Yes. Emulators are freeware and there's no harm downloading them. Technically, you can legally use them by playing public domain products and demos.

You can of course, download roms If you already have the existing games, as it isnt legal to own back-ups or copies of your own games.

And thats where legalities end. Otherwise downloading roms is illegal. Playing roms is illegal. Sharing roms is illegal. And there's no suchs rule that you can download them If you remove them in the next 24 hours. The only time it is legal is when roms are set up as freeware.

I hate your attitude towards console games. Altough I do agree that there are lots of corrupted rom sites complete with polls (vote 4 times before you can download!), hentai adds, bad zip files, old mame roms and stuff like that. There are some good sites too.

EDIT: Beside's, If a rom-site would be run by a community like this, I doubt it would become "corrupted".

Technically, a lot of emulators contain copies of copyrighted content. Since they are based on reverse-engineering the original system, and a number require a copy of the original BIOS files to run.

I see. In that case, isnt dosbox kind of illegal too?

Not certain about that, but that's possible.

I think the legal status of emulators hasn't been stablished in court, because nobody's been sued about it, and it may depend on the system. Hardware may be patented the same that software has copyrights, and I think some manufacturers (Nintendo? not sure) have argued it to claim that emulators themselves are illegal no matter what software they're used to run or even if none. Some hardware (the famed Z80 processor I think) or even whole systems (3DO I think) were openly licenced so any manufacturer could make them, and that would mean that it would be legal to emulate them too. Anyway we're not lawyers...

But the debate is not about legality, PC abandonware is illegal in principle just the same. The point is that the owner doesn't care about the game's being distributed or even about the game at all. That situation surely happens to lots of games for other platforms, and even to hardware systems. So if PC abandonware exists then it's the same for other platforms, as simple as that--even though some platforms may have a large proportion or even all of its games and the hardware as well currently protected; but others won't.

Uhm...DosBox kind of emulates an old computer, which your computer could do but it has Windows, besides MicroSoft doen't really care about DOS, so i think it's legal.

somebody should signature this message

It is interesting what my nervous mind can come up with :amused: (I was in a hurry) Ohh well, go ahead and make it your sig R.U.S.S :P

*You have lost 50 charisma*

Tomekk...
It emulates hardware which is copyrighted (and probably also patented) by the original manufacturer, it most likely uses at least parts of firmware from the emulated devices and it emulates a copyrighted operating system on top of that.
Whether Microsoft does or does not care about MS-DOS is irrelevant, since they still own the copyrights (which can only expire after a _very_ long time).

It's just as Japofran said - emulators are pretty much illegal, except nobody really bothers with stomping them out.

Anyway... this debate really doesn't belong here. This topic has ran its course, and there is no point in trying to argue about it.

:closed: