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SvennoJ on 23 April 2017
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Pemalite said:
AlfredoTurkey said:
If stealing is acceptable, then sure.

How is that even a comparison? He isn't stealing. Console manufacturer/developer/publisher looses nothing.

SvennoJ said:
If you have gotten permission from the copyright owner, then sure.

That is not required either.

Super_Boom said:
  I know I certainly wouldn't feel confident defending myself that way in court...though I admit I haven't looked into the topic closely.

It's already been tested in court. Emulators won.

S.T.A.G.E. said:
Its never acceptable unless the IP holder says so. PC gamers done care though. MAME pushed on regardless.

Not true.

bonzobanana said:
Also if I buy a dvd does that mean I can download a high definition version of the same movie for free from a torrent. Many emulated games are massively enhanced over the original game.

Not an accurate comparison.

A better comparison would be buying a DVD and playing it in a Blu-Ray player.
It's taking a form of media and playing it on a hardware platform that it was never originally designed to operate on.

* Emulation is perfectly legal. Legal precedents have been set. Console manufacturers lost their court cases.

* Downloading the games from torrents is illegal. - But if you have the original CD/DVD/BD you can play it on PC anyway and make legal backups.

* Downloading a BIOS is also illegal.  But if it's reverse engineered/emulated/dumped it however is perfectly legal.

https://gaming.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/795/what-exactly-does-the-law-state-about-emulation-and-roms
I'd like to add that the ONLY time that you can legally have a ROM is if it was 1) purposefully released into the public domain by the copyright owner, 2) was given or sold to you by the copyright owner, 3) has had its copyright expire (75 years after publication, i.e. no video games until well into this century), or 4) it is an archival copy that YOU created for backup purposes (it cannot be a downloaded copy)

Emulators (without copyrighted material) are perfectly legal. However bypassing copy protection to dump the ROMS or BIOS is in a legal grey area. Downloading is definitely out.

PSCX2 is about as legal as you can get as it reads directly of ps2 discs. However dumping the ps2 Bios to do so is still dodgy, not perfectly legal.

Morally it's not stealing, it's more akin to printing your own money. Nobody loses anything right? It's simply an activity that is tolerated as long as it stays small. It's not really worth going after until it becomes too popular. And then it might be too late as with the music industry and freemium games will be the future instead.

Here's a more recent article on emulators
http://www.techradar.com/news/gaming/are-game-emulators-legal-1329264

Anyway I don't buy this whole preservation argument. You should preserve the hardware as well, not just a copy. It's like, I'm preserving history by keeping a picture of the mona lisa! Poor excuse.