> ... permitted?
Under the expansively vague copyright provisions added thanks to Hollywood lobbyist pressure in the 80s & 90s to deter physical media piracy (Sony Betamax / DeCSS DVD), basically nothing except fair use is clearly "permitted."
However, in practice, a lot of historical retro preservation and emulation for personal use is 'tolerated', as long as it's titles long out-of-print, strictly non-commercial (no one makes money) and kept relatively low-key. Projects like MAME and RetroArch have existed for decades doing truly wonderful work.
While manual decomp / recomps existed in the scene, the 2020 release of the amazing Super Mario 64 decomp SM64 showed that hundreds of hours of painstaking work could unlock ports, deep mods, community translations/expansions, and academic study of classic titles. In the last couple years decomp/recomp has been turbo-charged with LLM agent assistance. Of course, there's now the usual spectrum between carefully guided, curated efforts being accelerated and generally unhelpful slop.
I've been into retro preservation for decades now and the recent explosion of interest, new projects and contributors has been great but there's also concern too much attention, too quickly could attract profiteers who 'cross the line' the community has been careful to avoid, triggering a legal crackdown. So, welcome to the community but please try to not screw up a good thing.
Generally speaking, free emulators without game code or content are fine but free decomps even without original binaries or game assets are a little bit fuzzier. They could be closer to the line but 'how much closer' depends on how it's implemented and the degree to which a company sees it as commercially threatening. So far, there's been no sign of issues but the retro and preservation communities have been careful not to release decomps or recomp ports of titles currently (or recently) for sale. Of course, if someone does a recomp port just for their family and friends, no one will know or care, and if something anonymously ends upon a torrent site, that's just 'software piracy' and on the other side of the firewall. As always, don't talk about or link to that stuff in retro and preservation forums.
Under the expansively vague copyright provisions added thanks to Hollywood lobbyist pressure in the 80s & 90s to deter physical media piracy (Sony Betamax / DeCSS DVD), basically nothing except fair use is clearly "permitted."
However, in practice, a lot of historical retro preservation and emulation for personal use is 'tolerated', as long as it's titles long out-of-print, strictly non-commercial (no one makes money) and kept relatively low-key. Projects like MAME and RetroArch have existed for decades doing truly wonderful work.
While manual decomp / recomps existed in the scene, the 2020 release of the amazing Super Mario 64 decomp SM64 showed that hundreds of hours of painstaking work could unlock ports, deep mods, community translations/expansions, and academic study of classic titles. In the last couple years decomp/recomp has been turbo-charged with LLM agent assistance. Of course, there's now the usual spectrum between carefully guided, curated efforts being accelerated and generally unhelpful slop.
I've been into retro preservation for decades now and the recent explosion of interest, new projects and contributors has been great but there's also concern too much attention, too quickly could attract profiteers who 'cross the line' the community has been careful to avoid, triggering a legal crackdown. So, welcome to the community but please try to not screw up a good thing.
Generally speaking, free emulators without game code or content are fine but free decomps even without original binaries or game assets are a little bit fuzzier. They could be closer to the line but 'how much closer' depends on how it's implemented and the degree to which a company sees it as commercially threatening. So far, there's been no sign of issues but the retro and preservation communities have been careful not to release decomps or recomp ports of titles currently (or recently) for sale. Of course, if someone does a recomp port just for their family and friends, no one will know or care, and if something anonymously ends upon a torrent site, that's just 'software piracy' and on the other side of the firewall. As always, don't talk about or link to that stuff in retro and preservation forums.