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this post was submitted on 30 Jul 2025
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Would have to go back to before the license change in September 2024. The current license basically forbids forks, from my reading.
You can't fork it or redistribute it... but you can distribute patches for users to apply, and those are easy to add in a PKGBUILD. That's how a lot of game/ROM patches are distributed and they appear to be legal.
It's an emulator, lets be real, the majority of the users couldn't give a shit about license terms anyway.
It’s also a PS1 emulator. A console that’s been emulated for over 20 years now.
Getting flashbacks to installing qmail back in the day...
I have a heard time imagining it to be worth it with other psx emulators readily available without weird hoops to go through.
Yeah... But then it sucks for anyone not running Arch (btw) or derivative distros. I really don't have a dog in this merge conflict but really would feel bad for any packager maintainers.
It's already unpackageable because of the license anyway.
The only "legit" way to get the emulator is their provided AppImage bundle, and nothing else. The author also has a rant about Flatpak being broken and unreliable and refusing to support that, so...
I have some issues with flatpak, myself, but that mainly stems from having trouble finding documentation to clear up how to properly use extensions and non-standard dependencies that are easy to do with OCI images.
Ex. I had a really hard time trying to get Vega Strike built as a flatpak.
If it's only available via appimage, as the reply to this comment states, then it will still run just fine on Arch.
Yeah... That's pretty terrible. I was meaning packaging patchsets for other distros. Hopefully the GPL-preserving fork is better.
Why is it terrible? Appimages are fine.
Appinages are fine. Needing to apply changes as patchsets rather than just building normally sucks. Especially in deb and rpm distros.
You cannot forbid forking a public GitHub repository, per their terms of service
Yes. The license doesn't technically appear to forbid forking, just sharing the fork.
So how would that work? I know we say emulators are allowed...but Nintendo came knocking a while ago, Github removed the repos pretty quick. If they go and applies their fork-less license in a court of law....that would have very nasty consequences for them.
the big thing that caused nintendo to take action against the switch emulators was that the creators were taking money for it, and explicitly pirating games. like, they set up a patreon where you could pay for early access to builds specifically tailored to games that were not released yet.
Theres a LOT of emulators that got caught in all that not just the ones that were taken down for legal reasons. Theres a reason quite a few new emulators are not on Github/public git sites anymore.
Im not saying your wrong, what I am saying is that the situation is a bit nuanced and if a PSX emulator wants to push their "rights" they might find they actually dont have any when push comes to shove.
yeah they came down hard after someone crossed the line after looking the other way for like 30 years. i'm not surprised.
also, playstation is like the most legally well-tread area for emulators. remember bleem?
thats a name I haven't heard in years! Oh wow blast from the past.
Yeah, but the Bleem! case set the precedent for all emulators of all consoles. The ruling doesn't just apply to PS1.
Bleem! was able to charge for their product as long as it didn't include the system BIOS. They reverse engineered the emulator itself, so without BIOS or ROMS, no IP is being stolen.
Which has become the standard operating procedure regarding emulators for decades now.