isnt it a fan made server? shouldnt it be easy to make an emulator work with it without any legal issues?
the home page says its for “purposes of security and moderation” but I dont get it, it’s really dissappointing since it cuts down the potential player base by a lot.
I know people are supposed to own their game copies but what about the ppl who just dont have their wii u anymore? or got broken and wish to play on cemu?
It is kinda hard to find a wqy to stop piracy by that i mean there is no way to stop piracy from things i have heard im unsure about lime 3ds but i guess they support citra the owner of the pretendo project said on one of my posts that they if pretendo supports emulators or not is up to the emulator owner to add support
the cemu emulator does support it, but you still need to own a wiiu to make it work by dumping its files, which is still strange to me, since they couldnt easily accomodate eachother to not need that setup
Mainly to prevent piracy as far as I know (could be wrong) and for security reasons. I know Wiimmfi implements similar restrictions to us for some multiplayer titles.
If you don’t have a Wii U, it’s illegal to offer the files in Cemu directly or to download it from the internet. That’s the simple answer really.
please see Jon’s answer, got some info wrong here: Why is owning a nintendo console still required to connect to pretendo? - #14 by PN_Jon
It’s nothing to do with piracy, it’s so they can effectively enforce bans. You need a nintendo-signed certificate that can be banned if necessary, and those have to be dumped from a real console. Other ways of issuing a ban (like IP banning) are relatively easy to bypass
All of this is fault of a certain person ,too…
BECAUSE of them, you need to link an actual console…
Which person do you mean?
I think he could be referencing to one hacker during the beginning of 2024 and before that continuously would break into Pretendo’s mainframe database…Or it probably isn’t that guy who knows
I don’t know that person.
Please do not say the name of that person btw, it might provoke them
I wasn’t trying to… but alr
If you want to play MKWii on Wiimmfi, you require registration keys that you have to dump from a Wii.
The keys, along with a mandatory 7-day activation period during which you can’t play, serve the purpose of making it hard to bypass bans.
So why can’t Pretendo have a similar system? By gatekeeping the service like this, if someone’s problematic, Pretendo can issue a console ban and make it hard for the offending user to just bypass it and keep trolling or hacking.
I see, still odd to me since it limits the player base by a hell lot and I imagine it decreasing it more in the long run, and its already not that big
It has nothing to do with this, and it also has nothing to do with piracy. We did, at one point, allow the use of the servers without valid console dumps and even provided a way to download “fake” dumps from our website, and it was just heavily abused by cheaters since there was no way to do bans outside of account bans which are easily bypassed, so we removed it
As mentioned, we require the use of valid console dumps as part of our security and moderation efforts. I’ve answered this same question many, many times on Discord, GitHub, and I’m pretty sure even on these forums
Unless we have an effective way to ban consoles, there will always be trivial ways to get around bans. Every Wii U and 3DS comes with a console-unique certificate which is cryptographically signed by Nintendo using a private key only Nintendo knows. The public keys for these certificates are known, however, which means that we can validate the signatures of these certificates to check if:
When we ban a console, we are effectively banning this certificate. And since only Nintendo can sign these certificates, it means it’s impossible to bypass these bans without physically owning another legit console (or at least, having the dumps from one) since trying to modify an existing certificate, or sending an entirely fake one, won’t have a valid signature
This is the most effective way to ban cheaters, as there’s not really any way to bypass this without financial cost (and tbh if cheaters want to keep wasting their money buying burner consoles just to get them banned again, no skin off my back)
As mentioned previously Wiimmfi also has a similar setup, requiring dumps from real hardware to go online and for the same reasons. Here’s a quote from Reddit about it:
You definitely need a NAND backup from a real Wii or WiiU in order to play Mario Kart Wii on Wiimmfi using Dolphin. You probably also need that for other games.
We had to add this requirement because there were too many Dolphin players just getting a new identity minutes after they’ve been banned for cheating, making all the bans useless.
There is no trivial way to effectively ban cheaters outside of console bans (though, to be clear, we always start with account bans, and then only escalate to console bans if a console has many account bans)
Many people have all tried to suggest the same sort of “fixes” for this, but none of them come close to the effectiveness of console bans which can only be done via certificate banning, which requires the use of real hardware
There’s an entire issue on GitHub already which is dedicated to this exact topic, and it covers all the reasons why anything short of console bans doesn’t work long-term [Enhancement]: Update FAQ/installation docs to note that we require real consoles, even with emulators · Issue #317 · PretendoNetwork/website · GitHub
i mean, mostly right, i just say i started noticing that after that certain person started alting on Juxt a lot, during that timeframe, accounts made outside of consoles couldnt access the Juxt Web account setup thing (i noticed the html as commented out) , because before that it worked as normal…
Like I said this is just wrong. It had absolutely nothing to do with this, we just had an influx of cheaters and no effective way to deal with them. So we made console dumps a requirement again
Entirely off-topic, but how did you get the link to “old.reddit”? I used to use it a lot (I joined Reddit in November 2021), but ever since changing the address name to “new.reddit” (the interface that I first saw in 2021) stopped working as of December 2024 (at least, I think it was then), I haven’t been back.