Emulation Android Emulator Skyline Emulator's development has been cancelled permanently

[Headshotnoby]

Quoting Mark from the Skyline Discord server:

Hello @everyone,

It is with great sadness that we bring you this news. Recently, Nintendo has issued a DMCA takedown notice against Lockpick RCM which will likely come into effect on Monday, Lockpick is a core part of legally dumping keys from the Switch. They claim that it circumvents their copy protection (TPMs) and therefore violates their copyright. We find ourselves in a position where we are potentially violating their copyright by continuing to develop our project, Skyline, by dumping keys from our own Switches.

After much internal discussion, we have made the difficult decision to immediately cease all further development on Skyline. We understand that this is not the news our community wanted to hear, and we are heartbroken to have to deliver it. The risks associated with a potential legal case are too high for us to ignore, and we cannot continue knowing that we may be in violation of copyright law. We would like to emphasize that we were entirely unaware of these potential legal issues before, and we fully believed that dumping keys was legal prior to this notice. Despite this, Skyline itself is entirely legal and we won't be taking down the repository (it will be made read-only) or builds. In addition, all incomplete source code for `texman` and `nnvk` will be made public.

We want to take this opportunity to thank our community for their years of support. The development of Skyline has been an amazing journey, and we are grateful for all the support we have received from our users. We understand that the emulator is not where we ultimately wanted it to be, but we could not have made it this far without your dedication and enthusiasm. We hope that our community understands the difficult position we have been placed in, we thank you all for everything Skyline was and wish it didn't have to end so abruptly...

Sincerely,
Mark, Billy, and the Skyline Team

FAQ:

**Can you not use an alternative to Lockpick to get around this?**
No, you can't as Lockpick specifically isn't very important here. Any tool that would extract keys from the Switch would likely be breaking the law by circumventing TPMs one way or another.

**Does this affect other projects? (yuzu, Ryujinx, etc.)**
It depends on them, we personally think the risk is too high but developers from other emulators can decide for themselves. Ultimately this could all just be nothing but even the slightest chance of any legal action is too much for us.

**What are you going to work on next?**
Me and @Bylaws are going to work on another project on Android that we suspect will interest many Skyline users. More details on the project will follow in the coming months.

**What will happen to the Skyline server?**
At the moment, not much will change. We'll be making #showcase, #support or any other channels directly involved with Skyline read-only and later permanently archiving them. **Any showcases or discussion of Skyline running commercial games are also no longer permitted.**

**Should I stick around?**
Since we expect a major overlap in the audience for our next project, we'll be reusing the server for it so feel free to stick around to stay in the loop.

**I was previously subscribed to Edge and I want a refund for the last month?**
DM us on Patreon for a full refund for any payments made last month, we appreciate your support at any point. Any proceeds that haven't been refunded will directly support our next project.

 

[Reploid]

So big freakin n can strike this emulator, but can't the other ones?

 

[DarkCrudus]

So big freakin n can strike this emulator, but can't the other ones?

Did you read?
It's not about the emulator. It's about the tools used. They don't want to potentially be caught in the crossfire.

 

[linuxares]

Seems like going forward. Don't make emulators for a current gen system?

 

[_Hexenhammer_]

They sound like bunch of teenage cowards.
nintendo striking that tool doesn't mean its illegal, they do it because they can, eventually it will be taken back online, N believes they can somehow protect the game that just came out, they cant.
And these emu devs that i just heard about, their behavior doeskin make any sense.
Probally their emu wasnt worth anything so they used this chance to split

 

[MohammedQ8]

Nintendo and hackers these days:

 

[Dark_Ansem]

cancelled permanentely over a pretender?

They just wanted out.

 

[Aggro-Hamtaro]

Seems like they are continuing the project under a different name!