2 Yesterday on the EarthBound community, someone asked how to get Mother 1 or 3. I told that person, "get the ROM!" and half an hour or so went by when I got a notification from the Miiverse administration: "Your post contained content related to criminal activity, so it was removed. " Emulation is legal. So some tattletale thought it was a good idea (or maybe Reggie or some other guy was just reading through the community?) to report my post. So I made a follow up post this morning saying, "Hey! I posted here earlier and someone reported my post for "criminal activity" (involving the whole MOTHER franchise) and it got removed! Let's not go tattling on each other in this community!", and it got a piddling two yeahs.
Moral: Don't mention ROMS or emulation on Miiverse!
You can follow me, I'm conqueror17. You can follow but I will NOT accept friend requests! Miiverse makes it very clear that friends are for real life friends only, and I'm sticking to that!
Replies:
any idiot could have told you that
the fact that the person was asking "how to get" mother 1/3 logically means that they didn't own it in the first place. Emulation is completely ILLEGAL when you do not own the software or content you are emulating, be it a old video game or a operating system (looking at you francis, try now to WHINE about it (hohohohoho)). The fact that you complained on a company message board to other users about this fact while clearly being misinformed yourself just highlights your own arrogance and stupidity.
so modding and emulating is allowed as long as you dont share the software or raw improvements with others. The emulators themselves will always be outside of the argument as long as they dont include a BIOS file since they are independent software that simply creates certain conditions for any given file type. One could make the argument that supporting certain exclusive file types brings it into the illegal realm, but the contents of file types such as .N64 are usually just modifications of existing files types, dropping it right back into the legal gray realm.