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Preserve Your Games with the Open Source Cartridge Reader
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this post was submitted on 07 Oct 2024
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At this point are there any cartridges on earth I couldn't find a torrent of in about 2 mins on Google? They'd have to be deliberately being kept for rarity.
Probably not, but it does add a touch of legitimacy to the claim that emulators are for playing your own backed up games.
Nintendo doesn't even care about that so tbh fuck em.
Did that claim have any actual grounding in reality? Or is it just an urban legend that keeps persisting?
It did, yes. Emulators as a piece of software that does not do anything illegal are not themselves illegal. But piracy is illegal, and downloading roms of games you haven't purchased constitutes piracy. But if you purchased a game and used an emulator to play it that's a perfectly valid use case that falls within the law.
Nintendo has been trying to push the envelope on that for years though. And it seems like they might recently be succeeding in some fashion.
Do you have anything to back that up? Or is it just "trust me bro" that kind of proves my point?
America v. Bleem, March 1999
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bleem!
See the "Sony lawsuit" section. It isn't cut and dry case law unfortunately, it is very much a grey area. But Sony lost every one of these lawsuits and the only reason we don't still see Bleem around is because they went broke defending all of them. Sony couldn't beat them in court so they just bled them out of money
[...]
Sorry, I should have been more specific. I'm asking about whether the concept of "you are allowed to play pirated games if you own a physical copy of it" is based on any legal truth.
I'm aware that the emulators are largely completely legal as long as they don't package console bios' with it. That's why you have to go find a pirate bios to make your emulator run
Well, not quite. If you dump the ROM of a game cartridge you have purchased and use that dumped rom to play your game that's legal. If you pirate the ROM, that's still illegal regardless whether you own the original game, however the end result is identical and there's really not many ways to prove you didn't dump your own roms.
Unless, of course, you don't own a rom dumper and have an internet history of visiting rom sites. Even then it's technically circumstantial evidence.
What is this based on? It sounds like something that would be against even the most basic licence terms.
Very few. However, this type of devices can also backup saved games.
Yeah honestly, what is the point of these devices when literally every retro game ever already has a perfect 1:1 dump available for instant download all over the internet? Why are new cartridge dumping devices still being produced? Even the rarest of rare games have easily-obtainable ROMs available. Who are these meant for?
That's pretty neat about save games, actually.. but this seems like a service tool not a purchase for everyone.
I definitely believe there are a few handfuls of games out there that need dumps. Most of them are owned by collectors who don't want the value of their collection to go down. Eventually they'll die and we'll get those too.