This varies greatly per country, and being from the US, it’s very common. Is there any sort of rules around emulation/emulators specifically? Could I be slapped with jail time? (Obviously all advice isn’t guaranteed legal advice, etc)
And no, I’m not talking about downloading ROMs of games. My PSX disc drive died and I can no longer play my PSX games cause they’re NTSC
Please delete if topic is not allowed. I didn’t see anything in the wiki that specified about it/rules
Edit: reason for concern are obviously jail time time, being deported, etc
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I’ve seen third-party retro consoles being openly sold in Akihabara, so I can’t see how this would be any different, provided you’re using the physical discs. Might get iffy if you rip those discs to make ROMs of your own or have to download a BIOS to get the emulator working though.
Assuming that you meant PS one games, you should be able to play them on earlier PS3 models, the ones that had backward compatibility. The PS3 is for all intents and purposes region-free for games, and since both the North American and Japanese versions are NTSC (unlike the European PAL versions) there shouldn’t be any technical issues.
An other option is to use a PS one emulator on PC that can read directly from the game disc in an optical drive. Some may require a PS one BIOS however, and it’s not clear if it’s complete legal to download one or even dump it from the original hardware.
I’m also curious about this. If you own a physical copy of the disk it seems like there’d be a valid defence (in my non-lawyer opinion)
i think every person in the IT world or enjoys retro games has a hard drive offline with emulators and thousands of ROMs.. so go for it. just don’t advertise it and keep it offline and on do what you will with it.
The reality is the full legality of emulation and modern emulators has never been properly tested in court. Generally, large game companies like Nintendo and Sony have the stance that they’re illegal.
You do occasionally hear stories of people getting in trouble – a man got arrested for distributing modded Zelda save files a couple of years ago, for example. But these incidents are rare.
Downloading ROMs is clearly illegal and while you probably wouldn’t get caught for it, there’s a somewhat non-0 chance of that happening.
Backing up your own games to play on an emulator is a legal grey area – some interpretations of the law state that making any copy for any reason is illegal, others state that the copies are allowed to exist for backup purposes but only if the original medium is destroyed and others again state that backups may exist but only if they are used in conjunction with original hardware. Again, it’s never really been tested in court.
Emulators themselves are another grey area – reverse-engineering a system is legal, but using an emulator to play ROMs may not be, even if those ROMs are ‘legally’ obtained, which may or may not be possible to begin with. If the emulator contains copyrighted code, it may not be legal for that reason too.
tl;dr Emulators and emulation in general may or may not be legal, you’re taking a risk by using them. With that said, you probably won’t be caught for anything as long as you’re quiet about it and you don’t try to sell anything. Downloading ROMs is illegal, but again you’re unlikely to be caught unless you try to sell them.
If you are only concerned with PSX, you could buy a used/junk one in Hard-Off and get the region free mod chip. Now you’re not emulating and you get the native experience.
If you want to play it on your PC/other, you could
a) rip the legally owned game using various tools and emulate it after dumping a BIOS
or
b) Get the games/BIOS files from online and walk into a largely unchallenged but legally fairly clear territory. With the right VPN and such you could be fairly safe, but IANAL and TINLA..
Emulation is not as scary as it seems. Myself have been emulating many things freely for over 20 years (granted in the USA) with no issues.
That being said if I were gonna download a PlayStation emulator to play games that I have paid for in the past but have no way of dumping from my legally owned PlayStation disc, I would use a vpn to mask my identity before I did that. Especially before I theoretically dump emulators with hundreds of roms to my steam deck.
But seriously if you want to play the original SNES version of chrono trigger with the original Woolsey translation, giving super potato your money isn’t going to translate into active revenue for Nintendo or square so just download the rom like 8 milllion other people have and call it a day.
If you’re keeping it to yourself, I’m not sure why you’d need to worry. There’s literally no way anyone would suspect you of anything.
I dump all my retro carts, I paid for them and they are expensive to replace now.
According to article 30 of the [Japan Copyright Law](https://www.cric.or.jp/english/clj/cl2.html), a user may reproduce a work that is subject to copyright if the reproduction is for personal or family use or any other use of a similarly limited scope.
There’s a law against modifying save data (which perhaps you are getting confused with?) as part of Japan’s Unfair Competition Prevention act, but again… idk how folks would know unless you were flaunting it.
DM me if you want to discuss technical details.
The Mini version of consoles sold by Sony and Nintendo such as PlayStation Classic, are literally just a small computer running an emulator. PlayStation Classic is famous for running an open source emulator. So emulator by itself cannot be illegal, because even the manufacturer themselves do emulation.
Back in the 90s I remember a couple of salesmen going round knocking on doors selling their 100 in 1 famicon game. There were all the big titles on it like Tetris, Super mario 2+3, Wai wai world, akumajou dracula-kun etc lol wonder if they ever got caught. It was great because all i needed was that one casette and sold all my other famicom games.
Illegal
* Emulators using BIOS from game systems which had DRM
* Extracting / Playing ROMs that had copy protection / DRM
Depending on the method, emulation with older systems like NES, Game Boy, Sega Genesis can be legal (eg. レトロフリーク / Retro Freak, SanniCart). At most a legal grey area (eg. RetroArch).
Therefore any PlayStation system would be illegal. For 10k JPY and under, you can buy them on Yahoo Auction easily.
Search terms:
* “PS3 本体”
* “初期型”
* “CECHA00” 60GB or “CECHB00” 20GB
* “作動品” or “動作確認済み”.
I play SNES games on my phone on the train almost every day and never even thought about it. Could I get into trouble?
I doubt it. I was on the train the other day and saw some Japanese dude playing wind waker on dolphin on his phone. I doubt he got the rom legally lol