Nintendo Targets Yuzu, Citron Neo, and Switch Mod Chip Firmware in Fresh GitHub DMCA Wave

Nintendo has launched four DMCA notices at GitHub, aiming at two Switch emulators, Yuzu and Citron Neo, plus mod chip firmware in a sweeping purge.

This isn’t the first occasion on which Nintendo has filed takedown requests with GitHub, and it is not even the first attempt aimed at Yuzu, but this round appears to center on firmware for mod chips. That firmware was tied to 144 repositories, all now removed by GitHub and swapped out for a DMCA notice. Mod chips such as Picofly can be soldered to the Nintendo Switch mainboard, then flashed with this firmware to bypass Nintendo’s copy safeguards.

GitHub has published Nintendo’s November 6 DMCA notice, which states that the Nintendo Switch console and video games use technological protection measures, or TPMs, so the system works only with legitimate Nintendo game files. The notice says this protects copyright-covered games by stopping users from running pirated copies on the Nintendo Switch and from copying and using Nintendo games on unauthorized hardware.

Even so, while this action has removed a large number of repositories carrying mod chip firmware, TorrentFreak reports that the same material still appears to be hosted elsewhere on the service. Nintendo may also not be done yet; in 2024, it effectively removed 8,500 copies of Yuzu through a notice that targeted 12 separate mirrors of the emulator.

This move also arrived just days after emulators became capable of running the remake of The Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of Time for PC, which may suggest Nintendo is preparing another legal push against emulation.

Emulation in 2026 is a very different scene from 2024, largely because of AI. There has already been a surge of AI-made mashup mods that flooded social platforms for a couple of weeks and pushed Anthropic to add a restriction preventing Claude from directly copying games. Game studios are also clamping down on AI-made game versions, too. Just last month Rockstar removed a browser-based GTA 5, and Bethesda pulled an AI-generated Fallout New York project.

Jackie Thomas is the Senior Tech Editor at IGN and the PC components queen. She has covered gaming hardware for more than a decade for IGN, TechRadar, Gizmodo, PC Gamer and more. You can follow her @Jackiecobra