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Quote:
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Originally posted by Chris Morse
I've been following this discussion and cant think what the point of an emulator is. Obviously I know it's to emulate, but if there are "honest" developers out there why are'nt they developing for the system rather than the emulator it's going on?
I have a sneaky feeling that if there were no illegal Roms out there, there would'nt be many legitimate ones either.
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People that actual develop their own "homebrew" games for systems (such as the NES) are not usually developing them specifically for an emulator. Most of them have the hardware that allows them to write their finished game to the EEPROM of an actual NES cartridge. The emulator allows them to test the game throughout the entire coding process, without having to write it to a cartridge to test. Also, the emulator allows tons of other people around the world to play the game.
And as has been discussed, there are
SOME games that have been moved to public domain, freely distributable by anyone. So these are also okay if you run across one. The problem really lies in being able to
truly determine if a ROM is indeed legal or not. There are few sites out there that list
only legal ROMs. That is a big part of the reason that we do not allow links here. Even the "legal" sites usually have at least a handful (or more) of illegal ROMs available for download.