Legally Emulating Games


javaJake

Jacob Godserv
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I hear about all these games, and would love to try them out, but I want to do it legally. Someone had shown me how to get Mario Kart 64 onto my computer once, but it dawned on me (yep, it's that same ol' 40w bulb!) a few days later that it was probably illegal, so I promptly deleted it.

So it all boils down to this simple question: what's the legal way I can do this? :)
 
You could buy the actual game and then download the rom to the computer to play. there are lots of places that still sell 32-bit games in the dark corner of 2nd hand game stores.

But I understand it is still illigle to plays the rom, even if you own the game.

Best to stick to public domain roms if you really have a concious. ;)
 
The most legal way is to get a DoctorV64 or similar and dump your own cartridges.
Even then Nintendo would still insist that this is illegal and it may depend on your national laws...

The problem with most games is that you are not being sold the game itself, but rather a license to play it.
Morally speaking the best way is to dump your own software, the next best is to only download games you own and finally just be a ROM whore and stick your middle finger up at the man.
 
javajake,

In all honesty, the "legal" route in 2008 will not be easy. You would have to track down some probably hard to find equipment (various dumping devices). Older consoles will probably be the hardest to do.

And even then, as mentioned, there are still questions of legality. Your country's laws also matter a lot - don't assume Nintendo's (or any company's) claims are true - they say what's in their perceived interest. Actual law may not agree.

Anyway - IMO doing emulation of commercial games legally may be far more trouble than it's worth. Not in all cases - i.e. ripping PSX games is really easy. But in many cases it is. And even then, as said, not always sure it's technically legal to play copies on anything but the actual hardware. Again, each country's laws may be different on that.

You might want to consider ethics vs. legality. Is it illegal for you to play a copy of an old game you may own on cartridge using an emulator? Maybe. Is it unethical? Maybe not.

It's up to you.

There's always homebrew and public domain if these issues remain for you.
 
They are changing the laws in the UK in relation to music and video (ie making it legal for you to rip your collection to a PMP) I wonder if these changes include video games.... time to read up...
 
Thanks for the input guys. It really helps a lot to clear up my confusion on this topic.

I think I've decided it is ethical, not necessarily lawful. I've taken this same stance on CD ripping (I mean, give me a break...).

Making sure what I'm doing isn't wrong is important to me, though, so I'll keep thinking about it and doing a little research. Unfortunately, this desire for doing what is right has been pretty much lost in the world in general. It's sad to see things degenerate like that. I think if people had better morals we wouldn't be seeing insane lawsuits and other things happening. :(

Edit: I don't expect a reply. Just letting off a little steam that's been pent up because of this issue. :p
 
My understanding of US law(Admittedly out of date) is this: You may download and use a ROM, legally, for a maximum of 24 hours, after which you MUST delete it unless you have the physical cartridge for the game.
My guess is that the law treats these as "personal" rips of games that, under Fair Use, are legal because you own the original data. Audio and video in the US is very different because of the RIAA and the MPAA(They're why you can't legally download music that you have the disc for, it's retarded.)

My understanding(As I'm into emulation and abandonware) is that as long as you have the cartridge, disk, card, etc. for a game you can legally download and use a ROM, ISO, BIN, etc.
(Not sure where everyone lives, but I like to disseminate knowledge.)
(Insane lawsuits come from litigious motherfuckers, not immorality.)
 
There are a lot of rumors concerning ROM usage. In America, it is illegal to emulate commercial games. Period. Even if you own the game. Even if you dumped it yourself. The 24 hour idea is also a misconception, probably one that came out of general moral advice.

This is one of those things that is technically illegal, but if you own the game itself, then at least that takes care of the moral dilemma. And I can't think of anyone that's ever really got into trouble for emulating, unless they're putting ROMs up for download. In my mind, it's more a moral decision than anything.
 
javaJake said:
Making sure what I'm doing isn't wrong is important to me... -SNIP-
"Wrong" is a very vague term, and in this case a very difficult parameter to gauge. Wrong for who? There are many participants involved, i.e. the original creators of the game, the publishers, pro/anti piracy organisations, law enforcement etc. What may be "wrong" for one may not be for the others. At the end of the day, one thing you can ask yourself is – by performing this action, am I hurting others or putting them at risk of harm? Am I harming myself or putting myself at risk? If the answer is yes, then you probably shouldn't perform that action. Of course, it depends on the situation and on your intentions... but I find this way of reasoning much more useful, and well-founded laws will complement this.
 
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javaJake said:
Unfortunately, this desire for doing what is right has been pretty much lost in the world in general. It's sad to see things degenerate like that.
Yeah. They killed and pirated and raped and so, but they had morals, the others were Muslims, Negroes or Mexicans. They hardly are people at all. And the Bible says something about raping Muslim women somewhere.

But nowadays you find that everybody is downloading music and video and games FOR FREE. Even Mexicans. It freaks me out.

Things degenerate a lot.
 
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Yrx said:
There are a lot of rumors concerning ROM usage. In America, it is illegal to emulate commercial games. Period. Even if you own the game. Even if you dumped it yourself.
Admittedly I don't live in the US so my knowledge of US laws is somewhat vague, but I seem to remember the Library of Congress making an exemption to the laws where "obsolete" consoles and computers are concerned. That is, if the machine needed to run the original software isn't readily available anymore, you can do whatever is needed (including reverse engineering) to make the software run on hardware for which it was not designed (i.e. emulation). It still requires that you own the original software, thus taking care of the ethical dilemma.
 
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juanvvc said:
javaJake said:
Unfortunately, this desire for doing what is right has been pretty much lost in the world in general. It's sad to see things degenerate like that.
Yeah. They killed and pirated and raped and so, but they had morals, the others were Muslims, Negroes or Mexicans. They hardly are people at all. And the Bible says something about raping Muslim women somewhere.

But nowadays you find that everybody is downloading music and video and games FOR FREE. Even Mexicans. It freaks me out.

Things degenerate a lot.



Uhhhh, am I missing something here? What does ethnicity or religion have to do with ROMs?
 
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javaJake said:
Making sure what I'm doing isn't wrong is important to me, though, so I'll keep thinking about it and doing a little research.
The problem is that the gap between what is morally acceptable and what is legal is quite big when it comes to game emulation.

No one can seriously argue that freely downloading a game is immoral when right owners have no way to make profit of it any more.

Most former small editors and game author are not against free game downloading (it is clear in Amiga game community). I guess that if big editors fight it, it is mainly because they don't want to make piracy of recent games looking more acceptable.

Of course I am not talking here about PSX games which are still sold for a fair price by Sony.


pkostrze said:
Uhhhh, am I missing something here? What does ethnicity or religion have to do with ROMs?
Please, God, protect GP32X against political and religious useless trolls. Amen.
 
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As a former Commodore 64 graphics artist and designer, I can honestly say that anyone that emulates anything that I had a hand in, Warhawk being the most obvious, has my full support.

It gives me pleasure to think that people still enjoy stuff I helped create 20 years ago.
 
That is one of my favourite topic, here is the answer for my country (France)

First, Nintendo, and probably other companies, will say than using a rom is illegal whatever the circumstances. They are wrong of course, the decision isn't entirely their.

Second, the right to private copy is no more. They were some point in 2005/2006 where a glitch in the law made all piracy legal, as P2P was considered "lending things to friends" basically. That is why at this point the SACEM stopped filling lawsuits for a few months. However, the private copy law was abolished by De Villepin's government.

Third, there is a recent law passed under Raffarin's government specifically targeting video games, saying that hardware no more sold can be freely emulated, and games only available for not commercially available any more hardware can be copied and used for free. Problem is the law was never used in any judgement as no one bothered yet to sue someone downloading/using games old enough to be considered "abandonware". Meaning, we don't know yet what is meant by "not commercially available any more" (is "not sold in supermarket" good enough ? Or is the system considered available if an obscure oldies shop still sell it somewhere in France ?), and we don't know the status of remake and such... (Nintendo could say it's not ok to download SMB1 since it's sold on NDS under the name NSMB).

Fourth, the kind of games most of us are interested in I suppose (C64-type and Amiga-type) are often 100% free : the makers having gone bankrupt, no one holds any copyright on those.

Fifth, there is also some devs that explicitly decided to get their older games in public domain. Cinemaware is even distributing cracked roms of their old games (with original cracktro and everything !) on heir website.

Sixth, although is doesn't concern us yet (the oldest video game being about 50 years old or so), every US games more than 75 years old automatically go into public domain internationally. (was 50 before the mickey mouse act a few years ago)

Seventh, dumping your own game or downloading it is the same at the eye of the law. Only difference is the one that uploaded it to you is in more trouble than you are. That doesn't include P2P, obviously, since you're both downloader and uploader.

I think that's about it. From a non legal point of view though, lots of companies tolerate the distribution of their older game, some of them even acknowledged that it's not "officially" allowed, implying that unofficially they don't care. (I think it's Activision, #1 publisher now, that said to a french abandonware website something like "We won't sue you for pirating our oldest [in the context, they meant "pre-1995"] but we don't allow that". There is also the case of rockstar that still claim copyright for every games, but allow free download on their website of most pre-2000 games, making very unlikely they'd sue anyone distributing the game for free, on P2P or any other network). Not to mention devs stating that they are ok with people pirating the older games they created, even if they don't own copyright on their games, often it's the publisher that does.
 
Clad said:
Sixth, although is doesn't concern us yet (the oldest video game being about 50 years old or so), every US games more than 75 years old automatically go into public domain internationally. (was 50 before the mickey mouse act a few years ago)
I took a music technology course, and we learned a lot about when ownership of intellectual properties expires. I think it's actually 75 years after the original creator's death. I'm not sure how you would gauge that with corporations, so I'm sure it's different in that case. Or it's possible that it doesn't expire if they keep making games using that IP...

Getting back to the original question, I do agree that the morality of this case exceeds the law. If you download a game (one that isn't sold anymore, of course, like the Virtual Console on Wii) you're not hurting anyone, unless you would feel bad for people selling their old collections. And if that's the case, then buy a copy before you download it to ease your conscience.
 
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Yrx said:
Getting back to the original question, I do agree that the morality of this case exceeds the law. If you download a game (one that isn't sold anymore, of course, like the Virtual Console on Wii) you're not hurting anyone, unless you would feel bad for people selling their old collections. And if that's the case, then buy a copy before you download it to ease your conscience.
I don't think morality would be much of a defence in a court of law, you don't have any rights to play a game, even if you can't buy it - the rights owner is entitled to say you can't play it and I won't sell it to you.

With things like the Virtual Console, mobile phones etc, some old games are starting to be sold again and you could find sometime you thought was abandonware isn't any more.
 
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Yrx said:
I took a music technology course, and we learned a lot about when ownership of intellectual properties expires. I think it's actually 75 years after the original creator's death. I'm not sure how you would gauge that with corporations, so I'm sure it's different in that case. Or it's possible that it doesn't expire if they keep making games using that IP...
Actually, it's 75 years after the creator death if the creator is a physical person, and 75 years after release if not. No matter how the IP is still used. (The mickey mouse character will go public domain in slightly more than 20 years, while still being massivly used by the Disney corps)
 
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Clad said:
Actually, it's 75 years after the creator death if the creator is a physical person, and 75 years after release if not. No matter how the IP is still used. (The mickey mouse character will go public domain in slightly more than 20 years, while still being massivly used by the Disney corps)
I'd expect another one of these to turn up around then. ;)
 
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