Well done. Why shouldn't emulation of systems like N64 and PSX be legal? Programmers can make emulators without breaking Copyright laws. However,dumping roms, or creating PSX game CD-R's without the origional andplaying it on an emulator _is_ illegal. Having an emulator alone is not.Even though emus like MAME can emulate 900+ arcade roms (mostly older anddefunct), the companies still hold the copyrights to those roms. But,since those roms are so old and practaclly useless, no one seems to care.(well, look at what happened between IDSA and davesclassics.com).

    Another point that organizations like IDSA and SPA like to point out isthat if a person d/l's Super Street Fighter 2 to play on ZSNES withoutowning the cart, Capcom/Nintendo just lost a ~$50 cart sell. However, Ithink that this is inaccurate because that person may or may not have bought that cart in the first place. He or she may have downloaded itonly because he/she thought is was "free".

    Look at the video game industry in Taiwan for example: The SNES/SFC isVERY popular, solely because of SNES/SFC copiers. People there can'tafford to spend a months salary to buy one SNES cart. But, they canafford to spend $1 to buy a pirate version on disk to use with a copier.Even the PSX/N64. PSX is the most popular game system there (...or waswhen I was last there), and the N64 was dead (although N64 was very popular here). Why? Because PSX games are only ~$3 each for pirateversoins, while N64 didn't have copiers, so carts were full price. Gamersdidn't buy the systems until the games were "affordable", but does thatmean that companies are losing money because of this piracy? not nearly as much as they claim. No one there bought N64s until copierscame out for it. No copiers, no buyers for the system, no buyers for the games. Have copiers, have buyers for the system, but still no buyers forthe origional games.

-Kelly Gillian