Nintendo manages to get Steam to remove the Dolphin video game emulator by appealing to US copyright law

May 30. (Portaltic/EP) –

Nintendo has appealed to the US Digital Age Copyright Act (DMCA) for Valve to remove from its cloud video game platform, Steam, the emulator known as Dolphin Emulator.

A emulator is a ‘software’ that has the capacity to simulate the functionalities of a ‘hardware’ or another ‘software’. In this way, a Game Boy or Android emulator for PC, for example, allows you to use console games or mobile applications and services on a computer.

These emulators work using reverse engineering, a legal process that allows users to create new systems or improve existing ones by obtaining information from an already finished product.

Generally, when using an emulator for a gaming platform, such as a game consolethe computer on which it is deployed is required to have features such as ample storage space for the basic input/output system (BIOS) and keys that help extract the games.

Although emulators are usually legal, they also have detractors who call them illegitimate. Among them, the video game companiesas is the case of Nintendo and, which has recently asked Valve not to publish Dolphin on Steam.

Dolphin is a free and open source emulator that allows you to run copies of Nintendo Wii and GameCube games on PC and that a few months ago announced that it would be available on Steam as free ‘software’.

In this sense, it should be mentioned that this does not offer access to ROMsthat is, to the files that contain the data of a game, but only allows them to be played and accessed by players.

In this way, it is the users who must obtain copies of these ROMs, either legally -that is, with a physical unit of the game Nintendo Wii or GameCube in question- or not (accessing pirated copies).

The creators of Dolphin have now announced that the launch of the emulator on Steam, announced in marchhas been postponed “indefinitely” because Valve notified them that Nintendo had issued a cease and desist citing the US Digital Age Copyright Act (DMCA).

The Dolphin managersHowever, they have commented that they are currently “investigating new options” to get it introduced on Steam and that they will have a “more detailed” answer and news to give in the near future.

Nintendo, for its part, has not made a public statement, but PC Gamer has accessed a legal notice in which the Japanese developer points out that Dolphin “violates Nintendo’s intellectual property rights.”

For its part, the specialized portal Kotaku has reproduced some statements from Nintendo, collected by a user known as @luigiblood, in which he indicates that the well-known emulator “works by incorporating cryptographic keys without the authorization of Nintendo and decrypting ROMs during execution or immediately before”.