Now that I've created a working emulator I wanted to document my process to try to help others make it the same way. One of my goals for this project is to be able to teach some kids how to make the game emulator. I know a handful of kids that would be eager to create their own video game station, and I am always glad to encourage STEM and curiosity to these kids. I think this project could be enjoyed by anyone, but I want this tutorial to focus on a kid's perspective. To accomplish this, I want to make a friendly tutorial with many pictures (unlike some of the tutorials I have found). Although it is an important skill to learn to read through blocks of text for the material you need to know, I simply find this more engaging (example page of the tutorial): I want this tutorial to be clear and concise, yet detailed enough that they should not run into any trouble. Considering that I will facilitating this tutorial, I want to make the tutorial specific to the hardware that we are using - there are many possibilities of how to get RetroPie running. I also don't have enough experience to make a tutorial considering so many different possibilities like some of the other tutorials I have found. This tutorial will only consider the Raspberry Pi 3, using the arcade buttons that I have, and specifically using a MacBook to download everything.
And there's good reason for it - downloading these game roms is illegal . . . sometimes. In order to save any trouble, or any possible blaming, all of these tutorials tend to stray away from showing how to download the roms. There is some misinformation ahead. This is what I found all over the internet about downloading roms. But it turns out this information is wrong, it is in fact illegal to download roms from the internet in any way shape or form. Here is the research I found from all these misconceptions: To stay within the laws of copyright, if you own the physical game you are allowed to download the game on your own or possess the download of the game. You own the rights to play the game, therefore you can use the roms. The problem arises when you are on a website that has roms for nearly every game that was ever made on the Nintendo. If these tutorials were to direct you to one of these websites, then you could easily download any of the thousands of games that you do not own.
This information was all over the internet as I was looking to find out how to legally download the roms. You can check out some examples of this here , here , here , here. From all these sources I was convinced that it is perfectly legal to download the games that you already own . . . but that's not quite true. You are permitted to copy your games' data to keep a backup - but this does not mean you can download these games from any site distributing them online. Here is Nintendo's official statement about the matter:
The confusion is that it does not matter wether you have the game, that never was the problem. Everyone downloading these roms, including myself, thought this misinformation was logical and a good argument to have rights to play the game. But the game player having rights to the game is not the main problem. The main problem is that all those websites mentioned earlier, distributing these games, do not have rights to all these games. These are illegal websites. Not only are they "enabling piracy", but every game they have on the website is pirated - so you can't download any game from them legally. It doesn't matter what games you own, downloading them from the internet will always be pirating. As I was researching more about the actual facts of downloading roms, I found this insightful video on the matter. Rob discusses the legal issues behind downloading these games, but he also brings up some legal options on how to continue using an emulator: As Rob mentioned, there actually are some games that are legal to use on the emulators. On the RetroPie website there is a nice page that points to many places to find legal roms. All of these roms have been released by the game developers to be used free of copyright, in the public domain. There are even a couple other games that still hold their rights on the game, but are open to use on emulators. Once I found out the majority of my project was actually illegal my project came to a hard stop. I did not think there was any way that I could move forward from here. When I started this blog I thought I would just talk about making a tutorial, and how to jump around the rom problem. But this new insight on the problem has changed the direction of my project. I will continue working on the tutorial, but I will need to be sure to carefully explain the rom problem and direct the user to the legal roms. Luckily I don't have to throw out the whole tutorial, but the purpose of the tutorial has changed. I don't find making an emulator for some random space game near as fun as creating it to play Mario Kart, so I probably won't continue to make the handheld emulator. There were other motivations like learning about soldering and 3D printing, but in the end I don't think the end product will be worth the time and money I would have to put into it . . . but I am still excited to teach some kids about making an emulator using the arcade buttons! Just not quite as excited anymore. One last note: I mentioned that many people using these emulators thought this misinformation was logical and a good argument to have rights to play the game. Although being logical does not mean it's legal, it does have other implications. Almost all of the sites that I referenced talked about the morality of using these roms. After talking about the legality, many people are still left unsatisfied, it was easier to believe the old information. There is a general agreement that it is morally upright to download the roms for the games that you do own. But that is a loaded topic that I don't have time to discuss now - I'll save the "Morality vs Legality" question for next week. (1) https://thumbs.gfycat.com/BlissfulSmallCanine-max-1mb.gif (2) http://ocremix.org/game/98/super-mario-world-snes (3) http://www.retrogameage.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/08/Super_Mario_World-4.png (4) https://i.ytimg.com/vi/dX8TPomp0k8/hqdefault.jpg (5) https://pbs.twimg.com/profile_images/448641554609995776/7Z9Y1XAU_400x400.jpeg (6) https://www.nintendo.com/images/social/fb-400x400.jpg
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