Welcome to tech Stuff, a production from iHeartRadio. Hey there, and welcome to tech Stuff. I'm your host, Jonathan Strickland. I'm an executive producer with iHeartRadio, and how the tech are you? It's time for a tech Stuff classic episode. This episode originally published March first, twenty seventeen. It is titled how Video Game Emulators Work. And I've often thought about getting like an Arcade setup running a video game emulator.
Never done it because while most of those titles that I would want to play are not really available through any legitimate means, I can't reconcile the fact that a lot of video game emulator solutions involve essentially just kind of stealing intellectual property. But let's listen to this classic episode.
Just letting you guys know, in case you're wondering, like, whys Jonathan sound so weird, or rather more weird than he normally sounds, is because I am recovering from said cold, and my voice is probably somewhere between eighty and ninety percent back.
So got that out of the way.
Today's episode is actually coming to us courtesy of a little listener male or actually it's from a listener tweet Now, remember the tech stuff Twitter handle is tech Stuff HSW so if you tweet me there, I will see it. And this one comes from Dan who says I'd love to hear a show on how video game emulators work. So today we're going to explore what an emulator is, why they're necessary, in how they work. Now, first of all, I should say there are a lot of different types
of emulators. It's not just for the video game world, but I'm going to focus specifically on video games. And you might wonder our, right, So what is an emulator? Well, it does what it sounds like. It emulates some other technology, which means it's attempting to replicate how another technology works or what it does. Now, sometimes the emulator does this in a very different way than the original technology did.
And more often than not, an emulator relies on software at least partly to replicate a particular piece of a hardware's functionality. So you can think of emulators as being at least partly a virtual machine. Some of the components may actually be physical parts that are original to whatever the technology you're trying to emulate was. Other components are going to be purely software, and it's helpful to use a little analogy here to understand what an emulator tries to do.
So let's say you got two people.
And you know what, let's give them some random name. So, just picking out of the air, I'm going to go with Josh and Chuck. Now, both Josh and Chuck are in a jungle, but they are separated, so they're each individually in a jungle. Both are running from something. Let's say they're being chased by aggressive badgers. So both of them have managed to put some distance between themselves and the fur balls of fury chasing them. And then each of them individually comes to the edge of a pit
two different pits. So Josh is at one pit, Chuck is at a different pit. There's no way around the pits. There's too much overgrowth on either side, so you have to go over it somehow, but you can't go around. They each have a short amount of time to figure out a way around, or rather over.
Their respective pits.
So Josh decides what he's going to do is fashion a makeshift bridge out of some branches on the ground and some vines, and so he binds them together and he lays the bridge across the pit he crosses gingerly across, because we know that Josh's sense of balance is somewhat precarious under the best of circumstances. He gets to the other side and then he kicks the bridge back into the pit so that the badgers can't just follow him across,
and then he continues on his merry way. Meanwhile, Chuck, on the other hand, uses a vine to tie it to a branch and use that as kind of a grappling hook. He tosses it up into the limbs overhead and it catches, and so then he swings Tarzan like, bellowing the whole time, and he gets to the other side. Then he jerks the vine and dislodges the branch so that it falls down and throws that into the pit
just in case. Badgers can also swing across pits. But that's because he has not yet read how badgers work on HowStuffWorks dot com. So both Josh and Chuck got across their respective pits, but they both did so in very different ways. The end result was the same, but the pathway was different. That's sort of what emulators do. They're meant to produce a result that's identical to another technology, even if the pathway to get there is very different.
A video game emulator is really meant to replicate how a specific machine works so that you can play the games that were designed for that machine, typically on a computer a PC. So an emulator could be a specific arcade game emulator, like for a very specific title, or it could be a video game console emulator, which means it could act like a video game console virtually and you could play the games made for that console on
your computer. The end result is that you can play those games meant for one device on a totally different device, and as I said before, typically we're talking about a personal computer. Now, emulators are not the same thing as ports. A ported game is one that developers originally created for one architecture system and then they adapt that game for a totally different system. So the easiest example is a game that originally comes out on the PlayStation might get
ported to the Xbox. These are totally different architectures. The video game consoles work in very different ways, so you can't just reformat and put it on an Xbox one disk and expect it to work. You actually have to redesign parts of the game that's what porting is all about now. Because each system, whether it's Xbox or PlayStation or mac os or Windows, works in a very specific way.
Those programs are.
Not compatible, but a port can be reworked so that it will operate on those new systems. Now, an emulator is different. An emulator can run a game meant for one system on a totally different system because the emulator is doing the work.
So instead of.
Giving a game to a new group of developers and saying I need you to make this version of the game playable for this other system, you have a piece of software that pretends that it is the other system, and that way you don't have to have developers change the code of the of the original game. You do have to have developers create the emulator. So it really just shifts the world from adapting a game to a different system to adapting an emulator to be able to
work on whatever target machine you're talking about. Like I said, typically a PC, more often than not it's a Windows based PC, but you also see them for Unix and mac os, so it's not like it's exclusive to Windows machines. Now it's necessary because video game consoles and even arcade games like the old arcade game cabinets, they have specific hardware and software architecture to them. So some of those old arcade machines don't really even have much software at all.
It's like the lightest level of software. It's mostly circuitry, like hard coded circuitry. The game itself is represented in the circuits that are on the board within the arcade cabinet. It's kind of like the old cartridge based systems if you had one of those, like the old Nintendo Entertainment
System or Super Nintendo or the Atari. Those are video games that would be programmed onto a circuit board that's housed inside of a cartridge, and you insert the cartridge into the video game console and some contacts between the console and the cartridge allow the console to read that information and then you're able to play the game. Obviously, you don't have, for most PCs, a cartridge based system
that can accept these games in this way. Now, in the olden days, arcade games contained a circuit board unique to that particular game. So in other words, an Asteroid's machine was an Asteroids machine. That's all there was to it, because the circuit board had the Asteroids game on it. If you opened up a pac Man machine and you opened up a Donkey Kong machine, you'd find two different circuit boards. The pac Man one and the Donkey Kong one would be unique to those arcade games.
They did have a very.
Low level of software on the machines, on the circuit boards called BIOS now that stands for Basic Input Output System, and really it's just a foundational software layer. It's really just meant to be responsible for managing the relationship between input devices like a push button or a joystick or that sort of stuff, and the output devices like the monitor, or even just what the game is supposed to do
whenever you enact on those input devices. So the input could be a jump button, for example, you press the button and the output is you see your character jumping on the display. But keep in mind, the actual output is really the code for jumping and a signal to the arcade machine's display. Right, the display is not making your character jump. That's being controlled by the code of
the arcade machine itself. It's reflected on the monitor in a way that you can see by having the little character jump up.
In the air.
Now, the game's circuit board handled everything else in those old machines, Besides that input output, the hardware was handling everything. It was just programmed directly onto the circuit board, and that included the game's sound, its graphics engine, its logic. If you had an Arcade cabinet and you wanted to switch out games. Let's say you've got a Pacmand cabinet and you think I'm gonna put Donkey Kong in this cabinet, I'm gonna I want to switch out the games. What
you had to do was gut the machine. You had to take all that circuitry and those connections out of the machine, the Pacman machine, and replace them with the ones from a Donkey Kong machine. You couldn't just swap out a certain element. You had to do pretty extensive surgery. It took some time, usually, you know, half hour an hour easy to switch these things out. Later on, it got a little simplified. First, it got simplified in the
the adoption of some more standardized connectors. So that meant that you could start to disconnect a circuit board from the rest of a system, and assuming that the control scheme is similar from the old game to the new game, you could plug the new circuit board into a cabinet and it would work pretty well. Now, obviously, that only
works if your control scheme is the same. So, for example, if you're playing pac Man, there's no jump button, right, there's a player one, a player two, and then there's the joystick that has for motion control, and you just control the pac Man character that way. But let's say you want to play Centipede. Centipede is a very different type of game. It has a rollerball controller, so you have a ball that you swipe and you can move your character that way, and it has a fire button
where you shoot whenever you press the button. So if you were to switch out the pac Man to the Centipede boards, assuming that they had these universal connectors, you still would have to switch out the control system as well, or else you wouldn't really be able to control the game Centipede the way it was meant to be played, Particularly since you wouldn't have a fire button, that would
be a problem. Later on, arcade manufacturers would create machines that had the basic hardware set up so that different games could be plugged into the system more like a video game console. So this was even simpler than the universal kind of standardized controls. This was more about like a set structure where you plug in a chip essentially that has the game on it and everything else remains
the same. So kind of like a video game console where if you're playing a Nintendo and you wanted to stop playing Super Mario Brothers instead play Gumshoe, then you could turn off the console, pull one cartridge out, put the other cartridge in, turn it on, and there you go.
Same sort of thing with these old arcade machines. Once they got to this level of sophistication, it was still a bit of a pain in the butt because he still had to open everything up and get in among all the wires and stuff, but it was still way faster than the old days where you had to replace everything essentially. Now the games themselves are called ROMs.
MS.
Now ROM is an acronym. It stands for read only memory. That meant the player or anyone else couldn't write anything to the game. Now, they might have something on the circuit board, some temporary memory in the arcade machine that would allow players to put in initials next to high score, and that would be stored in that memory CHEP, but the game itself was immutable. You could not change the game. It was the computer equivalent of being set in stone.
So in the emulator world, we generally refer to game files as in the software that represents that game as a ROM. If you've ever used an emulator, you're probably familiar with ROM. And there's a big legality question people have when it comes to ROMs, and I'll get to that later in the episode. At the end, I'm going to spend time talking about the legality of read only memory files and whether or not it is legal to download them, But for now, let's just focus on the
technical side of things. We'll get to the legal stuff at the end. So you got various types of games, each designed to run on specific hardware. And there are the standalone arcade machines that each had their own peculiar architecture. They're the later arcade machines that could accept different chips, with each chip containing a different game. And then there are the video game consoles and their proprietary game technologies.
You even got old computer games that were designed to run on slower machines with much less computing power than today's PCs. A lot of those are impossible to play on later machines because they just they can't handle the fact that they've got access to all that processing power. So you might even need an emulator for a PC based game on a PC.
If it's old enough.
If it's an old game, you may need an emulator in order to run it a virtual machine of some sort. Emulators are what let you run those games designed for those older or other devices on a modern machine. So I've got more to say about this, but before I get into it, let's take a quick break to thank our sponsor.
All right, we're back now.
There are two big categories for emulators, and this doesn't depend upon the type of console or game you're trying to emulate. It's universal. These two big categories are universal no matter what system you're trying to emulate, so all different systems, all different arcade games, emulators can fall into one of two categories. There's low level emulation and there's
high level emulation. And it might be a little counterintuitive what these mean, but with low level emulation, programmers are trying to create software and or hardware that can pretend to be the emulated hardware. In other words, you're trying to replicate the actual mechanics, although it's not mechanical, it's electronic, but the actual physical process I guess physical process doesn't really work either, right, the actual logical process of the
original game system or arcade machine. So you want your system to look from a high level as close to that original system as you possibly can get it. Sometimes that actually means including original hardware from the target machine with the emulator, so that means you're not just replicating the target machine, you're using some of its actual parts.
You're in part rebuilding the actual original machine. In fact, the first couple of models of the PlayStation three actually contained elements of the PlayStation two inside it in order to provide some backwards capability. So if you wanted to play a PlayStation two game on one of those early PS three models, instead of it using the typical PS three equipment inside the console, it would actually hand that
off to the PS two elements. So it was almost like having two different video game consoles in the same box.
You didn't know it.
As a consumer, like, you don't see any of that happening. It's all happening inside the console. But it wasn't a PS three system reading the information and then playing it on your screen. It was actually a PS two system housed inside that PS three, So the PS three's core system was acting as the emulator, but it was using
PS two hardware to actually read the information off of discs. Now, if you're using something like an sixty four emulator, the emulator's trying to replicate the way the N sixty four is hardware worked, and the more sophisticated that target system is, the more difficult this is to do.
So.
With low level emulation, the amount of processing power you need on your computer to run the emulator so that you can play those games the way they were meant to be played. That processing power demand increases as the complexity of the video game system you're emulating increases, which
makes sense, right. The more complicated the system, the greater the demands are in processing power, particularly if the system you're trying to emulate is remarkably different from PC architecture, because your processors having to handle all of those differences and it ends up creating a bigger drain on the processor's ability. So if you've ever played a video game emulator, and you've run a game and you're thinking, this thing as slow as molasses, I'm barely able to get this
character moving. It's probably because you're experiencing that problem that the emulator is probably a low level emulator. It's trying to replicate that original system as closely as possible, and as a result, your processor is having to work super hard to keep up, even though the game might be fairly simple. It can be very frustrating because you might be playing a game that came out in like the late eighties, and you're thinking, it's twenty seventeen. My computer
should be able to run this with no problem. But the truth is the processor is trying to handle a system so different from itself that that's what's causing the slow down. I experienced this with a friend who had an Arcade emulator, and he's had Ghosts and Goblins on there. And I love that game. I loved it when it came out, but as I started to play it, I thought, this game is way slower than and I remember it am I just remember getting incorrectly.
Nope.
Turned out it was because the emulator was putting too great a demand on his system's processor, and as a result, the game I was playing was much slower than what it was supposed to be, and it's really hard to make low level emulators efficient. Some games and systems require multiple synchronization processes to make sure all the emulated components
are working together properly. So the more frequently that happens, the more times that an emulator has to say, hey, is everything all right and send that message out to all the different components and wait for a response, the more demands it places on that processor. So if you want to have a really good low level emulator, you need a computer with like a screaming fast processor. And
that could be again a little counterintuitive. You might think, well, this game can run the latest computer games with no frame rate issues at the highest graphic setting, everything's awesome, But when I try to run this emulated game, everything slows down. Why is that? It's because of this. Now, then you have high level emulation. This is very different. High level emulation simulates the functions of hardware, but doesn't
try to replicate those functions. So, in other words, all it wants to do is get to that end result. It doesn't care if it follows the same path as the hardware. So this gets back to that Josh and Chuck example I gave at the top of the show. Both the vine and the bridge will get Chuck and Josh across the pit, but they do it in different ways. The end result is the same. That's what high level
emulation aims to do, so we call this abstraction. We are able to create an environment in which a game will work even if you're using totally different hardware because of this level of abstraction. This is particularly handy for game developers, not just people who want to play games, but people who are making games, because you can develop a game for a specific system using a level of abstraction, and you can use whatever system you prefer to develop on.
So let's say you're a developer and that you use a Mac as you're a computer, but you're developing a game for the Xbox. A level of abstraction allows you to do this on a virtual level, so that you're developing an Xbox game in a Mac environment and you don't have to have special equipment or anything like that. You've abstracted all of the elements into a virtual realm. So high level emulation uses shorthand for basic operations instead
of a specific pathway. So a low level emulator would try to replicate the exact way a game saves information. For example, a high level emulator would just say save this data to the storage drive, and firmware would actually handle the transaction. So the software hands it off to the firmware that says, all right, what's the most efficient way for me to do the task I've been asked to do? That puts the least demand on the processor. It's kind of like a voice activated assistant in a way.
As these systems get more robust, you can ask for the same information in many different ways. So for example, if I had an iPhone, I could ask Siri what is the weather like outside? Or I could ask Siri is it raining?
Now? Both of those questions.
Will get me a weather answer from Siri because the system can actually handle the different ways to request essentially the same information. Hardware abstraction does something similar. It interprets a request and then it does the leg work to fulfill that request. Now, there are three main ways that high level emulators simulate hardware functions. The first is called interpreting.
The emulator will go through the code of the game line by line in chunks and replicate what the instructions are supposed to do, so, interpreting makes sense right like you, It's kind of like if you were to read a story and then tell somebody what does the story say? Like what are the basic points of the story. Or you're trying to tell someone about a movie you've seen and you're giving them kind of a high level, bullet point rundown of what the plot was all about. That's
what interpreting does, except it does it with code. Next is a strategy called dynamic recompiling. Now that method actually looks at blocks of code, looks at the instructions that are the processor is supposed to carry out according to that code, and then it starts looking for a more efficient or optimized way to run those same instructions on the actual computer you are using. So, in other words, it's recom hiling the code for a different piece of hardware.
It's kind of like saying, all right, this was written for an Atari twenty six hundred, I want to rewrite it so that the same result will happen on the PC that is running the software. Very interesting that this can be done on an abstract level. And finally, there's a strategy called list interception. Now this is relevant for computers that use coprocessors, and for systems that you're trying to emulate that also had coprocessors. Most PCs these days
have a coprocessor. The graphics processing unit is a coprocessor. Now, those chips are meant to handle graphics, but they're also really handy for parallel processing. You might have heard that a lot of hackers use GPUs in order to do
brute force attacks against secure systems. This is because GPUs can process stuff in parallel, which means you can have a bunch of parallel processors all tackling the same problem, going through different potential solutions, and that cuts down on the amount of time it takes for you to find the real answer. So with list interception, an emulator interrupts a command list sent to the original device's coprocessor and turns that into instructions that the actual host computer's graphics
processing unit can handle. So it's kind of like translating text from one language to another. It intercepts the message says okay, well, the GPU can't understand this the way it's written, but I can take these instructions rewrite it in a way that the GPU understands. And send it along, And that's how that works. The big advantage of high level emulators over low level emulators is that they require
less processing power to run games. So a well designed high level emulator can run titles smoothly on a modest PC. You don't need to have a killer gaming rig, but a low level emulator would require that bf yeer processor
to handle demands. Now, the flip side is a low level emulator tends to be more accurate when replicating a game, and a high level emulator might not be able to replicate all the things the game does because it's not as specific to that system, like, it's not replicating the system as faithfully.
As a low level emulator would. So there are trade offs.
So let's say you want to invest in an emulator and some games, and just for argument's sake, let's say that there's a legal way for you to buy the games rather than just download them willy nilly. Like I said before, I'm going to talk more about the legality of all of this at the end of the show. So what system should you go for if you want
an emulator? Well, that really depends on several factors. For one, are you missed their money bags or miss money bags, because if money's not an object, you might as well go bonkers and trick out a nice low level emulator system with a really really good gaming rig PC to get the most authentic experience when you PLoP down to
a rousing game of Burger Time or Gauntlet two. Low level emulators, particularly ones that include actual hardware used by the system you're trying to emulate, get pretty pricy, and remember you got to have that powerful processor to run those emulators.
And as opposed to.
The high level emulator types, high level emulators don't require as much horsepower from the host computer, which brings the cost down. You don't need to buy a super fast computer. In fact, you may already have a machine more than capable of running a high level emulator program, so you won't have to spring for that screaming gaming rig with
you would like for a low level emulator. But sometimes those high level emulators cannot perfectly replicate whatever the target system is the emulated system, so you might find certain games don't have all the bells and whistles that they should, and if you might even be unplayable, like you might get a title a rom for a game you love, and you have an emulator, a high level emulator for that system or for that machine, and then you find
out you still can't play the game. Well, it might not be that the file you got is corrupt.
It may be that the.
Emulator just isn't capable of replicating that game the way it should. Now, mostly that depends upon the way the original game developers programmed the original game. If they use a lot of weird shortcuts and hacks to create the game that would work on the target system, it may
not work on an emulated system. So in other words, like let's say I've developed a game for the original Nintendo, and the original Nintendo could totally handle these sort of cludgy hacked processes I've created because I wanted to do it to make a bunch of shortcuts. Like the code looks messy as heck. If you look at the code,
but the gameplay doesn't reflect that, it's just fine. But then you pull it over onto an emulaid system that's more designed to handle games that are written to the standard of Nintendo as opposed to just getting it done, and you may find out that that game isn't really playable on the EMULAID system. It's really frustrating if in fact that was your goal from the start. So the more standard of games code is, the better the chances are that a high level emulator will be able to
handle it. Now, arguably one of the most popular types of emulators is the multiple arcade machine emulator or MAN. That's an open source emulator. An open source essentially means the code is open for anyone to look at, to alter, and even to re upload and distribute. So that means as people find better ways to emulate a particular machine, they can make adjustments to the code, and a new
version of the emulator can incorporate those changes. So if it's a multiple arcade machine emulator, then you may have a specific arcade cabinet that has not been emulated yet. You might figure out how to do that, and you add that code into a already existing MAME emulator, which I understand is repetitive. See also my tire rate about
atm machines and pen numbers. But because you're able to actually take that code and change it, then you can increase the functionality for the community as a whole.
Now, the stated purpose of.
MAIME is to preserve games as an historical effort because these old arcade machines relied on physical hardware, and a lot of them are no longer in production. In fact, most of them aren't in production anymore. So creating the software that could run those games is a way to preserve the games indefinitely instead of just have them get older and older and older and eventually they just don't
work anymore. They break down to the point where it doesn't matter if you have an original arcade machine, the circuit board just won't play the game. This way, they could be preserved indefinitely.
Now it just so happens that the.
Software also allows you to play those games, because that's how the games work, right, Like, if the software didn't allow the games to run, all you really would need to do is find a way to preserve that random or rather the read only memory the ROMs. If you could just preserve the ROMs period, you could have a library of unreadable files. It would be pretty unusual to do that, Like, what's the point.
It'd be kind of like going into.
A library that is filled with books written in an ancient language that no one understands anymore. So, yeah, they're historical. They have some historical significant but there's no way to understand what is there. So you start asking the question, does it really make sense to keep them if there's no way to read them. So Maine can read these files that can play those games. But the stated purpose for Maine isn't to play the games, it's just to
preserve them. Now you might find that that purpose is a little do not peak behind the curtain esk, and that you could easily imagine mame's design is meant to give you the chance to play those old games and not just keep them for posterity. I mean, if you can't play the video game, is it really worth keeping? But never mind that it doesn't really matter for the purposes of this discussion. I just find it amusing. So the main software evolves over time, and part of that
is just to keep up with technology. As operating systems evolve, we have to adjust the software, the MAME software to run on new systems. So you know, if Microsoft releases a new version of Windows that's remarkably different from previous versions, you may have to tweak the code for MAME to
be able to run on the new Windows platform. So it is necessary for this to be open source for the software to remain relevant, and there are lots of different versions of MAIME on operating systems like Windows, on Unix mac os. There are versions for both thirty two bit and sixty four bit Windows versions. You can find people selling MAME machines inside either classic arcade cabinets or new cabinets designed to look like old ones, complete with
special controls. So if you wanted to, you could create a computer like You could build a computer on your own, a decent one, not like again, not a super fast one necessarily, but a decent computer.
With a lot of storage.
You could mount a display inside a cabinet to look like in arcade monitor. You could have the computer inside the cabinet. That's essentially the case for your computer, and you could hook up arcade controls, including ones that are more unusual like the roller balls or some of the other yoke versions for flight games like the old Star Wars game, that kind of stuff. You could have all
those sort of controls available. You can even have ones that detach from the system so that you can swap them out whenever you need to for whatever game you want to play, and you could have that in your house and you would essentially have access to all the arcade games supported by that emulator. That doesn't necessarily mean every arcade game ever invented, but it could be hundreds and hundreds of different titles. On the inside's just a PC running that mame software and a collection of ROMs.
So it's getting to time for me to talk about the legality of this. Like, if you wanted to do this, if you wanted to have an emulator, whether it was a main emulator or a video game console emulator or whatever, what are the legal considerations you should make. I'm going to tell you more about that in just a second, but first let's take another quick break to thank our sponsor.
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So you could technically build or buy a machine capable of providing an entire arcade's worth of gaming on one device. But is that legal? So this brings us to the legal discussion or law stuff, don't dun.
Interesting.
Note there are a lot of questions about ROMs and their legality. So our ROM files illegal? Is it ever legal to download one? Are emulators illegal? It's good to finally kind of tackle these questions now. First, emulators in general are legal. You can own an emulator. There is nothing inherently illegal about emulators. They're software meant to emulate another technology, but in general they don't contain any proprietary code, So that means emulators more often than not, don't have
any code in them that is protected by copyright. Since there's no copyright violation, there's no illegal nature to these emulators. Developers haven't stolen any intellectual property from the companies that made the original equipment. They're just creating new software to run programs that relied on older original equipment. So it's a fine line. But emulators on their own are totally legal.
As for ROMs, that's where it gets messy. For one thing, we do not have global laws guiding our choices about legality or illegality when it comes to ROMs, so the rules in one country can be significantly different from those of other countries. Now, I'm gonna be looking at this from the viewpoint of someone in the United States because that's where I live. Longtime listeners of text stuff. No, this is my mo I will take a view from the US because that's where I'm from and it's way
easier for me to talk about this. But if I wanted to tackle the legality from every country, I'd have to do a whole series of podcasts because it's different for different places. In fact, even just the length of copyright protection is different in different countries. The US has a lengthy period of copyright protection, Like we're talking decades and decades of protection even after the death of whomever
held the copyright. So something to keep in mind, all right, So, downloading a rom of a game you do not own is violating copyright and is illegal pretty much anywhere.
So if you wanted.
To get hold of a RAM for a game, but you don't own that game, you have no legal copy of that game, Downloading it is against the law. It's no different from downloading a song you don't own, or a movie you don't own, or a television show. If you do not own a copy, you're essentially stealing. Now, in the case of arcade games, it's pretty darn common for people to steal them. Not many people actually own
arcade machines. There are people who do, there are a lot of them who do, but most people do not. The average person does not own an arcade machine in their home. So unless you own a legit copy of an arcade machine, downloading the ROM for that game is pretty much illegal.
But let's say you.
Go go to an auction right and you buy an old Spy Hunter cabinet for your rec room at home. First of all, good job, Spy Hunter, awesome arcade game, one of my favorites from the arcade era. You get the machine home and you realize that the circuit board is damaged a little bit. It's kind of fried, and the game isn't really working properly. It's not stable, like you can get it running every now and then, but it doesn't necessarily run flawlessly or it might crash at random intervals.
So the question is, could.
You then download a ROM for Spy Hunter and replace the guts of the cabinet you've bought with a PC running an emulated copy of the game. So instead of having the actual Spy Hunter elements inside this cabinet, you remove those, you put a PC in there.
The PC is.
Running Maime, and the only ROM you have on it is Spy Hunter, because that's the game you bought.
Would that be legal? Well, if you were to rip the.
Game off the circuit board yourself, you could probably argue that as being totally legit. So in other words, you'd have to make a digital copy of a hard coded game, which isn't exactly easy for the average person to do, but it would be a necessary step to use a digital ROM on another type of device.
In the United States, this.
Would likely be seen as making a legal backup copy, as in a lawful it is perfectly fine to make a backup copy of media you have purchased. It's similar to making a backup of a CD or a cassette tape or a vinyl album, either through putting it onto another medium or ripping it and making it an MP three.
That's perfectly legal.
As long as you're doing it for your own personal use without the intent to distribute, you're pretty much okay. You are legally al oued to make backup copies of stuff you purchased, as long as it's for the purpose of a backup. But what about downloading a ROM from another source rather than ripping it from the circuit board
you physically own. Let's say that you don't have the equipment necessary to pull the code off a hard coded circuit board and convert it into something digital that a PC could read, so instead you're just going to download a copy from the internet. Now, arguably you could say that downloading the ROM in this instance is a case of fair use. So the argument you would make is that you already own the game. You purchased a legit copy of Spy Hunter, and you're not distributing the ROM to anyone.
You're not trying to.
Create a marketplace for the Spy Hunter game. All you want to be able to do is play the game you bought on the arcade console you purchased. So you could argue, I'm not causing harm to the market, right, I'm not denying a sale. I'm just trying to get access to the thing I have already purchased. Well, that could be a legit fair use argument, but you got to remember fair use is an argument you have to make in a legal case. In other words, it doesn't
protect you from getting sued. You can't say at the forefront, this is fair use, don't sue me. Instead, fair use is an argument you make once you have been sued, so fair use doesn't matter until you get to court.
Chances are, though, no one would sue.
You in the first place unless you were distributing games, particularly for some of these old ROMs because in some of these cases, the companies that made the games have been out of business for years, or they were acquired and sold and acquired so many times, then no one really knows what the ownership rights are for some of these games. So, in other words, there's no one to give your money to because no one knows who owns
the copyright. And not only are no copies being sold, but there's no one who's authorized to sell them, right, no one knows who owns it. So in those cases, you're probably okay to download the ROMs, not that it's legal, but that you're probably not gonna get punished for it because there's no one to lay a claim against you. That doesn't stop companies from doing that even when they don't necessarily have a legal claim to the content. If they think they can get away with it, they could
totally go that route. You would have to prove in a court of law that the company suing you does not have a legal claim to the property they are arguing is theirs. So you know, if video game Company A says, hey, you know, back in nineteen eighty eight, we purchased video game Company B, which means we own the video game you have downloaded illegally and you say, well no because of X, Y and Z. Maybe it turns out you're perfectly fine, but it means you have
to go through the whole court experience, which isn't great. Now. You may have also heard that there's a special rule that allows you to download any video game ROM and keep it for twenty four hours without it being illegal, as long as you delete the realm after twenty four hours. So generally people say, oh, yeah, you can download the game, give it a whirl, and delete it a day later, and there's no fear of someone coming after you. I am here to tell you that is not based on
any actual legal grounding. From what I can tell, there is no legal foundation for this argument. It's probably just wishful thinking that's been passed along as gospel among a lot of realm sharing communities. The truth is, if you're downloading something that doesn't belong to you and you're not purchasing it, you're just downloading it, you are stealing. It. Doesn't matter if you're keeping it forever or for twenty four hours, it's still stolen.
Now. Complicating matters in this.
Case is that we're talking about digital information, not a physical copy of something. I mean, if I walked into a video game store and I pocketed a copy of an actual video game that was stored on physical media like a CD or a DVD, there's no question that I stole something. Right If I walk into a game stop and I grab a box and I shove it under my jacket and I walk out, I stole that.
There is a physical copy of the game that I have taken, and that means the store can't sell that physical copy because it's in my possession and I didn't buy it. But downloading a file doesn't feel like stealing, right.
Because the original file still exists.
On some server somewhere, So you didn't. You didn't take the one and only existing copy. You made a copy of another file, and now you have that copy, so other legitimate customers could still purchase the game that you've taken,
because it's not like it doesn't exist anymore. And so because of this, a lot of people justify their actions as being okay, because it's not like they actually took something that physically exists, except that at the end of the day, you are accessing something without paying for it. When there's an entire business based off of making games for money. If game developers didn't make money, there wouldn't be games. No one would make games, or at least
not on the level that we are used to. People might make games as an expression of art and they're not trying to make any money, But there wouldn't be a video game business if we all just stole stuff, right, because there's no money in that, you would spend your time doing something else where you'd actually be able to
make a living. But we get even more complicated because many of the games that are in raw form are now on obsolete systems or which you cannot purchase at least not from a primary company, Like you're not gonna be like be able to buy a classic Nintendo system from Nintendo. You could buy the little ones that replicate, you know, a dozen or two dozen games on one system, but you can't just go out and buy an Anys.
They don't make them anymore. Or some of those video game systems are in limbo as far as ownership goes. And that also makes it easier for people to justify downloading the files, but it doesn't make it any more legal.
Now I'll admit.
It's really frustrating to be in a position in which you would happily pay for something if you could, but you have no legal way to do it. That is really frustrating. I found myself in that same position with a lot of British television series that I love but are not available for purchase in the United States.
So I do the.
Legal, grown up lame thing, which is that I don't I don't access it like I don't. I don't get it means I don't pirate the stuff I love in the hopes that one day I'll have a legal means to access it.
Instead.
I'll, you know, I'll post about it, I'll write to people, I'll ask questions, but I have to wait until there's a legal way to purchase it.
I do think this is a muddy area.
If a game exists and there's no way to buy it and the company that made it doesn't even exist anymore, are you really causing harm to the market by downloading a ROM I'd say it probably not, because there's no way to purchase it legally. But someone in court might say you undermined their attempt to make a legitimate commercial copy of the game. Further down the road, and because we can't see into the future and see if someone is really telling the truth in those cases, that's problematic.
So if I download a bunch of ROMs from a previous publisher that no longer exists, but their intellectual property belongs to another company, and that other company says, hey, in five years, we're going to release a best of compilation little console that you can connect to your TV, and if you distribute these ROMs, then you devalue that system, even if they have no plan of doing that. I don't know the case right, so it's complicated.
At the end of the day.
It is illegal to download ROMs for any games you do not own, and you could technically get in trouble for it. And as for games you do own, it's a gray area and you could still technically get in trouble for it. So tread carefully, and if there is a legal way to buy or access the stuff you love, I urge you to do that first. It helps cut down on reactionary laws and digital rights management strategies, and it helps prevent companies from making these these.
These new systems that hurt everybody.
So if there's a way to get it legally, do that, and if there's not, think really hard before you go down this pathway, because you could be causing yourself more frustration in the long term. And that's it for that classic episode about how video game emulators work. As I said at the beginning, I've thought about getting like a mame machine. But the issue I have is that a lot of the content you find with those, I mean again, it's like pirated content. That doesn't mean that emulators themselves
are bad, as I've said many times, they're not. Emulators are a way of preserving work that otherwise could just go forgotten. It. I don't have an issue with that at all. It's just the issue where I balk is I really do believe in paying to have access to work that other people have made, and so that's why I haven't taken the plunge on getting a mame machine. It's not that I think Maime itself or any other video game emulator for that matter, is inherently bad. That
I believe in paying people for their work. And I don't just mean the people who make the emulators. I mean the people who made the original games that are running on those emulators. It's a it's a it's complicated because in many cases you literally cannot purchase the content any other way, and then you're left with the question of, well, if you can't do that, doesn't it just get forgotten? And honestly, I don't. I don't know how to reconcile that.
So as I struggle with this, I hope you all are well and stay well.
Don't worry about me.
I'm sure I can come to some sort of decision about Maine at some point, and I will talk to you again, really soon. Tech Stuff is an iHeart Radio production. For more podcasts from iHeartRadio, visit the iHeartRadio app Apple Podcasts wherever you listen to your favorite shows.