Which brings up a problem.ĭigital games are married to the console. Which is why emulators are often thought of as way to get rid of the physical games and the physical consoles once they're no longer available. Nobody has that much space to dedicate to gaming. A 'gamer PC' in Japan or Korea is basically a non-thing.

There's also a large culture component that exists regarding Japanese games that doesn't exist in the west, and that's PC games are usually weak and for adults in Japan. People primarily use emulators for piracy, and that's just the nature of what is going to happen if you don't produce that console and it's software in perpetuity and at a price point that people can afford. Like Nintendo, despite it's overreach and anti-consumer heavy-handed message, has always been correct about it. Anyone under the age of 30 likely has no way of acquiring an original SNES and the cart (most carts on eBay are counterfeit (repro) flash carts, and not legit) so you can safely bet anyone playing a translated game on an emulator, almost certainly stole it. In recent years, there have been 'randomizer' mods for a few SNES games that reasonably operate under the same legal justification, you still need to dump the rom yourself and modify the rom yourself, just like with translation patches.

It has, and has always been that you can not copy the firmware (which is software after all) and redistribute it.Ī lot of early generations of emulators also require firmware/bios dumps, and even high-accuracy emulators of 16-bit consoles like the SNES require the firmware dumps of the expansion chips to actually emulate it accurately.Įveryone who throws out the 'homebrew' argument can never name any homebrew software that they need the emulator for, let alone modifying their console to play, or the flash copier for. End point.īleem did not require Playstation firmware while ALL other emulators did at the time, and thus that became the legal test for it. If an emulator requires a console BIOS/ROM to operate, it's only intended for Piracy. (the ones that don't use firmware of the consoles). The point is to get a good working emulator later down the line.Įmulators have been proven over and over to not be piracy but original pieces of software.

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