Last week an NES emulator called NESBox went for sale on the XBox One marketplace. It was noticed by many news outlets, who began speculating if this was just the beginning of open emulation on modern consoles. The attention, of course, also alerted Microsoft who removed NESBox immediately.
But just THIS week, another emulator appeared, this one built to run Nintendo 64 games. It bore the jumbled name of Win64e10, and again, news outlets reported its existence — and within hours, again, Microsoft took it down. The emulator was a modified version of Mupen64plus, which emulates the N64 on Windows 10 and Linux. Mupen is free, but whoever made Win64e10 tried to charge $9.99.
The thing about emulators is, they’re not illegal in and of themselves. Creating a program that just happens to mimic the processor of an ancient console is a thing you can do and get away with it, and there are legit products out there that run on emulators (such as Hyperkin’s Retron series). It’s worth noting these emulators are obviously passing through Microsoft’s certification process, which every submitted app has to be subjected to.
So there isn’t much of a legal leg to stand on when forcibly removing an emulator. Though usually, when an emulator winds up on a public marketplace and stays there, it’s because the company host doesn’t care — example: iPhone and Android have plenty of them, as well as countless Mario and Zelda ripoffs. Microsoft hasn’t said why they’ve been removing the emulators, but it’s most likely out of fear they’ll make Nintendo angry.
It’s too late to get either emulator from the XBox Marketplace, but those who already downloaded NESBox and Win64e10 are free to use them.
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