Emulation - The Legalities, Ethics, Benefits and Drawbacks

[Leadified]

collint0101 said:

Leadified said:

How is it any different to emulating old games? Nintendo is selling the SNES mini right now and has been offering their old games on their store for years now.

That why I said I can kinda justify it. Some games are simply gone, there's a lot of stuff out there that we're never going to see on steam or the eShop or psn whether it be for legal reasons, licensing fees or a lack of interest from publishers ect and I'm ok with people emulating games like that. Before the snes classic there was no real way outside of emulation to play star fox 2 so that's understandable but no one has any reason to emulation something like Sonic 1 which has probably been released on over a dozen different platforms. 

If it's based on personal morality then you could start to justify piracy in any way you want really. Many people would find it acceptable that if you already own a legal copy or it's abandonware then downloading a ROM is not that big of a deal, but nonetheless this is still illegal.