Tell me about Emulators

[SophroniaLee]

The computer program that lets you play N64 games. What exactly are they? Do they cost money? Are they legal? Where can I find them? Whatever you can tell me would be lovely to know

[Shadow27]

N64 emulators are easy to find. They are free for example you can google project 64. and they are not illegal. The roms however are illegal unless you own the game. There are also emulators for: GameBoy Advance SNES Playstation 1 Playstation 2 GameCube And probably other systems. If you have any further questions, just ask ~Wes

[Maria92]

There are also emulators for Wii and Xbox. They don't work well, but they're in development. And yeah, technically speaking, it is illegal to download ROMs (basically a ripped copy of the game in digital form) unless you own the game. That said, there are plenty of sites that comply with DMCA takedown requests and still host direct downloads. An emulator works by simulating hardware using software. Games are built to run on a specific system, using specific hardware. Instead of recreating the games from scratch, it's just easier to simulate the hardware. But because this isn't very efficient, a simple N64 game can take tremendous power to run. My computer is a year old, and can't emulate DS games at even half speed. So if it doesn't run well for you, you're gonna have to toy around with the settings and probably sacrifice quality.

[Shadow27]

N64 games run very decently nowadays

[SophroniaLee]

Thank you greatly! The reason I was interested was to find rare games that I can't find anywhere else, but I guess that's illegal. So I'll just hit ebay instead!

[Shadow27]

They may not be illegal if the copyright has run out, but I'm not entirely sure.

[Replicon]

I've only really emulated NES and SNES games. AFAIK, the emulators are legal, but the roms are not. I think in the playstation case, it's like, the emulator is legal, but some specific file (the actual playstation chip rom or somesuch) is not, so the emulator site would say "google for this file name and add it here"

[Shadow27]

I've only really emulated NES and SNES games. AFAIK, the emulators are legal, but the roms are not. I think in the playstation case, it's like, the emulator is legal, but some specific file (the actual playstation chip rom or somesuch) is not, so the emulator site would say "google for this file name and add it here" That would be the playstation BIOS.

[Vertebrate]

Emulators are, actually, illegal. For the same reason that hacking the PS3. (By the way, the entire DMCA oversteps its bounds in my opinion, and it's only a matter of time before you can do what you want with hardware)You won't get into any trouble for downloading emulators or even ROMs, however, unless you call up Quantico and ask for instructions on downloading emulators and roms.

[Sornaensis]

Downloading a ripped ROM is illegal, whether you own the physical cartridge or not.

[Alric]

There was some website around that you could download a lot of old games. It made you like do a simple survey or fill out a thing for their sponsor site or something(I am sure you seen sites like that before), and the money they make from that they let you use to download games. It might of been legal, if they were using the ad money to pay the game developers. Which I am sure they would do, since the games are so old, it is probably the only way the developers would still make money from the games. There are probably other sites that you can pay small fees to download games on too, and I would hope their legal. It is probably true that you wont get in any trouble though. Realistically if you download a 20 year old game that isn't being sold any where, no one cares. There are games that however may be being sold still though.

[Shadow27]

There was some website around that you could download a lot of old games. It made you like do a simple survey or fill out a thing for their sponsor site or something(I am sure you seen sites like that before), and the money they make from that they let you use to download games. It might of been legal, if they were using the ad money to pay the game developers. Which I am sure they would do, since the games are so old, it is probably the only way the developers would still make money from the games. There are probably other sites that you can pay small fees to download games on too, and I would hope their legal. It is probably true that you wont get in any trouble though. Realistically if you download a 20 year old game that isn't being sold any where, no one cares. There are games that however may be being sold still though. If a game is 20 years old, if it is being sold, it is not going to be new. It will be a used game in a store that specifically sells old games. Therefor, the money goes to the person who owned the game previously and the developers who initially created the game have already gotten their money out of it. You'll never be able to find a new copy of the game so the developers aren't getting any money from it anymore at all. So yeah, who cares?

[Vertebrate]

There was some website around that you could download a lot of old games. It made you like do a simple survey or fill out a thing for their sponsor site or something(I am sure you seen sites like that before), and the money they make from that they let you use to download games. It might of been legal, if they were using the ad money to pay the game developers. Which I am sure they would do, since the games are so old, it is probably the only way the developers would still make money from the games. There are probably other sites that you can pay small fees to download games on too, and I would hope their legal. I know for a fact these sites are illegal. But they get away with it. Don't pay for a website for roms. The ad money goes towards their operating costs (server and bandwidth) and they are almost certainly losing money. You don't have anything to worry about as the one accepting the illegal downloads though. I'm not going to go into the details as to why, but no anti-piracy company in their right mind would prosecute the users of such a website when the owners of the website are 100,000,000 times easier (and cheaper. and more profitable) to prosecute.

[Alric]

That is true of pretty much all illegal stuff. When you sue someone you only get the money you would of lost(and maybe some other factors but they are fairly small). So if someone downloads 1 game, you sue them for 5 bucks. It isn't even worth going to court. Especially for a 20 year old game that isn't produced any more. You sue someone who gave out a million copies, of the same game, and its 5 million dollars. Suddenly its worth doing something about it.