Emulation - The Legalities, Ethics, Benefits and Drawbacks

[Pemalite]

VGPolyglot said:

Bandorr said:
I think the thread is confusing two notes.

It isn't about "emulation" through official means. Xbox 360 games on the xb1 requires the consent of Microsoft and the makers of those games.

Where as CEMU/RSP3(I think I got that right) is none of that. They aren't getting the companies approval. They aren't getting the games approval. They are making money (CEMU making somewhere around 40k a month) bringing games from one system to another without consent from anyone.

Bleem and VGS were commercial emulators. Sony sued them. They lost. So, commercial emulators are allowed. That's not the grey area. The Grey area are the BIOS and the games.

In regards to the BIOS it's perfectly legal to reverse engineer/emulate the BIOS. What is the grey area is taking a console and dumping said BIOS.

Bandorr said:

Interesting, yet I don't see how that addresses any of my points?

He cleared up your emulators making money and not getting the approval point. A reply doesn't have to address every point you make. :P

Bandorr said:

My point was that the thread needs to make a clear point to the thread. No one is against "company endorsed emulation" like xbox 360 to xb1.

There is no grey area or morality involved in xbox decideding to implement xbox games on their xbox.

The thread is about the legalities, ethics, benefits, drawbacks of Emulation.

VGPolyglot said:

Super_Boom said:

Of course, when it comes to piracy or illegal forms of emulation, I would be completely behind more severe moderation, depending on the offense, as I find it absolutely shameful that scum that don't contribute to the developers that sweated over these games are pretending to have the same hobby as those of us who do.

Well, the vast majority of games that I get are used/second-hand, so most of the time I don't contribute to the developers. Am I wrong for assuming that I have the same hobby as those who buy new copies to give money back to the developers?

Exactly. Developers and Publishers are NOT entitled to your money. They cannot force you to hand your money over.
Otherwise the second hand market, key resellers, renting, loaning/sharing etc' would all be illegal.

Developers need to provide incentives for you to buy/rebuy the game.
Multiplayer services are a massive leverage in that aspect, often that cannot be emulated and most certainly will never have the same population levels to make said service worthwhile.

Green098 said:

But the copy of the game you bought of someone else still had money contributed to the developer by the original's owner who purchased it.

Piracy is just steal the title yourself for free.

And one other obvious difference one is illegal one is not.

But the point you make (playing the game with the money going to someone else and not the developers) is also one for why I'm against the idea of renting games.

 
And to duplicate a copy of a game, someone needs to have purchased an original copy which resulted in money being contributed to the developer, it's not as different as you think. ;)

Piracy is illegal though. I'm not condoning it.
But there are ways for developers to minimize piracy that isn't intrusive DRM, lawsuits etc'. - They have been proven not to work anyway.

SvennoJ said:

VMWare is not promoted here.
VMWare is not shown to be running brand new games.
VMWare is not available for download bundled with pirated games.

Virtual Machines and Emulation aren't as different as you think.
Many Virtual Machines emulate various pieces of hardware.

Virtual Machines can run brand new pirated games.
In-fact, nVidia has Virtual GPU Passthrough to allow said games to work. - http://www.nvidia.com/object/dedicated-gpus.html

Virtual Machines can be bundled with anything you want.

Green098 said:

Well just like with what happened to DVDs, it might just die out in time due to a shift to digital. Even now renting games and etc. was a much bigger thing years ago than now so we're all aleady within that process.

Game developers could always even one day rent games digitally one day in the future themselves, or like netflix become part of a subscription service.

Digital isn't an answer to avoiding emulation. They will just dump the digital copies eventually anyway.

Wii Emulation is so accurate that you can buy the games directly from the Wii Store.
http://www.eurogamer.net/articles/2017-03-17-wii-emulator-is-so-accurate-you-can-buy-games-from-the-wii-shop-channel

SvennoJ said:

DOSBox doesn't run brand new games, plus DOSBox doesn't circumvent security measures.  If console emulators truly emulated the console they would require the game disc in the drive or the user to be signed into an account with the digital license.

False. Games are still being Made for DOS and thus DOSBox. The Homebrew and indie scene is alive and well.

Plus Gog.com will often repackage allot of older games with DOSBox and sell them to you that way.

Plus because Gog.com games are DRM free, they are ripe for people to copy.

Also, some emulators do support playing a game directly from the optical Disk.