Yes, emulators are legal, and you can use them to play homebrew that is FOSS, but the majority of people seem to use them to play non-free ROMs which are often

Yes, emulators are legal, and you can use them to play homebrew that is FOSS, but the majority of people seem to use them to play non-free ROMs which are often obtained illegally. They are useless to most without these additional non-free binaries. The major software distributors understandably want nothing to do with this. And I'm saying this as a big fan of your work. I consider having working references in software for all those old chips to be important -- but I doubt anyone else has bothered to collect every single retro game cart in existence just to dump them and say they could play them legally on bsnes.