tl;dr : People who have handheld emulators, how do you guys play your games? Download or Dump?
I am new to game emulation (just a casual PPSSPP user years ago) and have been wondering about buying a dedicated handheld console for emulation.
I was wondering about the laws of downloading ROMs in Japan.. How do you guys play games (for all you emulator lovers)?
Do you guys dump games or download it?
2 comments
It’s basically the same everywhere in the world. Downloading is illegal and stealing as defined by the law (unless the game is supposed to be free). This includes Japan and there have been numerous arrests over the years, recently (last year?) a Chinese guy in Japan was arrested for selling modded switches with illegal ROMs.
Which side of the moral fence you sit on is really up to you, if for example the games have been out of production for 20 years and aren’t even sold directly anymore, it’s easy for some to argue that just downloading the rom is morally fine.
At the end of the day though, if you want to do everything legally, you’ll have to buy legitimate copies and dump the ROMs yourself.
I can dump most of my games, and have a healthy collection. But if I were to download any for convenience, I’d just do so on archive dot org, and would use 1.1.1.1 as my DNS server so that my ISP doesn’t automatically know what I did.