Emulation occupies a genuinely murky legal space, and I get asked about it constantly. The honest answer is: it depends, and the reality is more nuanced than most hot takes suggest. This isn’t legal advice, but here’s my understanding of where things stand.
Emulators Themselves Are Legal
An emulator is software that recreates the behaviour of hardware. In most jurisdictions, writing and distributing an emulator is legal — you’re not copying code, you’re independently implementing the same functionality. The landmark case here is Sony v. Connectix in 2000, where the US court ruled that recreating the PlayStation BIOS through reverse engineering was fair use. Emulators like ZSNES, RetroArch, PCSX2, and Dolphin are legal software.
ROMs Are the Grey Area
A ROM is a copy of a game’s software. The game software is copyrighted. Distributing ROMs without authorisation is copyright infringement. Downloading ROMs of games you don’t own is technically copyright infringement in most jurisdictions. The commonly held belief that “it’s okay if you own the original” is not established law — it’s a widely repeated claim without solid legal backing, at least in Australia.
The Practical Reality
Enforcement against individual ROM users is essentially nonexistent. Publishers periodically send takedown notices to major ROM hosting sites, but personal use is not being pursued. That doesn’t make it legal — it just means the risk of consequences is very low.
The FPGA Alternative
FPGA devices like the MiSTer and the Analogue Pocket are often misunderstood. Both devices are primarily designed to be used with ROM files loaded from an SD card — the MiSTer has no cartridge slot of its own, and while the Analogue Pocket does accept original Game Boy cartridges, its openFPGA cores for other systems (like SNES or Mega Drive) require ROMs just like software emulators do. FPGA emulation is technically more accurate than software emulation, but it doesn’t sidestep the ROM question. The copyright situation for ROMs is the same regardless of whether you’re running them on FPGA hardware or a software emulator.
The cleanest legal approach is to use hardware like the Analogue Pocket with its native cartridge slot for genuine physical cartridges you own, or to use original hardware. But for the vast majority of the library on most platforms, ROMs are how people access these games in practice.
Make your own call based on your own values. But go in with an accurate understanding of what’s actually legal, not a convenient fiction.
— Chris
