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Is emulation really legal?
it is. The case of SONY V. CONNECTIX
found that unauthorized emulation is perfectly legal. It was the
decision of the court that CONNECTIX had the right to emulate the
SONY Playstation and that reverse engineering of the Playstation
BIOS for such a cause fell under fair usage. As a result of this
case CONNECTIX was allowed to release it's Virtual Gaming Station
for the Mac OS.
Ok, so it's legal, but is it right?
simply makes one hardware platform act like another. There is nothing
wrong with making the hardware you own behave the way you want it
to. That is exactly what software is for, it makes the hardware
you own behave in a useful manner. Emulation is not used simply
for playing console games on a PC. Emulators exist for all kinds
of hardware and all types of platforms. Console emulation is only
part of a very large emulation community.
Are ROM images legal?
under very specific circumstances. Section
117 of the US Copyright Law gives the owner of a software package
the right to make an additional copy under certain provisions. If
you adhere to the provisions then making ROM images is perfectly
legal. However, legislation has been passed to prevent software
piracy that makes game copying devices illegal. Using such a device
to create a ROM image makes the resulting image illegal as well.
Also you have to remeber that there is a large amount of freeware
/ public domain roms that you can download from the internet, and
only way to play them is to use emulator or a flash card!
Is distributing ROM images legal?
not clearly. Individuals and Companies have a right to back up their
software. This does not give them the right to distribute that copy
to others, even provided they also own a legal copy of the software.
So, in short, it is perfectly legal for you to copy a software package
you own, but not for you to give that copy away.
Do you distributing ROM images?
Is Flash Advance Linker and Flash Cards legal?
like asking if CD Recodes are legal. Yes they are 100% legal. Flash
advance linker is a Gameboy Advance backup unit and as such it is
perfectly legal as long as you use it for legal purposes! You could
go on internet and download all gba commercial game roms and than
play them on GBA using Flash Advance Linker and FA card - that would
be illegal! But if you use it to play backups of games that you
own or play FreeWare and Public Domain roms from the internet than
you are not doing anything illegal!