Emulation - The Legalities, Ethics, Benefits and Drawbacks

[Pemalite]

Cerebralbore101 said:

And buying lockpicking tools doesn't mean you're going to go breaking into people's houses, but they are still illegal in the U.S. to own unless you are a locksmith. In fact I'm pretty sure it's a felony.

Except emulation isn't unlocking or breaking into anything, it's reverse engineering.
It's like when AMD or Cyrix took an Intel chip and reverse engineered their own x86 compatible processors by studying how they worked, Intel tried to take the legal high-road and lost.

Emulators are just a software environment, people can and do build their own software from scratch for these emulators, it's why Homebrew is as big as it is... Or why Xbox Media Center got so popular at one point.

Cerebralbore101 said:

Every PC User =/= 43% of the 35% that admitted to pirating games. But keep those strawmen coming. You can't pirate on a console without first breaking the system which requires a PC. Not to mention very few people want to hack their consoles, since it voids the warranty, and gives the console manufacturer a reason to brick your system the instant it goes online. Oh, and hacking a system massively devalues it. Used game shops won't even take them in the states. 

What makes you think you need a PC?

The NES and SNES classic have shown a ton of people are happy to mod/hack a console... And mod chips to circumvent copy protection was actually a very big thing in the PS1 and PS2 era's.