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Comment by intopieces | Hacker News Reader

With no legal way to purchase most of the games on these systems -- and certainly not in a way that the original creators would benefit -- most people would be O.K. with pirating games.

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A lot of these older classics that you'd probably want to emulate are actually available in some form or other. For PS1/2 games, you can often purchase inexpensive digital copies on the Playstation Store, and for older Nintendo titles they offer digital copies through their Virtual Console service.

Additionally, just because a title isn't easily available for purchase, or available through your desired channels, that doesn't magically invalidate copyright.

> Additionally, just because a title isn't easily available for purchase, or available through your desired channels, that doesn't magically invalidate copyright.

I think most people understand that legal/illegal is only loosely correlated with right/wrong.

>A lot of these older classics that you'd probably want to emulate are actually available in some form or other.

And emulation is the reason those titles are available. Those titles are being emulated on other systems. Without the games having been pirated to begin with, the people sitting on the IP would have left them to rot. Piracy is a demonstration of demand. Do you think the iTunes Music Store would have come about without Napster?

>Additionally, just because a title isn't easily available for purchase, or available through your desired channels, that doesn't magically invalidate copyright.

"Information wants to be free." It doesn't invalidate the copyright, but it certainly lowers the 'perceived harm' in the mind of the end-user.

And the copyright holders, thankfully, don't seem to be very attentive. Coolroms and EmuParadise are still around, I was grabbing ROMs from there over 10 years ago.

I definitely agree that console emulation is a Good Thing from the standpoint of preserving the history of the medium. Hell, I've been working on my own Game Boy emulator in my spare time out of a mixture of technical curiosity and preservationism.

I also agree that a large, driving force behind the development of these emulators is the wider public's desire to easily play old games for free.

That said, it doesn't mean I condone the illegal redistribution of old games to play on these emulators. The fact that it's easy and largely overlooked by rights holders doesn't change the ethical equation for me.

> The fact that it's easy and largely overlooked by rights holders doesn't change the ethical equation for me

Which is fine, but ethics are essentially a personal thing. For example, I've pirated things I own on non digital medium. Or heck, even things I own on DvD because frankly double clicking 5 times is way more convenient than digging out the disc and sitting through unskippable shitty intro warnings etc.

In neither of those cases am I within the law, but I'm ethically comfortable with it. Similarly, I wouldn't feel bad using an emulator despite them necessitating the pirating of games.

AFAIK you can make copies of your owned disks or rip them, legally, as long as you don't distribute. So ripping a cd to listen to it is fine. Now instead of ripping it, youngot yourself a copy online. You have already paid for the material. (As long as you don't sell your physical media, that is).

At least, that is how it is in the Netherlands.

I condone the illegal redistribution of old games. In fact, I consider it a moral imperative. Social archiving is the only reason some things still exist.

Literature, music, video games -- all are artifacts of our cultural heritage. That lawmakers have decided to exceed the original copyright terms in the interest of whatever holding company batch-acquired the dead IP is unfortunate, but I don't derive any moral judgement from that.

You could buy an officially licensed emulator which gives you copyrighted ROMs. You are allowed to use your legally purchased ROMs however you want, including in other emulators.

It is possible in some cases but super fragmented, you can buy old Sega games on Steam for example. Probably best thing to do is pick the games you play the most and try to buy something from the parent company, if it still exists.

In the case of Nintendo and Sega, a large number of their games can be purchased through the Nintendo eShop on the Wii U and 3DS.

That number isn't all that large when you take into account the size of each console's library. Virtual console only carries the "top" titles and a small smattering of outliers.

Take the SNES for an example. 721 titles released in the USA, 1442 (with considerable overlap) in Japan. The VC only has 63 titles.

N64? 296 titles USA, 21 on VC.

NES? 679 USA, 92 VC.

Genesis? 729 USA, 73 VC.

So unless you want to leave roughly 90% of each system's library untouched, "piracy" is the only choice. I'd give just about anything to play Tetrisphere again (it's one of those games that doesn't emulate quite right) in a sane way, but Nintendo doesn't want to sell it to me.

Some games may never (for human-scale values of "never") be sold again, or only with unacceptable alterations, usually for licensing reasons. Goldeneye's[1] a big example of the former (Bond licensing), Crazy Taxi of the latter (music licensing—IIRC the only console release of it with the original music is on the Dreamcast, and it's unlikely that'll ever happen again).

Similar things happen with older TV, too, especially with music licensing. Failure to license for online/dvd distribution was common until pretty recently—I think Skins (UK) has that problem, for example. Only way to watch it as it originally aired is piracy.

[1] There was a "remake" released but it was an entirely different game. Basically a bad Call of Duty clone. Nothing at all like the original, and nothing like the excellent HD re-release of its successor Perfect Dark on the Xbox360.

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