Heard the recent news of the Valve Cease and Desist citing DMCA Anti-Circumvention law(s) removing Dolphin from Steam. I got curious and thought about it for a little bit and have an idea that may be helpful and relieve some struggle with legality.
As some of you may be familiar with, RPCS3 and PCSX2 require an official BIOS or Software Update to allow the emulators to run games. Dolphin already has support for the Wii Menu, which requires Network Certificates extracted from an IOS to work. Potentially something similar could be done with cues from PCSX2 where a legal IOS dump is required for games to run. I have very little coding knowledge on how difficult this would be to implement, but I imagine this would remedy the need for the Cryptographic keys being baked into the Emulator, it just pulls them from the legally obtained IOS from a real console.
Using BootMii it should be possible to dump "keys.bin" from a given console. The problem that arises is that this is the Private Key. Perhaps there is a way to get games to be decrypted or run in a way utilizing this Private Key. However, this would require an entire rework of the game boot sequence and how the Emulator handles running games at or during Runtime, I assume. It is already possible to import a BootMii NAND backup into Dolphin, so I wonder how that process can be reutilized or expanded upon to make this idea work (require the user to import a BootMii NAND or keys.bin for the emulator to load).
I do not have any pointers for developers on how to do this, as I have no coding experience besides a class in High School once. I do, however, have an idea for a Quickstart Guide, that consolidates basic information from most of the guides to a simple explanation on how to rip IOS/ NAND, ripping games (the recommended way, dumbed down for beginners or non-tech savvy individuals), Controller setup for both Real Wiimotes and Gamecube Controllers and Emulated, and Configuring Paths for things like Texture Packs and Game Dumps. I have many friends who would like to try out Dolphin and other emulators but are worried about how complicated it might be with the setup and process. If anything is taken from this recommendation, at least let it be a streamlined Quickstart Guide to lessen the confusion and intimidation factor for newcomers, as I'm sure all of us have been using Dolphin and other emulators for years and have learned the quirks of Console-PC Emulation.
As some of you may be familiar with, RPCS3 and PCSX2 require an official BIOS or Software Update to allow the emulators to run games. Dolphin already has support for the Wii Menu, which requires Network Certificates extracted from an IOS to work. Potentially something similar could be done with cues from PCSX2 where a legal IOS dump is required for games to run. I have very little coding knowledge on how difficult this would be to implement, but I imagine this would remedy the need for the Cryptographic keys being baked into the Emulator, it just pulls them from the legally obtained IOS from a real console.
Using BootMii it should be possible to dump "keys.bin" from a given console. The problem that arises is that this is the Private Key. Perhaps there is a way to get games to be decrypted or run in a way utilizing this Private Key. However, this would require an entire rework of the game boot sequence and how the Emulator handles running games at or during Runtime, I assume. It is already possible to import a BootMii NAND backup into Dolphin, so I wonder how that process can be reutilized or expanded upon to make this idea work (require the user to import a BootMii NAND or keys.bin for the emulator to load).
I do not have any pointers for developers on how to do this, as I have no coding experience besides a class in High School once. I do, however, have an idea for a Quickstart Guide, that consolidates basic information from most of the guides to a simple explanation on how to rip IOS/ NAND, ripping games (the recommended way, dumbed down for beginners or non-tech savvy individuals), Controller setup for both Real Wiimotes and Gamecube Controllers and Emulated, and Configuring Paths for things like Texture Packs and Game Dumps. I have many friends who would like to try out Dolphin and other emulators but are worried about how complicated it might be with the setup and process. If anything is taken from this recommendation, at least let it be a streamlined Quickstart Guide to lessen the confusion and intimidation factor for newcomers, as I'm sure all of us have been using Dolphin and other emulators for years and have learned the quirks of Console-PC Emulation.