Talk:Emulators

Speculative List

I've removed a list of machines which 'might' be emulated. To be honest, I don't see the need for such a list; it is explained quite clearly in the text what could be emulated and I want to act now to prevent this wiki becoming a mirror of the GP2X wiki at the time when the longest page on the entire site was just a list of machines, rating their 'emulatability'. It was a mess, un-needed and was actually plain wrong in places (e.g. GameKing was rated as 'Very likely' despite the fact there is no complete emulator for any platform and very little in the way of hardware documentation). I was originally going to keep the wiki low profile until the Pandora was released in order to prevent purely speculative lists.

I understand why some people may want them (they think people are too dense to read a few sentences etc.), but I feel it is not needed and just builds expectations leading to buyers demanding a particular emulator, which is not nice for developers. Of course, when the Pandora is released and emulators become available, I am more than happy for them to be added to the list of ones which do exist! Orkie 23:55, 1 May 2008 (CEST)

Agreed. The detailed list wasn't stopping the baseless assumptions and questions anyway. Chip 21:50, 2 May 2008 (CEST)

These dumps cannot be distributed legally without the permission of the company/individual 
who created them due to them being copyrighted. In some cases (such as the GBA) it may be 
feasible to extract a dump of the BIOS yourself if you own a GBA and the necessary equipment 
but for others (like the PlayStation) the only way most people can optain a BIOS dump is to 
illegally download it.

In any modern legal system downloading copyrighted content is not illegal if you own a license. In a playstation game as mentioned hereabove, you do not buy the disc but a licence to use a content under an eula. So if your disk is destroyed but you keep the receipt or the non functional disk you still may receive a copy from any other user or the original author or copyright owner as a backup. In fact any limitation under an eula to keep an user away from making a backup of the content will not be valid under civil law.

The statement that donwloading copyrighted content is an illegal action is false at least in european legal systems i know. And specifically is false in spanish and french systems where such an action even without owning a licence for the content may be only prosecuted as a civil ofense but not as a criminal one as long as there was no intention to make a profit with that content. This line of reasoning is applied by courts in such systems.