I’m curious if it’s legally allowed to emulate Mario Kart 8 Deluxe on a Steam Deck. If it is legal, what are the steps involved? For example, do I need to dump files from my own Nintendo Switch or the game? Any advice on how to do this correctly while staying within legal boundaries would be appreciated.
3 Answers
To stay fully legal when emulating, the safest route is to dump your own game files directly from your Nintendo Switch. That means modifying your Switch to extract the system and game data yourself rather than downloading ROMs online. There’s hardware and software tools that let you make your own backups from cartridges or digital games. This way, you avoid any legal gray areas. Just keep in mind companies like Nintendo are pretty strict about this, especially for newer titles.
Honestly, I’ve done emulation of Mario Kart 8 Deluxe on my Steam Deck following the methods that use your own Switch dump, so yes, it is doable. Just make sure you follow the legal steps by using your own game data. Emudeck can help set up the emulator side once you have everything extracted.
Emudeck is a popular setup for running emulators on the Steam Deck since SteamOS is based on Arch Linux. Emudeck itself just helps install and manage the emulators for different consoles but doesn’t provide any game files (ROMs) for you. As for legality, from what I’ve read (though I’m not a lawyer), if you already own a physical or digital copy of Mario Kart 8 Deluxe, it’s generally considered legal to make a copy of the game for personal use, like emulating it. But if you don’t own the game, downloading ROMs from the internet isn’t legal. Laws can vary depending on your country though, so keep that in mind.
Thanks! That makes sense, I’ll look into the tools needed to dump my own copy.