Emulation: Good or Bad

by Vicks Eddington

...thing, but now I'm gonna get dumped on because many people think it's illegal. WRONG! Emulation itself isn't illegal, but the distribution of commercial ROMs is.

Before I go any further into this I'd like to explain what I mean by commercial ROMs. A ROM as many of you already know means Read Only Memory. But where do they come from? Well when you open up a game cartridge (I really don't recommend doing this) you'll find the little microchips inside. That's where the programming of the game is stored, the unalterd game itself. I will not however tell how to get the information off of the chip because of the overwhelming amount of people that will just go out and say, "hey I can do that," then go out and dump their games, and post them for redistribution.

Which comes to the illegal part. The redistribution of any file you have purchased is illegal. I know you're saying, "I bought it, I'll do what I want with it!" But you didn't buy it, you just bought the rights to use it at home. America (God Bless it!) has certain laws called copyright laws. And they prevent us from "copying" things for our own profit if somebody else developed it. This is called "Software Piracy" which is illegal. Yeah, I know you've seen those warnings, "Delete this file after 24 hours" It doesn't matter. If you download it, it's illegal, "backing it up" is illegal.

Going on to Emulation again. Emulation is what we do to make our computers act like other kinds of hardware. For example the Super Nintendo, Nintendo, Genesis, Neo Geo, and Arcade Games. All of these have been emulated. But an emulator is no good without software to run on it. So people dump their cartridge games into an image file. This "image file" is a file that contains everything that was on those chips discussed earlier. It's like taking a photograph of a room, and then bringing out everything in the photograph. Say you took a picture of your home entertainment system. Well now you've got two of 'em! Go to the store, take pictures of the stuff there, take 'em home, and viola! You got yourself a department store! That's the best way I can explain the image files, but I digress. The emulator needs those image files to run, otherwise it just takes up space. Which is where the "Software Piracy" comes in.

I'm not going to say software piracy is right, no less than a bank robber can say they did anything wrong. I've been on the emulation scene for about a year now. And thanks to it, I've been able to experience a lot more games than people who don't.

My goal: What I'd like to see is some of the great consoles out there to make a piece of hardware that'd plug into a parralle port, or a USB port, at a fraction of the cost of buying the whole system. The hardware would have controller slots in it, so you could use the same controls as everybody else, and you'd just plug the game into that. That's hardware emulation, and it's all legal. The illegal part of it is software piracy.

The concern of Software Companies: The corporate giants, like Sony don't like this. Why? Because they think they're going to lose money! They had a bit to do about this with a small company called LLC. Sony feared that the software would flaw and let people use copied discs. Got news for ya Sony, your product lets people use copied CDs! It's a lot harder to distribute the CDs anyway. It's not like you can download them from the internet in under twenty minutes. Not without somebody first taking the time to upload them. And then who would want to do that?! No, the only choice Sony has here is to make money. And so they take bleem! LLC to court to try to stop them from making their product which in turn will make Sony more money. As it turned out a judge said that bleem! had remained within their bounds and copied nothing from Sony's Playstation. So for a price you can play some games on your computer now that couldn't be played before. And that price is a very good fraction of the price of a Playstation game console. Again I digress.

In a Nutshell: Emulation is good, piracy is bad, Sony strange on their money making policies, devil bad, THE MAN bad, giant robots good when used the right way, Playstation on the computer good!