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Nice list. I do wonder how useful they are though, given that the actual ROMs for many games are illegal to distribute and the emulators require them to work.
by CM30 11y ago
Nice list. I do wonder how useful they are though, given that the actual ROMs for many games are illegal to distribute and the emulators require them to work. Are they for people running a personal server on their computer? For websites that want to let people play homebrew games through the browser?
Seems like the list of uses for a Javascript emulator isn't particularly high.
But they're pretty cool on a technical level.
- azakai 11y agoThe ROMs may be copyrighted of course, but there is an argument to be said for there being a fair use case here, namely archiving of historical content that is no longer accessible otherwise. That's what the Internet Archive nonprofit is doing, and it's very important, https://archive.org/details/softwarelibrary_msdos_games https://archive.org/details/softwarelibrary_msdos_games
- StuffMaster 11y agoAlso, is it legal to posses a ROM that you own physically? I would think legal precedents for archiving or ripping (format conversion) might apply.
- bri3d 11y agoThere's no reason a JavaScript emulator can't take a local file and run it in the browser, using the HTML5 File API. That's not different in any way from an emulator written in a native language - the user supplies data to a runtime on their own hardware.
- chriswarbo 11y ago> Are they for people running a personal server on their computer? Many pure JS applications can be run via a file:// URI, so there's no need to set up dedicated infrastructure, other than "Open With -> Some Browser".