TL;DR A representative for Nintendo has sent a DMCA notice to every Switch emulator on GitHub.
Switch emulator repositories are still up, but likely not for long.
Active projects are still hosted outside GitHub, but they may be harder to find in the future.
After shutting down Yuzu and Ryujinx last year, Nintendo has been surprisingly hands-off when it comes to the many forks that cropped up last year. That period of peace has now come to an end, with the company sending DMCA notices to literally every Nintendo Switch emulator and fork that’s currently hosted on GitHub.
The notice was sent yesterday and includes Eden, Citron, Kenji-NX, and MeloNX, as well as projects that are no longer active, such as Sudachi and Skyline. As of writing, the repositories are still online, but it likely won’t be long before they are removed from the website.
While the GitHub pages are likely to be shut down, active projects are also hosted elsewhere.
Switch emulation development saw a major resurgence early last year, with Yuzu forks like Citron and Eden picking up where the Yuzu team left off after it was abruptly shut down by Nintendo. Yuzu, being open-source, has always been open to new teams creating forks with new features, but these projects were far more organized than early efforts like Suyu.
Nintendo’s argument for taking down Switch emulators has always related directly to the circumvention of technological protection measures (TPMs), which include cryptographic keys in the console itself that are used to decrypt games. Neither Citron nor Eden bundles these keys with the emulator, with users required to mod their own consoles to import their own keys and firmware.
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