Nintendo’s been openly emulating their own games since about that time. IIRC, the SNES Virtual Console on the Wii had code from SNES9X in it.
The distinction (which seems nobody cares about) is that Nintendo’s going after copyright infringers. If your emulator doesn’t use any of Nintendo’s code, they ain’t doing shit about it; they’re just gonna steal it, if anything.
Somebody has fed you or you have invented bad information. Neither Yuzu nor Ryujinx, the two Switch emulators which recently ceased development due to intervention from Nintendo, included Nintendo’s code. The Yuzu settlement required those developers to acknowledge that
because our projects can circumvent Nintendo’s technological protection measures and allow users to play games outside of authorized hardware, they have led to extensive piracy.
There was never any mention of them stealing Nintendo code.
Ryujinx, we know even less about, because the agreement went down privately, but there’s literally zero indication of any stolen code. We know that Nintendo contacted the developer proposing that they cease offering Ryujinx and they did.
Obviously, Nintendo was bothered in both of these cases because the emulators do facilitate piracy, but that’s not the same as them having infringed on Nintendo’s copyright by using their code which you are claiming. Both of these emulators were developed open-source; if they were built using stolen Nintendo code there would be receipts all over the place. That was never the problem.
Yuzu supported unreleased games. To do that required using Nintendo’s code, and getting that code through unauthorized channels. Nintendo’s code may not have been distributed through Yuzu, but it was used in a way that was not permitted in order to engineer a way to circumvent the copy protection of those games. That was how Nintendo was able to go after them.
Dude why are you digging this hole even deeper. They are going after emulators. That’s a proven fact. You can try to handwave it however you wish, but that won’t change reality. Nintendo goes after emulators, after modders, after content creators playing those mods. An emulator can play games, that’s what it’s there for. I don’t see how an emulator would work otherwise.
