Former Dolphin Dev Explains The Emulator’s Decryption Issue

gameranx.com:

Last week news hit with headlines and videos about Valve removing Dolphin from Steam, after Valve talked to Nintendo. Today we have more clarity on the situation, and even further explanation on the issues that concern Dolphin, as well as all of the most popular video game emulators people play with today.

Now, Valve very recently confirmed that they proactively reached out to Nintendo of their own volition about Dolphin, a video game emulator that can run GameCube and Wii games on Windows, Android, and iOS devices.

Valve explained that they mainly didn’t want to ship a program like Gamecube if there was potential legal disputes with it, because it would be disruptive to their users.

Now, as we explained in our original article, Nintendo did not send Valve a DMCA, not even in response to Valve’s inquiry. An outgoing Dolphin team member named Pierre Boudroun explained that Nintendo essentially sent Valve a cease and desist from distributing Dolphin on their platform.

We also mentioned the Dolphin emulator’s use of the Wii’s decryption AES-128 Common Key. This was the apparent legal issue Nintendo raised when it comes to the emulator.

Today Pierre has a new post on Reddit explaining the issue of decyption keys on emulators and the legalities of its use. We’ll summarize the key points for your convenience here.

First things first, decryption keys are literally just a series of numbers. As Pierre had pointed out, emulators PPSSPP, RPCS3, Xenia, Cemu, Citra, Desmume, Ryujinx, Vita3K, melonDS, and no$gba all use decryption keys. Interestingly enough, the libretro API, and the Retroarch frontend based on it don’t bundle these keys, and they are freely available on Steam today.

Now, Pierre clarifies that he isn’t a lawyer, but