Any attempts at legal emulation?

So I been thinking, are there any? I seen plenty of paid emulators (which 99% of the time are poorly repackaged emulators made the community) but I don't recall any attempts at creating something like an iTunes or Netflix for old games and emulation.

Anyone knows?

 

There was some attempt at a legal emulation/rental service. Not sure what ever happened with it. The idea was that they'd rent you the game while you played it on your emulator. So they had an actual copy. So only however many copies they had could be in use at a time. They modified open source emulators for this purpose.

The best "legal" emulation would be just emulating on your PC with free emulators and using a device like the Retrode to dump your own carts.

 

What about the emulator that Tommo loaded on the Neo Geo X?

 

Emulators aren't necessarily illegal (at least in the US). Sometimes it's not even grey area. Emulator authors get into trouble when they steal code and use it in their emulators.

We have emulators running games on PSN, Virtual console, some "retro collection" type games, etc...

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Video_game_console_emulator#Legal_issues

The problem with this is getting the rights to all the games. Most of the rights for games people want to play are probably snatched up by Nintendo, Sony or Microsoft by now.

 

I believe there was some licensed Roms for multicade cabs that ran MAME

 

That'd be Console Classix then, I think.

Or was it? I remember a similar service that only had SNES titles. If that's them they seem to have expanded quite a bit. Good for them I guess.

 

That's the one I was thinking of. Interesting that they seem to still be around.

 

Virtual Console, PSN, XBLA, DOSBox/GOG/Steam?

 

It's my understanding that emulators are legal as long as they don't use any code taken off of the machine itself (like BIOS images). ROMs, on the other hand, are illegal if you don't own the original games.

 

I would not be satisfied with merely creating an emulator that just plays old games, especially when such games promoted are like your biggest titles. It would be nice to bring back more obscure titles via this method. However, I don't look to kindly on Virtual Console. I wish some emulated games were more like the Sega 3D Classics or the two Wii Collections. I'm playing the heck out of Space Harrier 3D and am very impressed with the tinkering M2 has done to this almost 30 year old classic.

 

There are arcade cabinets called "ULTRACADE" that ran MAME and licensed ROMS. There was also GameTap.

 

Isn't Virtual Console (Wii / Wii U) , PS1 games on PSN and PSP emulation as well? Do they count?

 

DOSBox? Completely legal and open source, also used in commercial re-releases of old games. Same applies to many old computer emulators - for example Spectrum ROMs are freeware for use with emulation, there are many games made free in binary or source form. Some games don't have copyright holder anymore - original author died, for example, and company that published it doesn't exist anymore - so these games are free too.

 

Some games on some consoles are actually running within emulators. Take the Metal Slug games within the Metal Slug Anthology compilation (for the PlayStation 2) as an example. Or some of the SEGA classics from those SEGA ages compilation discs.

 

I know about VC, repacks and GoG, the point was if there is (or was) an emulator that was completely legal, games and everything, and not a non-functioning grey area app that requires other components from the user to work.

I mentioned iTunes and netflix because those two are services in industries that even today still are very much against new models of distribution that threaten old ones.

 

Well Bleem and Virtual Game Station were legal emulators, they didnt include an iTunes type store tho
The closest to this at the moment is the Virtual Console on the Wii etc.

 

Legal as in? Runs without copyrighted BIOS?

 

This is the only thing close to what you describe. http://www.consoleclassix.com/
I'm not sure if you'd consider it a gray area or not. But in general, most emulators are legal. The only thing questionable legally involves copyright law for the games and in some cases BIOS data.

 

i had considered something like this a while back a sort of "community" owned collection of games, pay a small amount and have joint ownership of pretty much all games, then you could have a download site that's only accessible to "legal owners" of the games, not sure about the technicallities, but i assume even if you only owned a 0.000001% share in the entire collection you could sort of legally have access to a backup copy

 

That's right. Emulation itself is not illegal, provided you don't use copyrighted material illegally. So if an emulator does not use any copyrighted code, then the emulator is not illegal. This means that most (or all) N64 emulators are perfectly legal, since they don't use any copyrighted code at all (that I've seen). Nintendo did famously make the blanket statement "Bottom line, emulation is illegal" when the first N64 emulator, UltraHLE, came out, but that wasn't legally true.

If an emulator does use copyrighted code, then it may or may not be illegal, depending on the circumstances. For instance, all ZX Spectrum emulators use the Spectrum rom code, but that's not illegal, as Amstrad (who own the ZX Spectrum copyrights) have said that anyone can use the Spectrum rom.

On the other hand, no one has (as far as I know) given permission for anyone to use the Amigo OS, so any emulators that use this may or may not be illegal, depending on the country you're in. If you own a real Amiga, then your country's laws might allow you to use the copyrighted rom code on an emulator, or they may not. They might do so only if you yourself copy the rom from your Amiga and put the file(s) into the emulator yourself, it depends on your country. But if you don't own an Amiga then you have no legal rights to use the Amiga OS with an emulator, so you will be breaking the law by doing so. There are Amiga emulators + games packages sold which, provided they are legal, get around this in that by buying such a package you are buying the right to use the Amiga OS, but I don't know if these packages are sanctioned by whoever owns the Amiga OS now.

And regardless of whether or not an emulator is legal, it's illegal to play games on it that you don't own in their legal (i.e. paid for) state. If you do own the game, then you might or might not be able to legally play it on an emulator, again it depends on your country's laws.