Anbernic continues to walk on very thin ice. The Entertainment Software Association has already taken notice of this company because it bundles SD cards with pre-installed games inside the boxes of its gaming consoles.
Now, as of today, Anbernic has created its own unofficial version of Azahar—a fork of the original project. The original development team was extremely displeased—so much so that they publicly announced the termination of support for Anbernic devices. Put simply, future versions of the Azahar emulator may not work properly on this manufacturer’s hardware.
This news came after Anbernic unveiled a new promo video for the RG DDS handheld console yesterday. It showcased the use of the “Azahar Plus” emulator to run Nintendo 3DS games. Technically, creating your own fork of an open-source project is not illegal. However, such a practice is frowned upon in the community, especially if you do it without permission and alter the code by adding new and likely buggy features.
RG DDS video from the official Anbernic YouTube channel
This could damage the Azahar brand's reputation not only among consumers, but potentially in the eyes of Nintendo itself. And as is widely known, that company likes to keep an eye on such things, issuing warnings or initiating legal action against similar emulation-related projects.
The Azahar team publicly voiced their concerns regarding this “unofficial, piracy-focused Azahar fork.” The developers also added that “any issues or bugs tied to this specific vendor's devices will not be addressed or fixed.” In essence, they stated that they no longer want to spend their time helping users of Anbernic devices.
It remains to be seen how the Anbernic community itself will react to this. As for technical details, the Azahar team did not specify exactly which features were modified. But one can assume that Anbernic likely made it easier to bypass certain checks that Azahar uses to work with official keys, files, or ROMs.
One can only hope that Anbernic will not pre-install 3DS games directly into Azahar, as this would draw unwanted attention to the emulator due to actions its developers never consented to.