By using this site, you agree to our Privacy Policy and our Terms of Use. Close
Zkuq on 29 August 2017
Edit Thread
AngryLittleAlchemist said:
I have a question for everyone saying that emulators are fine as long as you don't pirate games.

What does that even mean? If I want to play an NES game, and I download an NES emulator and a Super mario bros rom, am I a pirate ? How else am I supposed to use the game?

Technically if you download a ROM, you're a pirate and that's all there is to it. Ignoring technicalities however, there are games that are either very hard or impossible to obtain, or perhaps that's the case with the hardware required to play the game. In such cases, there's no harm done by downloading a ROM. Then there's some morally grey areas where you can get both the game and the hardware, but the price is steep and the rightsholder isn't selling the game anywhere in any form. If you download the ROM, I won't judge you but some people probably will, and technically you're a pirate.

As to how you're supposed to play the game: You're supposed to get a proper copy of the game and then dump the data on its storage medium. Then you can use that data with your emulator. Of course for non-disc-based games, this is practically impossible for most people, but for disc-based games, the process is trivial.

SvennoJ said:
fatslob-:O said:

The ultimate goal of emulation is preservation of access to content since games are a special format of entertainment in that their information cannot be copied so easily in comparison to either solely or a mixture of video and sound data ... (It is a part of humanity's preference to not lose important information.)

And for that the benefits vastly outweigh the drawbacks once we achive such content for future generations to view ... 

Archiving / preservation is a lot different than offering up freely playable versions. Offering up enhanced / improved versions is even further removed from archiving and preservation.

For archiving / preservation you only need to make an exact copy of the data to store next to the cartridge on renewable storage in case it fails over time. No need to play it. To preserve the hardware, build schematics are the best bet in case the actual hardware gives out. Exact 1:1 emulation no matter how shitty it runs is also a good way to preserve the original experience. However most of the emulators are not interested in exact emulation or preserving the original experience.

The ultimate goal of most of the existing emulators is to play the old games, not to preserve them nor preserve the original experience. It's just an excuse people use to feel better about illegally downloading roms.

What use is preservation if you can't experience the preserved experience? Games are meant to be experienced, and small inaccuracies don't take away from the experience. Horrible performance however does. As far as I'm concerned, physical storage media isn't important either in preservation because games are essentially just software. I'm not saying physical things shouldn't be preserved too, but that's extremely unpractical for many so preserving them is probably best left to museums and such. One point of preservation, to me, is to let people experience old stuff themselves, and considering how easy preserving software is compared to preserving hardware, I'd say the current situation is pretty much fine.

ClassicGamingWizzz said:
VGPolyglot said:

Why though? It's related to gaming, doesn't make sense to ban them on a gaming site.

Emulation takes money from devs , hurts the devs, hurt the industry. Its simple.

Emulation doesn't take any money from devs, and emulation itself isn't harmful in any other way either. Quite often emulation involves piracy however, and piracy reduces their income somewhat, but that 'somewhat' is probably a very small amount. Emulating modern hardware requires powerful hardware that's not cheap, so that alone limits the damage done by piracy. Also, probably only a fraction of those that own hardware powerful enough actually use emulators, and of them, not all resort to piracy (although I imagine most of them do). If I had to guess, the number of people actively emulating any given platform is at most some hundreds of thousands, which is but a small fraction of the total users of the system. That's just not enough to do much damage to any more or less popular game. In all likelyhood, the damage caused by emulation-related-piracy is at worst a minor nuisance. The biggest issue is the loss of exclusivity instead of lost income, and I don't personally consider that an issue at all.