If it weren't for dosbox the only option to play dos games would be to run it in DOS. So you've just given a very strong argument FOR emulation, as it greatly benefits IP owners.

Retro City Rampage 486 is a commercial DOS game that was released in 2015. There was also ports to the Playstation 4, PSP, 3DS, Xbox 360, iOS, Android etc'.

And it also works under DosBox.

Microsoft uses virtualization in conjunction with emulation to achieve it's backwards compatability with Xbox 360 titles on the Xbox One.

That will happen one day.

You can for instance virtualize a windows environment on a Linux/Mac OSX machine and then run a windows emulator from there. Once Playstation 4 emulators are up to snuff, the same thing will be possible.

But I think you might be confusing Emulation and Virtualization a bit. They have similarities and they both do emulation to various degrees, but their goals/objectives are vastly different.

Lol, don't believe your friend. That's a myth. Yet a nostalgia filled afternoon with a bunch of old games isn't doing any harm. Might have been more fun with an actual mini Nes, yet Nintendo refuses to sell them... What can you do.

I'm not against emulation in general. It becomes questionable when it enables piracy of current software.

PCSX2 with disc support, awesome. It would be nice if Sony would endorse it and deliver the bios in a legal way. Why don't they buy the project, make it so it only works with discs or logged into an account, add digital store access, and provide it for free, problem solved. But that would probably be too risky, too easy to hack and cause more piracy. Pirates ruin it for everyone.

All this talk of running games off disk - aren't there legit programs out there for virtual disk drives, in which you load an image of a disk same way you put a disk in a real drive? Or is that how CEMU is used already?

Yeah, I get what you're saying. I'll just point out again that I'm not actually downloading anything I didn't pay for.  So while I am just one extra number like everyone else, my action has considerably less impact due to the purchase aspect alone (assuming others didn't buy the game like I did).  But anyways, I know what I'm doing is illegal. But I also know what I'm doing is ethically sound, as far as my ethics are concerned. So I'm fine with it. I don't need to do it much anymore anyways unless I have an issue ripping my discs.

That CEMU thing reminds me of a couple of the early NES and SNES emulators, where the free version didn't have sound, while the paid version did.  That was quickly done away with, though, once the big names like Nesticle and SNES9X hit the market.  Technically, they're just offering "perks" to their patrons, but it still smells fishy. I would hope that these features don't remain forever behind a pay wall, but who knows?  My interest in Wii U emulation is pretty much null at this point since my PC isn't quite up to snuff.

1. There are ways to mount a drive using a disc image, yes.

2. Not sure about CEMU, but most disc-based emulators will allow you to run a game from an image in addition to a physical disc.  Ther performance is almost always better using the image.

Depending on country, making an image of a disk and throwing it on a virtual disk drive is illegal.

I missed this before, very well written article on the ethics and legalities of emulators
http://www.pcgamer.com/the-ethics-of-emulation-how-creators-the-community-and-the-law-view-console-emulators/
It also touches on the dangers of Cemu as a closed source project.

I can agree with most of that except this:
"Piracy is wrong," Cifaldi said when we talked over Skype. "It does hurt the industry. But I don't think blaming emulation is the way to go on that.… I can go buy rat poison right now. That doesn't mean I'm going to make someone drink it. So blaming the existence of emulation for piracy, I don't buy it. I don't buy that argument."

If 99% of buyers of rat poison use it to poison people, you bet your ass it would become illegal. Ofcourse I don't know how many people play pirated copies on emulator, yet it sure is a far larger percentage than those making people drink rat poison...


Anyway as long as usage is small (which it seems it is) no real harm done

It's impossible to prove how many people pirate games for the sake of emulation, but there are still countless ROM sites distributing games that have been on sale on Nintendo's Virtual Console or in re-releases like the Mega Man Legacy Collection. In Breath of the Wild's case, many illegal downloads could be headed for hacked Wii U consoles. Dolphin emulator developer Pierre Bourdon, who goes by the handle delroth, actually argued that a very small fraction of the gaming audience uses emulators. In the latest stable release of Dolphin, the development team added an opt-in statistics gathering dialogue that users encounter when they first run the emulator, asking to collect anonymous data. Obviously some users will decline, but Bourdon told me their numbers indicate around 50,000 daily users. For comparison, Nintendo sold around 20 million GameCubes and 100 million Wiis. If half of Dolphin's users opted in, that's still less than one percent of the console audience.

That was a great article. Regarding Cifaldi's comment, I definitely agree with him more than you do.  But we really need to separate emulation and piracy.  Emulation is emulation, and piracy is piracy.  Do some (most?) emulator users pirate games?  You bet your ass they do.  But for as long as I can play a legal game on an emulator at the same time someone can play a pirated game on the actual hardware (with much greater ease and much lower cost), we have to stop thinking that emulation and piracy are the same thing.

I'd be curious to know what percentage of total pirated console games (maybe even broken down by console?) is played on an emulator vs how much is played on the original hardware.