Are these “safe”? A friend has sent me an emulator to play Earthbound on my computer. Will it cause any problems? I can’t get the stupid thing to unzip, but that’s secondary.
There are many different ones out there and they are generally legit although the different ones vary a lot in quality. Some of the emulators don’t have sound and some are hard to configure with certain controllers but the better ones I have used work and they aren’t a virus or malware if that is what you mean. You don’t have to use the emulator your friend sent you. You can google the different alternatives and reviews for them. They are generally free because some students like to write emulators for old systems in computer science classes and then share their project after the class is over. You still need the game ROM’s once you pick an emulator but those are trivially easy to get off the web.
Danke!
The hardware emulators are perfectly safe and “legal”, but the software for them may not be Supposedly, unless you own the ROM cartridge itself you aren’t to use to emulated cartridge.
Having said that, I personally use SNES9x v1.51, and it works fine on both XP and Vista64.
All the ones on Zophar’s website are good. I preferred Zsnes to Snesx when I used them but things may have changed since then. You won’t get a virus from these if you choose one of the first links in google. The emulators for popular systems basically work perfectly. More obscure or newest systems will have problems as Shagnasty describes.
As people mentioned, this is a legal gray area and all that.
Ah then, please insert the word “hypothetically” into my OP, when reading it to yourself :D.
Dega is a pretty good one for the old sega master system and Project64 was decent for n64 roms. It is perfectly safe for use on a home pc. As with all dowloaded executable files, they should be scanned for malware and or viruses.
As previous posters have said, the roms are the actual game files, which are downloaded separately. I too recommend Zophar’s site.
As I understand it, there is no grey area–ROMs are illegal to own or use, even if you bought the original game. There would simply be no benefit for the owners of the property in prosecuting pirates since the original games and consoles are generally no longer sold. Also, there is speculation that, for every old ROM played, the market base for a sequel on the new SuperWeeWeeTorus64 system increases.
I use ZSNES for Windows or for DOS (depending on the game) for Super Nintendo ROMS. Oswan is a good one for Wonderswan games, and Nesticle is my choice for old-school Nintendo. I used MAME for a bit to play insert-quarter arcade games, but I could only get a few of the games to work properly.
The emulators themselves are legal and reputable, and are as safe as any other legal and reputable software. The roms are in a legal gray area at best, and probably (mostly[sup]*[/sup]) illegal, and come from sources that one wouldn’t ordinarily trust to be safe, except that they’re insulated from your system as a whole via the emulator, and so couldn’t really do any damage even if they tried.’
- There are a few amateur developers who still make game-roms for the old systems and their emulators, and who mostly distribute them freely. Those are legal, and their existence means there’s a legal use for the emulators. But the Mario, Zelda, Metroid, etc. games are a different story.
With MAME you have to download libraries and such. Like it won’t play NeoGeo games out of the “box,” but you put some zipped libraries in a folder and everything works.
As Chronos says, the ROMs are mostly harmless because they don’t have executables, dlls, etc.
They are in all likelihood illegal to download even if you own the original carts, but if you dump* them yourself, it’s no different legally than making a backup of any other software you paid for. Oh, companies like Nintendo will still claim it’s illegal, and even put disclaimers about it in their manuals at some point, but Nintendo isn’t the copyright law.
Do most people actually have cart dumpers? No, of course not, but some of us do.
*dump - to use a special device to copy software from a cartridge to disk
Unless you own a copy of the game, it’s pretty much a given that you are breaking some law…
Emulators are great, safe, and fun. Downloading ROMs, sadly, is a pain.
Earthbound is amazing. Possibly the best rpg ever for that console. Where else can you smack a new-age-retro-hippie around like that?
Sadly, when the fan translation of Mother 3 (the next game, written for the handheld) was made available, I was told that that’s the sort of thing that the SD doesn’t want to be mentioned.
But it’s out there.
Speaking of gray areas… what the hell is wrong with the game companies? Surely they could make ROMs available legally and use an iTunes-like store to get $1 or $2 each for them. I have a collection of a couple dozen SEGA Master System ROMs (for when I’m feeling nostalgic) and I’d gladly pay for them if someone would let me.
I don’t mean this just as a rant. Is there some reason a company like Nintendo is prevented from re-releasing their old content?
Or are we just waiting for Steve Jobs to drag them kicking and screaming into the new century? 
There are tons of old games available for Xbox live and Playstation network, as well as collections on discs of old games. They are simply emulators with the rom bundled together, they don’t actually port each game.
Nintendo does sell retro games for use on the Wii. Which really doesn’t answer the question, I suppose, of why they don’t also sell them for emulators that run on PCs.
I use Jnes - no problems at all.
Lots of ROMs fall under abandonware. The companies are unlikely to profit off of any of these which is why is is more morally acceptable. Many companies however believe that they may compete if they decide to rerelease or remake the games, as have been done for the last couple years for handhelds and more recently with WiiWare and the like.
Only a fairly pathetic subset of them, though. EarthBound in particular, for example, was never approved for Virtual Console release, despite considerable demand, and never will be. The reason? Apparently there are a few very short unlicensed sound samples in it, a few of the songs kinda almost sound like other published songs, and one of the NPCs bears a vague resemblance to Mr. T. :smack:
I guess the next question is, if Nintendo thinks that they’d get in legal trouble for distributing this game, does that mean it’s fine and dandy to pirate it? 
The only reason I play with emulators rather than my SNES console is because the console is 20 years old and I often have to slam the cartridges in and eject them several times before they decide to work. My NES console died for good about 5 years ago, but I still had lots of cartridges so I downloaded the ROMs for them.
There was a sweet one going around Ebay in the heyday of the Game Boy Advance, that let you patch your GBA into the old serial printer port in the back of a PC. I used that so I could put my Gameboy games on my laptop; the screen’s bigger, and I can use a USB controller instead of the little dinky buttons right on the system!