That's my point

For example, I had super mario bros 3 on my gameboy. Years later(Gameboy is far gone), I downloaded it on my phone, and bought the game when it appeared on the 3ds shop.

I don't like pirating games. The only time I do it is if I had the game before(pokemon ruby, Naruto on the gamecube, etc).

I like to support companies. I also don't like to be a penny pincher. I'm fine with paying for a game, as they aren't magically made for free.

Depends.

If I had the game before(i.e super Mario Bros 3 went on the wii and Gameboy advanced, now on the 3ds), I won't get it. However, if I never had the game before(golden sun), then I'll happily buy it if they put it on their store. 

They got legacy collections out there.... Even for PC.

Are you saying that every single NES game is available for download in some way legally? I mean it's not even true of the previous generation of PSP games on the Vita as tons of games with licensed music are no longer available on the Vita such as EEE and THUG2 are unavailable for download other than in piracy form. Never mind the NES which had thousands of games from small devs who are long since forgotten and will never see a resurface on virtual consoles or otherwise.

I've zero issues in buying games if I enjoy them and can get access to them, heck even some games like the Rhythm Heaven series I had never heard of, Pirated the DS version of the game, loved the heck out of it so I went to buy that, bought the Wii version too and will be buying the + version of the game on the 3ds when it finally comes to EU, I'm just saying sometimes piracy actually sells legit copies of the game.

Jez most notable game effected by this is Minecraft where notch suggested that people pirate the thing if they didn't have the money and pay if they did, caused the game to spread like wildfire

@AndresLeay Just pirate it. If you still like it when you can afford it in the future, buy it then. Also don't forget to feel bad. ;)

— notch (@notch) January 12, 2012

Like I said earlier in this thread, piracy and the selling of used copies of games on ebay/amazon equal the same exact thing to the balance books at Nintendo, absolutely nothing, if you feel like you want to go and give a seller on ebay 200 for a sealed copy of a NES title so you can feel better about it, go for it, but don't think that cash is going to magic its way to Nintendo back in 1983, it just isn't.

My problem with pirating old games is that if these games do come out on newer platforms will people still buy them after they pirated/emulated them? There were many examples like Darkstalkers Collection on PS360 which didnt showed the results. And why is it always the japanese games people want to emulate, get for free? 

Sometimes getting a free game isn't even a factor to me. Playing Persona 3 1080p on PCSX2 feels great even though I own the game already. If a game is out of print though I see no problem.

I actually learned about rhythm heaven from Akecard. Loved it, and perfected every game.

It was a great game. Felt bad that I couldn't find the wii or DS version to this day. I did get the 3DS version first day though. Worth 30 dollars. No doubt about it 

Probably.

I pirated one of the mega man games to see how it is. I liked it, so I bought it

Aye it's sort of sad in a way but a lot of people do use piracy as a means to "demo" software, some go on to buy them, others don't but at the end of the day realistically I don't think those people who only pirate games are ever going to spend €60 on each new title from psn or xbl anyway so there never really was a €60 which was stolen from the company they pirate the games from. fuck it this is from someone who owns about 1000+ physical games, I still am a believer that piracy is not theft in the basic sense that there should be another term for it.... such as piracy!

This doesn't really align up with the "you shouldn't steal X because you are not starving" at no point if you download bits of software from a torrent site are you even costing the companies you are "stealing" from bandwidth to get a copy of the code you are going to then run, I'm just saying you can't equate this to stealing bread from a shop because after you torrent an old SNES rom, everyone in the world who had a physical copy of the game still does... you haven't taken any of them.