Yeah, other people have tried bringing that up too. There's no need for digital preservation. Older consoles and disks work fine to this day. 

Computer illiterate judges have ruled otherwise, but a judges ruling doesn't make something legal. Just look at the old Supreme court decision upholding slavery. Drugs are illegal, and yet there are still drugs. 

Almost perfect on PC?

You should've got the perfect version on PS4 then. smh

It's actually more like the initial shut down of Napster, a service designed to get free music. It's more like R4 cards, and how they were made illegal in most places.

There are tools that help people make things (DVD writers, for example), and tools used to pirate things (like the software used to rip movies from DVDs). Some software and hardware has to justify itself in a legal way to remain legal. Movie ripping is to keep all your media on a server, it's totally not ever used to pirate and the programmers don't support the use of it as such, right? But we know who's fucking using it and what for. The R4 card was so you can rip your games all into one convenient card, stopping the need to constantly change, right? Except Nintendo proved in court that it's purpose was for piracy.

I agree that emulators WERE important to preservation of older games, but companies have taken notice of that and there are legitimate ways to get a hold of nearly every title ever made digitally and legally. And yes, there are some games the still need preserving and emulators do that niche job, but there's a much larger number of people out there abusing emulators. Yes it's nice having your games in one spot and not having to worry about whether or not your old console can play them or if the cartridge still works, but there's a much larger group out there just downloading "free games". And no, it's not like banning cars because some people get killed by them. It's more like banning fake weed; the manufacturer can say it's for one thing and put "do not smoke" warnings on it, but we know what everyone is buying it for.

After contemplation, though, I don't feel like banning emulators would accomplish anything. Like with marijuana, people will use them regardless of their legality. The difference is no one would ever get caught driving with emulators in their cars. All we can do is watch the DRM get more and more invasive, with pirates and hackers overriding it with greater difficulty each time, claiming to be the heroes of a problem they caused.

*slow clap*

Are you disputing that hardware given enough time and use WILL fail? Of course my personal circumstances are anectodal, but it conveys the exact point we are debating. When the hardware dies, i still own my games and I have every right to play it anywhere I want.

The other assertions you made are also incorrect and several other people pointed them out as well so I'll refrain from repeating them.

Dispite you personal opinions on this subject, the fact is emulation exists and thankfully will always exist.

100 years from now, today's games should still live on thanks to it.

1. It's legal until judged otherwise, and I don't think there's any room for debate about this. As far as I know, there haven't even been any attempts to change the situation recently, which hints at the situation not being changeable under the current legislation. If console manufacturers could sue emulator devs and expect to win, they definitely would. You can argue about whether emulation should be illegal, but there's no question about whether it is right now.

2. Since you already attempted to counter my argument, clearly you must already know this was not my argument. Why did you choose to present this argument at all then?

There are five different Mom'n Pop game shops in my city. They sell everything from Atari to PS4. There are shops like this all across the world.If hardware failed as quickly as you thought they would all be out of bussiness by now. Yes in 60 year's time there will be very few working systems, but not absolutely no working systems. The Mona Lisa survived hundreds of years. Original game carts and disks should be just fine. Not to mention the code for most games hasn't been lost. You won't need an emulator to grab the original code off the net, and 3D print a PS1 in 2074. Hell, by then I'm sure you would be able to just insert a disk or cart into a device and extract all the code from there no problem. 

1. So Slavery was legal despite clear evidence to the contrary just because judges deemed it so? Is that how the law works now? 

2. What are you talking about? 

1. I'm not familiar enough with your history to be able to answer to this properly. If you can provide be me a short elaboration, I'll gladly look into it however. Anyway, if a judge's judgement on a matter isn't the official interpretation of the law and thus effectively the law, I don't know what is. Whether that's the correct interpretation of the law might be questionable of course. Maybe you should have a system for fixing judges' errors, but I'd say that's an entirely different issue. Getting back to the actual emulator topic though: Which copyrighted property do you think emulators are violating?

2. I'm not stupid. I know very well something being illegal has nothing to do with its existence. Laws need enforcement to be effective. Anyway, your arguments 1 and 2 are seemingly separate and seemingly counter-arguments to two different arguments, while I only had one argument. Thus, it seemed odd that you seemed to be countering two different arguments when I only had one.