Is emulating acceptable?

[SvennoJ]

AsGryffynn said:

SvennoJ said:

By emulating, do you mean pirating in this case? You still need to get the game first to emulate it.
What game is so rare you have to pirate it?

Or do you mean if you have the game you should wait until it's no longer sold before running it in an emulator?

Some games end up becoming relics. They are rare and expensive. Some are outright no longer sold. Those are alright. 

Alright to emulate, sure. Alright to pirate, no. Alright to download if released into the public domain or as freeware, yes. There's abandonware, which is basically a nice way of saying pirate away as the copyright owner is no longer able to or won't do anything about it. Morally it's alright, legally it's not.

For really old games it's a good thing anyway. I doubt many of my old 3.5" disks still work, 5.25" floppies are definitely unreadable now, cassette tapes with msx and c64 games are done for. Yet people weren't obsessed with copying books and movies out of for fear of them getting lost. Why is there no faith in creators of software to look after their stuff that we have to make lots of pirated copies :)