NES emulation

[gold163]

Is the emulation of old, published NES games considered piracy? If so, is providing a link to an emulator and a downloaded rom illegal? Kind of a dumb question, because I think the answer is yes, but if there's some way to subvert the legal issues of emulation, I think it would be kind of cool to put vNes in the new forums.

[NecroZerumus]

Emulators aren't illegal.

Roms will always be illegal, no matter how old they can get. The old ones just don't get much of any attention compared to isos of say 360 games.

Go ahead and do it, but the roms must not be present on the site. People should upload them from their computer or somethng

And fyi, NNNesterJ is far superior.

[gold163]

It kind of defeats the purpose of putting the emulator on the site if the user has to download the roms to their computer. Not to mention, vNes is the only embeddable emulator that I know of.

And some games are so old that the companies that made them are extinct. Is it still illegal then? Not that anybody plays those games anyway.

Anyway, nevermind; SMF Arcade only allows you to put up the games they have on their site anyway. Lame.

[NecroZerumus]

If the company is dead, then well pretty much it's not really illegal anymore. Unless graverobbing on the internet is illegal.

EDIT: Oh, how lame.

[gold163]

I could techically put up a page for it because SMF is cool and lets you put up web pages, but I'd have to find abandonware NES games that are actually worth playing first. :/

[Asii]

Why do we need NES games on our forum?

[gold163]

I dunno. For fun. We don't need them; I just thought it would be cool. Whatever, we're not going to do it anyway, because of legal issues. I have enough trouble trying to get the IRC chatroom to appear the way I like as it is. However, SMF is REALLY nice.

[NecroZerumus]

I would demand Gargoyle's Quest II to be the game of the week every month.

[gold163]

A month is more than one week though.

[Asii]

There would be three or four "game of the week"'s every month...

[Mutenpika]

OK, here we go. In the past few months I've lurked around Slashdot, and caught the "righteous indignation against the MPAA/RIAA" bug. As a result, I know a thing or two about copyright.

Copyright, so far, exists to a period on a work up until the death of the creator plus 70 years in the United States. You can thank Disney for that "plus seventy years" thing, they're desperate not to let any of Walt's original magic slip into the public domain. Furthermore, if a work was "for hire," or for publishing by a corporation, then the copyright lasts 120 years after creation or 95 years after publication.

Even if a developer company goes kaput, someone holds the copyright, and more likely than not NES carts contain some nintendo-proprietary bootstrap or similar code that is still copyrighted by Nintendo.

Do I give a crap about these copyrights? Not really.