ANBERNIC seem to be flying very close to the sun these days. Firstly, they are being targeted by the US office for inserting SD cards into their boxes and game consoles that come pre-loaded with games, which, as we know, is very illegal. Now, as of today, ANBERNIC have forked their own version of Azahar unofficially, and that hasn't gone down well with the team, so much so that they've publicly stated their move to no longer support ANBERNIC devices.
This means that future versions of Azahar may not work well with ANBERNIC hardware, including the upcoming RG DDS, which is becoming a very popular device which will release late in the year. This news comes after ANBERNIC posted a new promotional video to their YouTube channel, showcasing the use of an "Azahar Plus" emulator being used when playing Nintendo 3DS games, which was spotted by our pals over at Time Extension.
Now to newcomers to the scene, that's not technically illegal to fork your own version of an open-source project, but it's frowned upon, especially if you do it without permission and alter the code with new, and likely buggy features that will give Azahar as a brand a bad reputation, not only with consumers but possibly with Nintendo themselves which, as we know, likes to keep an eye on these things and issue warnings or legal punishment to emulation projects like this.
The Azahar team came out publicly to announce their concern with this "unofficial piracy-focused fork of Azahar", alongside "any issues or bugs related to devices from this specific manufacturer will not be investigated or resolved", which is basically saying that they no longer want to waste time on helping ANBERNIC users, which I am not sure how well it will go down with the ANBERNIC community.
To get technical, Azhar hasn't stated specific reasons as to what features have been tampered with, but if I had to guess, ANBERNIC has likely made it easier to bypass certain checks that Azahar put in place to work with official keys, files or ROMs, and let's hope that ANBERNIC aren't pre-loading 3DS games on here inside of Azahar because that will put Azahar under unwanted attention for doing something that did not give permission to do. We can only wait to see what version of Azahar the ANBERNIC RG DDS will ship with on December 10th. They could backtrack, and they could end up squashing this beef, but for all consumers, this isn't great news and makes the emulation scene even more complicated.
