Are using Emulators sinful?

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i_need_helpp

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For people that have used Emulators is it a sin? Sometimes, i Enjoy Playing ROMS on Mame (Mutiple Arcade Machine Emulator) mostly fighting games because i have a Fightstick thats compatible with my Laptop, Sometimes, i play Street Fighter 3 3rd Strike, Etc but is this piracy ?
 
Would it be theft if i Had the ROM & had the SF anniversary collection because i Play wanna 3rd Strike online on GGPO, i’ve invested money Well, my mom did in the SF series i bought the Fightstick, i have both SF4 & SSF4 but there not as good as the masterpiece 3rd Strike 😦 i love sf3 3rd strike
 
Sometimes i play on vNES but, they bought the games & just emulated them so people can enjoy them so they never stole them
 
the fair use doctrine of copyright implies strongly that, if you own the physical roms, using an emulator to play them is fine legally, IE, not theft.

Abandonware approaches to Roms are dicey; some publishers have said that they don’t care, while others still protect the IP for later emulation issues.

Some, like Activision, actually sell disks with emulators on them… The Activision Classics for PS2 and XBox are an Atari 2600 emulator and a collection of Atari 2600 cartridge rom dumps from the original games. Atari also released an emulation pack for the NDS running their old arcade roms, and hacked versions of their roms, too…

So is the Namco Classics for GBA… except it is a MAME emulator!

Oh, and every infocom game ever released used an emulator; they wrote them, and compiled them to a virtual machine format, and the VM runs that code. The actual story file from any infocom game can be run on just about any machine that has a z-machine program for it… I’ve played my CP/M copy of HHGTTG on a dozen different computers over the years. Just by installing the correct Z-Machine virtual machine and the original story file.

And Java is a virtual machine system, too. Your Java plug in is an emulator for a machine which never existed: the Java Virtual Machine. By emulating a reference platform, the code becomes much more widely portable.

So emulation is not, itself, sinful in any way. What you run on it might be… either because you have no legal right to use the emulated code, or because the program itself is causing sin. But the same is true of every computer, game machine, and music player.
 
It is with no regret that I confess myself to be too old to have the slightest idea what this thread is about! 😃
 
pinctor said:
It is with no regret that I confess myself to be too old to have the slightest idea what this thread is about! 😃
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An emulator is a program that pretends to be an old computer or game system so you can run software for that old computer or game system.

DOSBox, for example, allows you to run software written for MSDos 3.3-6.22 on your WinXP, Vista, Win7, Mac OSX, or modern Linux computer. So that old game your kid bought 20 years ago can still be played.
 
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