting about it, to me 100% of the value of this site is just being able to play a great game that other people made, for free. The actual emulator itself is almost irrelevant to the value, if you get what I'm saying.

Would many people visit a movie piracy site if it didn't actually have any movies but just had a blank video player that was capable of playing movies, in theory, if you uploaded one you already owned?

	▲	ndriscoll a day ago \| parent \| next [-]
		Given that the legally entitled publisher doesn't want to continue to publish it, and hasn't for many years, offering it for free does seem to be a value add? People can enjoy something they otherwise couldn't. That's value. At some point (and 22 years seems more than the proper amount to me), that legal entitlement also just becomes unreasonable even if they did still publish it. I don't see how there could be a moral issue here.
	▲	johnnyanmac a day ago \| parent \| prev [-]
		>who should be charging money for it. I don't see a tip jar as "charging money", though. Not unless the service is behind the paywall. There's thousands of people using this website and it's pretty safe to imagine 99+% did not even click through to the tip jar. >Would this website still be popular if it was just an online emulator that was capable of playing NFSU2 in the browser, in theory, so long as you uploaded your own legal copy? 1. Given the nature of the emulator crowd, that's not as unexpected an obstacle as you think. Someone running an emulator should be used to procuring a backup. 2. Why do the views/plays matter if there's no monetization? There's no ads that incentivizes web traffic. >Would many people visit a movie piracy site if it didn't actually have any movies but just had a blank video player that was capable of playing movies? So, a plex server? Or rather, the APIs used to track movie covers and metadata that Plex pulls from? Seems like the answer is "not as many as a piracy site, but still many"? But this seems far from my main argument at this point about tip jars. Yes, people have tip jars and may still want to err on the side of caution and make themselves as legally compliant as possi. Fanart, fanfiction, and remixes are technically a gray area with our current copyright system, but the powers that be determined this beneficial advertising (or just plain harmless and not worth fighting in court) and let it go. Clean room decompilations are the only aspect of "modding" that seems to have any particular legal protections, but still a particularly low one.

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AlAjem a day ago | parent | prev [-]

Emulators are legally protected and asking for donations is just fine, the fly in the ointment for emulation of modern consoles is that they require firmware and decryption keys extracted from real consoles to actually do their advertised function, the emulator might tell you that it is your responsibility to extract the required files from your own console to protect itself but just like game "backups" it's much easier to download the required files someone else has ripped and uploaded to the internet.

The stupid part was paywalling the latest version of the emulator behind a Patreon subscription which opened them up to being taken down by Nintendo, although it was likely they would have been taken down anyway just because the Switch 2 was nearing launch and they didn't want Switch emulator developers to get started on the Switch 2.