A funny and occasionally spicy 15-minute video by Nerrel from October 2024 about some of the nuances and legal fights surrounding Nintendo’s fight with community-made emulators:

The video paints Nintendo in the harsh light, highlighting their double standards and willingness to throw their corporate legal weight around just to squash the challenges before they go to court, despite court precedents ruling against them.

The video also talks about software preservation – this is the part that feels very important to me – and I also learned things about piracy, DCMA, and modern video game encryption.

Just to highlight the versatile value of emulation, in another corner of the emulation universe, I found this fascinating project: a web page called Yes we scan, made by George MacKerron, that promises scanning directly from the browser – for example if you have an old scanner unsupported by your modern OS.

And… it actually works! It combines WebUSB with an interesting technique:

Your web browser emulates a whole PC running Linux with open-source scanning software (SANE). It connects that to your scanner via WebUSB.

If you are interested, the details page has more… well, details. MacKerron also wrote Printervertion that allows you to print directly from web, too, even if your operating system abandoned your vintage printer. The way I understand this, both efforts basically invite an alternative operating system that might be more supportive to take a stab at scanning or printing, and do it in a friendly and sleek way through emulation. It’s kind of incredible this is even possible.