| Description: | Where do emulators come from? Generally, they’re built by fans. Sometimes it’s a single obsessive fan of a given console, and sometimes it’s an entire open source community. In almost all cases, though, these emulators are distributed for free online. Developers work hard to make their emulators as accurate as possible, meaning the experience of playing the game feels as much like playing on the original system as possible. There are several emulators out there for every retro gaming system you can imagine.
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And where do ROMs come from? If a game comes on a DVD, like the PlayStation 2 or the Nintendo Wii, you can actually rip games yourself using a standard DVD drive to create ISO files. For old cartridge-based consoles, special pieces of hardware hardware makes it possible to copy games over to your computer. In theory, you could fill a collection this way. Basically no one does this, however, and instead downloads ROMs from a wide collection of websites that, for legal reasons, we will not be linking to. You’ll have to figure out how to get ROMs yourself.
Is downloading ROMs legal? We talked to a lawyer about this, actually. Broadly speaking, downloading a ROM for a game you do not own is not legal–just like downloading a pirated movie is not legal. Downloading a ROM for a game you do own, however, is hypothetically defensible–at least legally speaking. But there really isn’t caselaw here. What is clear is that it’s illegal for websites to be offering ROMs for the public to download, which is why such sites are frequently shut down. |
