Your thoughts on emulators

[Lone Wolf Leonhart]

From what I understand emulators themselves are legal, but the games? Not so much.

I can understand not downloading new games, but what about old games?

So what if I want to play a Sailor Moon game on the Super Nintendo? The only people currently making money off of those titles are the collectors who sell them on ebay. There's no harm in emulating games that are no longer sold.

Do you play emulators? To what extent? Should you be allowed to play copyrighted games if they're no longer sold by the company?

[Bunny]

Nice try, narc.

[Ayen]

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.

[Psychotic]

I think from a moral perspective, playing any game that is no longer sold is fine. I don't do it very often but I've done it for a few NES and SNES games, mostly old Final Fantasy titles before they were re-released on formats that I have access to.

[Dr Unne]

I'm (mostly) against pirating new games. I don't do it. I want game companies to continue to exist and make more games. I want indie developers to be able to afford food. But NES era? SNES era? PSX era, even? I say pirate at will. Pretty sure it is actually illegal (in the US), but whatever. The law in this case is stupid. I don't believe people should be able to make a thing and then sit on the copyright for the rest of their lives. Thankfully in this case the law seems to be mostly unenforceable.

One big reason emulators are good is to preserve our culture. Once all the NESes break, do we want to lose the ability to experience those games forever? I want them to be preserved.

"No one makes money on old games" is not true. NES/SNES games are for sale in the Wii store. PSX games are for sale on PSP I think. Ones that aren't for sale now could be added later. Maybe the ones that are never re-released for new systems aren't released because they're pirated so much and the company knows it's not worth it. When I emulate an NES or SNES game, I know I'm depriving someone of a sale or a potential sale.

However I don't care. $5 for one game tied to a single Wii bought by fumbling through their terrible store can't compete with free + convenient + playable on any PC + save states + cheat engine + fast-forward + network play etc. If I paid for a game 15 years ago, why do I need to re-buy it for every new system that's released? If Nintendo put every NES game ever made into a bundle and sold it cross-platform DRM-free for $20, I'd probably buy it.

[Shorty]

I have no moral qualm with emulating games, though I've only done it with PSX games and the emulator I went (ePSX) with was terrible and put me off from ever wanting to go through such a method again because of how glitchy and awful it was. Since then, I prefer to play games on the console in which they were designed for because emulators are just too much of a hassle for me to deal with.

[Scotty_ffgamer]

I just prefer having a physical copy of older games and playing them on the original console anyways. This is the case for me whether its using an emulator on a computer or legally purchasing an emulation of a game through something like Wii. To me, it's not the same to play Metroid with a Wii Mote (or even classic controller) rather than have the experience of doing special tricks to get my NES to read the game and play it with the NES controller. This is of course different when playing PS1 games on the PS3 considering the controller and experience is practically the same.

That being said, I have no qualms with emulating a game that was never released in the US with a fan translation. I don't have qualms with emulating extremely rare games that the $200 to buy will all go to the reseller and not to a developer. New games that are released in the US should never be emulated, though. I feel like if you are going to play their game, they deserve the money for the work they put into it.

[RocketMBA]

Morally, once of a certain age. Legally, copyrighted material.

[Old Manus]

I play my old PS1 and PS2 games on emulators using the actual discs I own, because the consoles themselves have long gone.

[Quindiana Jones]

I support any action that leads to games being more easily played, regardless of who takes the action. If the developers and publishers make it prohibitively difficult or expensive to play their games, or if a game is too difficult to obtain or play through legitimate means, then I have no problem with the concept of pirating it.

[Bolivar]

It was the main way I played the Super Nintendo games canon as I never owned the system. I don't do it anymore because I'm more into current games, plus most of the older titles I want to play have been re-released on newer platforms and I'd rather play the official copy.

[Mirage]

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.

[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.

[Quindiana Jones]

Vivi and Dr Unne's points about gaming history are particularly important given that not only are the major companies neglecting to preserve their history, they are - for the most part - actively working to remove it.

[Slothy]

not only are the major companies neglecting to preserve their history, they are - for the most part - actively working to remove it.

Yeah, that last part is a bit of an issue too.