Any attempts at legal emulation?

Thats the grey area: without those the emulator is practically useless.

The problem with VC and the like is that its not a service but a feature locked to a piece of hardware, like say siri on apple devices

 

Lots of systems don't use any BIOS, and some systems that do have them can run without it. The GBA has a BIOS, but some emulators feature an ability to simulate BIOS calls/functions and still run games.

NES, SNES, Genesis, PC-Engine, all are examples of systems where no BIOS is required. There was the commercial Virtual Game Station and Bleem for PS1 in the past. Those were attempts at commercial emulators. Bleem got sued out of existence and VGS's company ended up being purchased by Sony I think.

 

It's important to note that they still won the case Sony brought against them. They just couldn't recover after the legal fees piled up. :'(

 

Yeah I remember that, bleem even put that in every box they sold

The thing about bleem that I think pissed sony the most is that they were emulating a currentgen console, not some old piece of hardware no longer for sale, and at the time sony was actually making a profit on PSX units sold so using an emulator actually cut into its profits, even if the user had actual games and not pirated copies.

Now something comes to mind: did bleem, VGS or any of the other for-profit emulators out there tried to share profits or something with game companies?

 

The PocketNES emulator for the GBA was used in various commercial re-releases by Jaleco, Konami, Atlus, etc...

 

POPS from Sony or the official HUDSON PC Engine CD emulator on PSP/PS3 are legal.

 

I think there's official demo versions of some Gyakuten Saiban (Phoenix Wright) GBA titles, which iirc were provided in the form of a ROM & emulator for Windows. You could call them commercial, I guess... Can't be bothered to look them up right now though, so I might be mistaken.