The issue is more with recent consoles e.g. Switch and Ps5/xbox

Well...If you want to emulate current gen, prepare to deal with consequences.
I believe Sony/MS turn a sort of blind eye to emulators of old gen if they arent hurting sales and being egregious with their presence (e.g. promote what it can do rather than word of mouth)

Bruh what? 💀 I chose the highest-profile and arguably best emulators for each major system, let alone that almost every other modern one uses GitHub too. If all of these emulators are flying under the corporate radar, I will deliberately inject myself with rabies and die a slow, agonizing death. I couldn't come up with this shit if I got cross-faded on meth and fentanyl.

Legitimately shocked that this abject fucking nonsense got three upvotes. Want to know how I know Sony knows PCSX2 exists? Two former PCSX2 developers are working on "ports" (read: shitty, subpar emulation) of PS2 games to the PS5. They got their jobs because of their work on PCSX2.

Edit: I'm going to go off a bit more, actually, because I'm sick of living in an era where zero-information dipshits can just say any unresearched, unsubstantiated bullshit online and put it into immediate contention with obvious, demonstrable facts presented with sourcing by a subject matter expert:

• I've included a Wikipedia article where applicable; these articles will often have links to these emulators being discussed in popular gaming outlets.
• This doesn't even count emulators like Snes9x, PCSX-Reloaded, and Project64 which are no longer top-of-class but which have their own Wikipedia articles, were wildly popular in their day, and host their code on GitHub.

Simply untrue.

These are known, and you'd better believe Nintendo knows everything there is to know about each and every emulator that exists. They tried pressuring the team behind Cemu years ago, but it ended up being pointless.

Some of these are years and years and years old.

Nah… I suspect that Sony simply doesn’t want to anger hackers again. The cost of downtime is likely to be higher than the imaginary profits they get from harassing emulator communities. I doubt they think their reputation is worth much but maybe they have started to see some value on it.

Japanese gaming companies often don't seem to understand the value of the reputation / honor which is really weird considering that it's one of the things japanese culture is supposed to value.

Right, Dolphin had an encryption key in there for the Wii that was hardcoded in. That is apparently the one bit of legal leverage Nintendo has to keep it off Steam, though being Nintendo, they would likely fight it, anyway.

In any case, the key could be a user provided configuration option, or tools for ripping games could do the decryption on their own. Either should keep the code safe from Nintendo being able to win a case. Though again, doesn't stop Nintendo from trying and exhausting your ability to fight it.

They threaten a crap ton to scare devs into not entering court, but tbf I'm pretty sure the guy they got was for actual piracy, and the court ordered the millions in alleged damages to be paid in $40 installments to Nintendo per month for the rest of his life.

Edit:

It was set at 20-30% of his salary so yeah I guess that's still a pretty hefty chunk of change.

Emulation isn't piracy and you're allowed to back up physical games you own. That's legally your right.