[sjroot]

These sort of arguments are really tiresome.

I’m absolutely a fan of engineering feats like these being made more accessible for educational purposes. Even in college, I built a NES emulator on an FPGA.

But to argue that it’s primary motive is not to facilitate (and potentially profit from) piracy is not grounded in reality.

[juliosueiras]

No, emulator primary motive is enabling longevity for the target system, since hardware get damaged over the years, CD/DVD/Cart get corrupt over the years, without it, there will be literally no way to preserve a console games and ecosystem, for example I own 805 switch physical games, but because I know Yuzu exist I don’t have to worry about if one day the cart get damaged or something

[syspec]

Out of curiosity how many of those have you played all the way through, or beat? Or are you more into collecting them as a hobby

[juliosueiras]

played maybe around 5% of it, I am mostly collecting them as modern gaming is rapidly becoming too unbearable for me(MTX, Lootboxes, the recent NFTs, etc), and I am most likely plan to just play the collection(which I collect with criteria of at least 1% of interest of playing ,so no baby games like Racing with Ryan etc) when I stop buying modern games

[kcb]

No. My primary motive, especially with these more modern emulators, is to have a better experience playing games I own. To play 3D games at higher resolution and more stable framerates. Also, so I don't have to breakout old consoles anytime I want to play those games.

[izacus]

The court has already decided in history that you're wrong with your assertion and I don't know why do you so heartly want to overturn that by defending corporations against the users who legitimately want to play their games on other systems.

[Firehawke]

Absolutely not. MAME's primary purpose is to document the hardware and ROM revisions, and to preserve as much accurate data about the machines as possible. You can use MAME sets to actually replace damaged ROMs, and the tools that come with MAME (romcmp) can help you identify an unknown board if you pull chip data off of it.

[lvass]

I see no one arguing this here at all.

Much on the contrary, I'd say piracy is a console emulators most common use. But it's still fine. All that matters is there's a possibility they're being used for good things.

If someone does something bad he's responsible for it, not the creator of the tools he used. Even if you don't like what most people use something for, just the possibility of one person doing it right is much more than enough reason for it to built. We call this individual freedom, and it's much more important than (game publisher's financial) security.

[powerapple]

most people using emulators are those who grew up owning consoles anyway.

About piracy, when I think about it, piracy is big part of my computer childhood, otherwise, I wouldn't afford to do anything with computers.

[libertine]

Honestly that's my take on it: piracy is a matter of accessibility.

As a marketer, I can even see the benefits of "free distribution of content" to people that wouldn't buy it anyway, and you're still building your brand on those people - they will, eventually down the line, buy your IP if they had good experiences with it.

I became a GTA fan thanks to it, and to modding, when started to be able to afford games I bought into the series.

If I haven't developed the emotional relationship with the game, nowadays I wouldn't care less about it.

[boondaburrah]

This is why I like using emulators with full debug tools. At that point it's quite obviously about research and development. Emulators that just have a game window and hacks on hacks to get your game "backups" to run aren't as fun.