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by mattigames 1143 days ago
What about people trying to archive games for historic value? What about people that want custom tools to develop games for the switch? (E.g. automating inputs for QA's sake) What about people that want to create mods for existing Nintendo games?

I know most people will use them for piracy but it's really shortsighted and I'm glad emulation is still legal.

1 comments

> What about people trying to archive games for historic value?

Well, from a purely legal perspective that's not any different than "regular" piracy.

Today's pirates are tomorrow's preservationists. Without today's pirates, works risk being lost to time
Archival isn't piracy.

archive

place or store (something) in [a collection of historical documents or records providing information about a place, institution, or group of people]

If you were downloading roms in order to build your archive, that would be piracy, but the downloading roms is the issue there. One could argue that downloading roms is fine if you own the games in question as well, but I doubt anyone wants to test that in court.

Even if you’re talking about just ripping your own games, you are on uncertain legal footing if there is any DRM you have to circumvent to do it.