Is emulating acceptable?

[Bofferbrauer]

SvennoJ said:

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.

The Preservation argument holds true for archivists and game historians/librarians. While they also try to preserve all the hardware, there's simply no guarantee it won't break down anytime so they need to keep a copy for archiving and redundancy purposes. But these are generally the only onles who do so (there are some exeptions, like persons with a huge game library who wants to make sure their games survive even if their consoles fail - but that makes them basically game librarians also).

Of course, if an emulator is sold with legal ROMs (Amiga and C64 Emulators do this) then you can use them as you wish, but otherwise you're basically banned from using a console/arcade emulator.

DOSBox is a special case as it only emulates the OS (DOS 8.x) and legal DOS games can bought (especially on GOG.com), so these often come bundled together. Less shady Abandonware sites generally remove their download links of games which are comercially available anyway, and would be the only ones I would go to, as they're the only ones which do have some serious archiving intent - and those never offer any console games on their sites because they're simply not abandonware.