MAME is great. I don’t feel bad about using “pirate” roms at all- I only play the games that I obsessed over as a teenager-- I figure I plugged enough quarters into those machines to justify the occasional nostalgic diversion gratis.
I also have ColEm, a ColecoVision emulator. Hard to comprehend that the emulator and the dozens of games that I payed $20 + for will all fit on one floppy. (Coleco roms are 24k each…)
Now I have an itch to play [sub]ZA[/sub]xx[sup]ON[/sup]
Nothing to say but Tombstone City. Never has any individual heard Waltzing Matilda as much as I have.
Couple of years ago I got the Spectrum 48k emulator on a CD with thousands of games. It must’ve been legal because it’s openly sold in high-street stores like HMV.
It is terrific. I reduce the screen to a little square and I’ve got something far, far more entertaining than Solitaire, much deeper, and much less harsh on the memory. I’m still stuck halfway through Head Over Heels, which remains one of the greatest games ever written. Furthermore I don’t know about other emulators but Speculator (my emulator) makes it pretty easy to save, which I seem to recall was a deeply tiresome process in the old days.
A Quadra 630. It’s basically the same as one of my faster Macs, so it’s the only one I can run with a clear conscience. 
Unlike my faster Mac, it’s currently functional, though–a big plus. I mostly use BII to run Marathon and shuffle files back and forth on sneakernet with my Macs. Very, very neat.
Have you gotten internet running on it? I can’t seem to make mine recognize my dsl connection.
IANAL, but from what I understand, when you buy a game (or most software, for that matter) you don’t really own the game, you are actually only purchasing a license to run one copy of the game. If you sell the game, you have given up the license and can no longer legally play that game. (Also, you can’t legally install the same game on two machines and run both at the same time.)
As far as abandonware goes, that is up to the original copyright holders. Some have released their older games into the public domain as abandonware, and it’s something you would have to check on a case-by-case basis.
I usually only get whooshed like this when I read physics questions in GQ, but this one was pretty good. To me, it pretty much said,
“I aardvarked my pikachu and trans am 1966 Harley at 100 mph with Mary Hart having lots of high number boxes glued.”
Quick explanation: a Quadra 950 runs a 33 MHz 68040, and it normally uses a 5 MB/sec HD. An ATA/66 HD can reach speeds up to 66 MB/sec. Basically a performance increase of over 300%. This is especially notable because many times, emulated peformance is slower than the actual machine.
I had my cable line working for a short time, but something happened and trying to access the networking causes my NIC drivers to crash. Did you install the “Basilisk II Ethernet Driver” in the Network control panel?
Dunno. I’ve dug up a faq–as soon as I get home, I’m going to give it a shot. And, um, “experiment” with Marathon some more.
IANAL either, but I think this is wrong, otherwise you are breaking the law if you back up your harddrive that has any copywrited programs on it. It is illegal to install windows on several machines at once, but i can make as many copies of the windows CD as i want, as long as they are used for backup purposes only. the ROMs should work the same way, as long as you own the cartridge, you are intitled to legal backup copies. That’s why some places make you click “Yes, i own the Cartridge.”