oh i just checked and the oid ones are indeed gone from the EU store too.

though the search pointed me Snes9x EX page where the begining of the description is "beware of these paying emulatior that are using Snes9x commercially under different names (snesoid, tiger SNES and many others). Snes9x is a non commercial use licence abd these can not be legally sold of force you to view adds".

so yeah even if you can claim emus  are themselves legal, these ones were illegal on the software licence aspect ^^.

Well... now I have no reason to buy the Xperia Play. Demo units seemed to have poor GPS anyways.

Well, good. I'm surprised they even allowed those emulators to be on there in the first place... I mean, those guys were making money by allowing people to play games made by others. In my book, that's stealing.

The Engadget article went for the click-worthy sensationalism, and failed to present the important points. I see the same confusion in some of the posters here:

1) emulators are not piracy and are not illegal as long as they don't illegally include copyrighted material such as a BIOS dump. A "clean room" reverse engineered emulator can be perfectly copyright safe. And patents on hardware (an enitrely different thing) don't apply, as they would only protect in case of a different vendor significantly cloning that hardware implementation.

2) legal emulators are not infringing per se on Android marketplace publishing agreement, unless Google decides to change its policy from now on due to pressure from other vendors. The emulators were accepted on the Android Market and I'm told other emulators are still being sold on it.

3) the particular author (Yong Zhang) has been basing his Android emulators on existing code that was either GPL or under licenses that prohibited commercial use. He never complied to the requirements of the GPL or other licenses even after precise requests, google for "Yong Zhang GPL" and you'll find news from many months ago.

Result:

the license issues being officially submitted to Google's attention are most probably what caused marketplace suprevisors to revoke Yong Zhang's seller account and remove his "products". Selling material on which he didn't have commercialization rights is evidently against the Android market policy, being a copyright violation. Not copyright of Sony or Nintendo, mind you, but the copyright of the original emulator coders.

You'll still be able to run emulators on Android, as it's not controlled a-la-Apple in what you can or can't run on your devices. Moreover, unless their policy changes overnight, fairly licensed and copyright-respecting emulators will still be sold on the Marketplace.

you know, i'm probably the loudest voice on this site for anti-piracy and even i won't really argue against you.  i'm still a bit down on it and i don't do it myself but i just never understood the length of copyrights.  if a patent is 20 years why is a copyright almost 100 years?  if the artist is dead why is his work protected for an additional 50 years?

oh, and your arguments are pretty valid.  if there is no "legal" route available to make that purchase i can't really condemn you for finding an alternative.

The reason copyright is longer is because it is used differently, it is usually designed work. The author is protected from his work being used by other individuals, and is protected for a long time. This regards typically to someone's "work" for example author and his written novel.

The reason why Patents expire, is to allow the playing field to be even after specific amount of time, but if they were never to exist, it wouldn't encourage R&D. This regards typically to inventions.

i know that patent and copywrites apply to completely different situations but the intent is reasonably the same imo.  it is there to protect those that create.  whether i created the wizarding world of harry potter or a new way to purify silicon the protections need to be put into place to entice people/companies to keep creating.

... but how is 50 years after the author is dead fair?  there needs to be a period after which the works are just public domain.  no one should still have ownership of shakespear's work ... it should be everyones right to consume at this point.

i dunno, i obviously am a believer in copywrites.  i'm a pretty staunch defender of them actually.  but 100 years?  to me that is overkill.  at this point, atari games really should just be public domain imo.

So if I can't acquire something legally, it is ok to steal it? Really?

Ebay. US SNES is compatible with all Japanese games.

I already downloaded all those emulators I think so I'm good. lol. Besides I didn't even get them from Android Market. I pirated the apk files (doesn't require a root to do this) because there's no fucking way I'm paying money for emulators for my Droid when you can get these equivalent emulators for FREE for your PC or PSP. Apparently some of those for-pay emulators even ripped off code from the GLU License emulators available for the PC. Which is illegal. For shame.

Anyway, it's not too big of a deal that they took them down from Android Market. Android devices can run applications acquired outside Android Market without needing to be rooted (ie. some of Gameloft's games are available through their website only, not through Android Market). So there is nothing stopping these emulator makers selling digital downloads of their emulators on their websites. Sure being off Android Market will hurt the exposure of these emulators. But at least the devs will still able to sell these apps and run them on our devices. It's not like iOS, where I believe you'll need to jailbreak the device to run "unauthorized content". Android is still an open platform. Just because Android Market isn't 100% open, doesn't mean Android itself isn't open. You wouldn't blame Google for taking down a white power game from Android Market would you? (Though in theory the developer of a Android white power game could sell digital downloads of that game on their own website.)

Emulating any game that requires a decent D-Pad is a pain in the ass on my Android phone though. I couldn't even get to the first checkpoint in Metal Man's stage in Mega Man 2 when playing on Nesoid. But when I played Mega Man 2 on my CFW'd PSP, that stage was no problem.

There is a mod out there that allows you to use your Wiimote with the emulators on your phone but I have a HTC phone and HTC Sense doesn't play nice with the Wiimote's bluetooth apparently. I might have to root my phone and install a custom ROM. But I'll be voiding my HTC warranty in the process so not sure if that's worth it. My CFW'd PSP can emulate a whole bunch of shit anyways so it's really not a big deal though.