Here's why Wii U emulator Cemu going open source is a big deal for emulation—and for the Steam Deck
On Tuesday, the creator of Wii U emulator Cemu announced a major 2.0 version release, introducing Linux builds for the first time and open sourcing eight years of work.
In 2017, Wii U emulator Cemu made history by pulling in thousands of dollars per month on Patreon to help fund development. Cemu's high profile Patreon, which was briefly earning $25,000 at its peak, raised questions about the ethics of emulation, particularly when money is involved, and when a project is «closed source» instead of open source, meaning their source code isn't publicly available. Closed source emulator development isn't inherently wrong, but it can be controversial—one of the key ways the emulation community protects itself from lawsuits is by keeping its source code public, so litigious companies like Nintendo can study it and confirm that none of its proprietary code is used in the reverse-engineering process.
Dolphin emulator developer Pierre Bourdon broke it down for me back in 2017. «You can save a lot of time if you ‘cheat’ and look at proprietary documentation (console SDKs, leaks, etc.) while trying to understand how a console works,» he said. «This is in general frowned upon in many emulation projects: it puts the whole project at the risk of a lawsuit. It's one of the things where we have no doubts about the legality: it's clearly illegal. With open source projects the development process is usually very open.»
Despite some worries in the community that Cemu would attract legal scrutiny thanks to its closed source code, lucrative Patreon and 4K Breath of the Wild videos, Nintendo never came knocking. And now worries that Cemu's source code could be lost if developer exzap ever disappeared are moot, too. The project in its
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