It has always been the long-term plan anyway. 'In the end, opening up development seems like the logical decision. This year was especially intense because I single-handedly ported Cemu to Linux while also trying to deliver somewhat constant feature and bug fix updates,' they wrote. 'Whenever I tell myself to make time for other things, I end up feeling guilty because my self-inflicted sense of responsibility drives me to always prioritize Cemu over my own interests. With open source projects the development process is usually very open.'Ĭemu's creator used the 2.0 announcement to talk a bit about the emulator's history-they've been the sole developer for much of its run, and said that in the last couple years the project has been especially draining. It's one of the things where we have no doubts about the legality: it's clearly illegal. 'This is in general frowned upon in many emulation projects: it puts the whole project at the risk of a lawsuit. '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. 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.ĭolphin emulator developer Pierre Bourdon broke it down for me back in 2017. 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.

In 2017, Wii U emulator Cemu made history by pulling in thousands of dollars per month on Patreon to help fund development.

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