Hardware is not the only thing that can be emulated. Here’s an example. To claim that things emulating software components are not emulators is simply incorrect, like claiming that squares are not rectangles. It’s always disappointing to see someone spreading that falsehood.
It’s true that Wine is not a hardware emulator, nor is Proton. But make no mistake: they are both emulators.
The unfortunate backronym made a kind of sense 20 years ago. At the time, lawsuits were flying hard and fast at projects offering APIs and tools modeled after commercial operating systems (Unix variants), and there was no established case law protecting them. The prospect of Wine contributors getting sued into oblivion by Microsoft was a very plausible threat. Rebranding it as “Wine Is Not an Emulator” helped frame it as something different as it grew and gained attention, and although that phrase is inaccurate, “Wine Is Not a Hardware Emulator” wouldn’t have fit the existing name or distanced it from being seen as a Windows work-alike. Also, most emulators of the time happened to be hardware emulators, so it didn’t seem like a terribly big stretch.
That time is gone, though. The legal standing for software based on reverse engineering is more clear than it was then. Microsoft has not sent its lawyers after our favorite runtime emulator. The backronym was thankfully abandoned by the project some years ago. Weirdly, there are still people on social media spreading false statements about what the word does and doesn’t mean.
Me: You have wasted what little free time I have with a bad design choice that you could easily have avoided. Since I can’t skip your cut scenes, I will instead skip your games.
Enshittification refers to a process with specific phases that ensure services will degrade at the expense of users, and then business customers, so that shareholders can extract as much profit as possible from both of those groups. It was coined by Cory Doctorow, who explains it here:
Here is how platforms die: First, they are good to their users; then they abuse their users to make things better for their business customers; finally, they abuse those business customers to claw back all the value for themselves. Then, they die.
I call this enshittification, and it is a seemingly inevitable consequence arising from the combination of the ease of changing how a platform allocates value, combined with the nature of a “two-sided market,” where a platform sits between buyers and sellers, hold each hostage to the other, raking off an ever-larger share of the value that passes between them.
Wildermyth is somewhere between a tactical combat game and a role-playing game, and quite good.
Solasta: Crown of the Magister has caught my attention, but I haven’t played it yet.
Dragon Age: Origins is good, and although not on sale, is old enough that full price is not bad. (I don’t know if the EULA is tolerable, though; I don’t think it was there when I played it.)
I think it’s a bit of a stretch to describe games with loading screens of that kind (whether disguised as choke points or not) as open worlds. Sure, they might allow more freedom than a game that stays on rails for every step of the journey, but to me, “open world” suggests something more.
Continuity while exploring the landscape, unimpeded by artificial barriers or immersion-breaking interruptions, is a big part of it.
Almost as important is that the world be interesting and diverse enough that I would want to spend my time exploring it. This is one of Skyrim’s great strengths: It’s full of unique things to discover, most of which aren’t marked on the map (except sometimes when you’re already there), and some don’t even stay in the same place. It ensures that exploring the world and paying attention is rewarding and satisfying. The Witcher 3, on the other hand, is weak in this area: Its world is mostly open, but practically everything in it is a copy/paste instance of a handful of events, and clearly marked on the map. Exploration quickly becomes a tedious exercise in running from dot to dot, doing the same few things over and over again. It doesn’t deliver the satisfaction I expect from an open world game. In a world like that, I get bored fast.
Ironically, one game that’s handled open worlds a bit better is on a console less capable of handling them.
This is even more interesting when we consider that BotW was not developed for the Switch, but for an even less capable console: the Wii U.
Hardware limitations haven’t been a real barrier to open world continuity for a long time, if ever. (Seven Cities of Gold allowed you to sail from Europe to the New World, and then explore it over land, with no loading screens along the way. That was on 8-bit computers with 48KiB of RAM, loading data from some of the slowest floppy drives ever, back in 1984.) Doing it on lower-end machines does require some planning ahead, but the effort is worthwhile, IMHO.
Breath of the Wild uses it to promote exploring towards vantage points and then interesting sights.
Not only that, but to incorporate verticality into the game mechanics. Reaching things that are surrounded by hazards, or taming especially wild horses by gliding to them from a mountain, for example.
The commit hashes on both of those mirrors match the official ones at least until March 2024 (v1.1.1217). I can’t vouch for the more recent commits that extend through today (v1.1.1403), but the two mirrors do at least match each other.
Warning: A zip file in the ryujinx_202410 subdir of archive.org/download/ claims to have the full git history, but the hashes do not match the original source repo. It’s possible that the mismatch is an artifact of some accident, rather than malice, but I would avoid it just in case.
Anything that emulates something else is an emulator. That something else could be hardware, or runtime behavior, or services, or a combination thereof. (It could even be a turtle, although we’re talking about computers in this case.)
Wine is an interesting example despite that silly backronym that was abandoned years ago, or perhaps because of it. It not only translates system and API calls, but also provides Windows work-alike services and copies Windows runtime behavior, including undocumented behavior. If it were just an API wrapper or “translation layer”, a lot of its functionality wouldn’t work.
The shape of a business envelope might not be an equilateral rectangle, but it is still a rectangle.
But go ahead and believe what you want. I’m not looking for an argument.
I have heard that you don’t need a lawyer in small claims court (in the sense that it’s not really expected). Like I said, though, I know little about it. Maybe someone in a position to know will show up in this thread and fill us all in.
I think the US small claims court is meant to handle situations like this (although I know little about it). I wonder if it’s available to litigants from other countries.
I guess that makes sense. I haven’t used Discord in a while, but I think tags are less noisy over there, since they don’t render as something long like @someusername. I avoid unnecessary tags on Lemmy because all that extra syntax makes for cluttered comments.