Are Emulators Illegal?

[Naiwen]

Cause that's I've been playing with "Tales of Phantasia 1" for GBA but on a PC emulator called : "Visual Boy Advance".

[Tiger21820]

No they're not! Emulator's are completely fine! The ROMs on the other hand... are a different story! Which is why we don't allow the distribution of ROMs here! Publishers only go after the ones who upload ROMs, not those who download them!

[Tedhaun]

As Tiger stated, emulators as well as are not illegal as long as they don't contain stolen or prior copyrighted source code or assets. Hosting commercial ROMs, ISOs, and BIOS for those emulators on the other hand is illegal.

[Tiger21820]

Few exceptions exist, such as with Sega supposedly allowing redistribution of classic Sonic the Hedgehog ROMs and hacks in the form of binary files (which is why Sonic Retro, which hosts such files, is exempted from our rule that forbids the sharing of links to websites to copyrighted content, though I still prefer that no direct links to the files or their wiki pages should be posted here!) as long as no money is involved! This is not a guarantee that anyone who distributes such hacks in the form of ROMs will be safe from litigation, and that's why I still forbid even those from being uploaded here! Patches are the safest way of sharing hacks! Public Domain is fine, but you'll need to provide proof of that!

[cm2]

With the ROM stuff, as long as you actually own the original game then it's legal to have the ROM version of it too.