The emulator itself is perfectly legal.
Downloading ROMs is technically piracy, and therefore illegal, but as long as it's two generations old or so, nobody really cares. Nobody has kicked down my door for having a GBA emulator.
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| pariz said: It is piracy. Sad fact. |
Wrong.
Downloading roms are completely legal, as long as you own the real game.
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If you don't legally own the roms and they're still under copyright, it's illegal. That's the games anyway. Nothing illegal about downloading an emulator.
4 ≈ One
scottie said:
The term you're looking for is abandonware, and it has nothing to do with the age of the game, it has to do with whether or not it is still possible to find legitimate copies of the game firsthand.
SMB is very old, but you can buy it on the virtual console, the IP is still going strong, the company that made it is going strong.
Dungeon Keeper is considered abandonware. It is no longer being manufactured or sold firsthand. The company that makes it has 'abandoned' the game.
Of course, what counts as abandoned is often a grey area. |
ahh okay i get it, makes sense.
Kind of yes, but not always.
As someone else pointed out if it's a game you simply cannot buy new anymore because it's simply not in print anymore and there are no plans for it to be in print again then it's either abandon-ware or "alright" to emulate.
Silver-Tiger said:
Downloading roms are completely legal, as long as you own the real game |
And that's...
....something that hardly ever happens.
Silver-Tiger said:
Downloading roms are completely legal, as long as you own the real game. |
Wrong (for the US). DMCA means format shifting by breaking copy protection is illegal. Even if the protection is weak.
ill be honest i have a SNES, 32X, GEN, NES, N64 emulators and a few games for each, yeah the roms are not really legal, but screw saving a lot of cash by not buying off of VC
It's legal until they come knocking on my door
its only piracy if you do not own the actual game which pretty much defeats the purpose of running an emulator anyway. i use emulators for my old sega and nes games to play on my pc or psp. its much more convenient than having to hook up those old systems. however, i do still enjoy hooking them up once in a while to play some old style gaming.
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