Your thoughts on emulators

[Slothy]

I'm not a lawyer but I think it's mainly games that are currently in stores that are illegal. Older games that are off the market and the company is no longer making money off of is a different story and a game that was never released in America isn't costing anyone money since there were no games over here to purchase in the first place.

No, it is still entirely against the law (in most countries). The question is if the copyright holder cares enough about it anymore to want to first find out who's pirating it, and then also pressing charges.

Pretty much this. Unless the copyright has expired and the game is in the public domain (which I'm not sure is even possible yet unless some companies went under and didn't sell all of their assets during bankruptcy proceedings somehow for some reason) it is illegal to download the games.

That said, I whole heartedly support the process of creating emulators, and making backup copies of games. I also support making them available for older consoles when there's no chance of finding a new copy. Anyone who wants to sue over money they're in no position to collect to begin with can screw off. I don't agree morally with pirating games currently available, but I also recognize that it happens, it's not going away, and fighting it is futile, so there's not really much to do about it.

But the reason I support emulation so strongly is that it is probably the only way we're going to be able to preserve our video game history. The number of working older consoles in the world is steadily dwindling, cartridges can die, CD and DVD games are even more fragile. Eventually there won't be any NES's or SNES's or Saturns or Playstations left to play the games and no functioning copies left to play. And the industry itself has spent decades doing absolutely nothing to preserve this stuff adequately. Most of the time, if they have backups at all, they're either on media so old they don't even have the means to intereface with it anymore (this was an issue with the HD re-release of Killzone), or they don't have a backup of the finished source code (I think it was a problem with Killzone again, and it definitely was with the HD releases of Silent Hill 2 and 3. There's a reason those two are basically broken). And even when they do have complete source code, it's often difficult to port because they did a terrible job of documenting things (Killzone did this again. They had entities in the game with names that didn't match what they were at all and they had to waste time trying to remember/figure out what the hell they were and why they named them that).

If hobbyists and the like weren't spending the time preserving this stuff, whether that's even their goal or not, we'd be in a position to lose a lot of great games in the next decade or two.