Console emulation certainly created an uproar during the crescendoing prevalence of "ROM" game packaging and "warez" communities, but distribution for a 120kb G

Console emulation certainly created an uproar during the crescendoing prevalence of "ROM" game packaging and "warez" communities, but distribution for a 120kb Gameboy emulator with 13kb ROM files was so widespread and underground that everyone stopped caring. I also remember every emulator resource having this staple legal disclaimer that probably demonstrated that what amounted to repackaged "game backups" didn't fall under any hard legislation. Ultima Online shards usually were based off reverse-engineered unsupported clients and were mainly populated when UO say larger changes to game mechanics so users could play different eras of UO. I remember people frequently discussing community stratification with the release of certain patches that popularized the idea of playing on private shards. Back in the early 2000s, we're talking about shards with communities that exist in an IRC channel. Today, I see World of Warcraft private servers with blogs and publicity, openly trying to recruit a userbase, and those seem to get abruptly shut down.