After a 7-year corporate stint, Tanveer found his love for writing and tech too much to resist. An MBA in Marketing and the owner of a PC building business, he writes on PC hardware, technology, and Windows. When not scouring the web for ideas, he can be found building PCs, watching anime, or playing Smash Karts on his RTX 3080 (sigh).
Game preservation has an uncomfortable problem. Many of the games worth saving are the hardest to access. Either publishers stopped selling them years ago, or the original console is too hard to maintain. With digital storefronts shutting down and games getting delisted on a whim, emulation often remains the most practical way to keep old titles alive.
However, emulation also falls into a legal grey area due to the obvious question over ROM acquisition and cracked encryption. Emulators give users the digital infrastructure to play old titles, but game ownership is often up in the air. Publishers have fought tooth and nail to protect their IP, sometimes going too far and shutting down small-time emulation projects that can't afford protracted legal battles.
Emulators aren't the only way to preserve obscure titles — FPGAs and decompilation have picked up pace — but it remains one of the most accessible. How legitimate preservation efforts make their presence felt will determine the future of emulation.
For thousands of titles, emulation remains the only way to play
Gamers don't realize what they would have lost
Emulating is often the only lifeboat lesser-known titles have. Although emulating popular titles gets the most attention, the obscure ones on the fringes arguably need the technology most. Older consoles can get nearly impossible to maintain after a point, publishers can go out of business and take their library with them, or the game can become otherwise impossible to purchase due to licensing or storefront availability issues.
Preservationists, enthusiasts, and researchers want to keep older games alive for as long as possible since they form a crucial part of gaming history. A 2023 study by the Video Game History Foundation showed that 87% of classic games were no longer commercially available. Emulation is sometimes the only way to keep these titles from disappearing completely.
Projects like MAME have effectively saved thousands of classic games from the 70s, 80s, and 90s coin-op arcade history. MAME mimics the physical microchips, sound boards, and visual layouts of thousands of systems to preserve classic titles as authentically as possible. Then, there's RetroArch, which centralized game preservation efforts by integrating dozens of console platforms, from the Atari 2600 to the PlayStation 2, into a single front-end.
Games like The Outfoxies and Golden Axe: The Revenge of Death Adder were never ported to home consoles, so emulators like MAME and Finding Burn Neo were the only way to play them. ScummVM brought iconic titles like Blade Runner, The MADS collection, and The Feeble Files back from digital obsolescence when the original source code was lost, storefronts completely dropped the titles, or the game engine was broken on modern Windows architecture.
Fans of classic games and gamers, in general, have a lot to thank these projects for. Many of them continue to maintain tens of thousands of titles spanning dozens of console systems. That said, the road to game preservation has never been smooth.
Publishers are ruthless when going after emulation
Emulation is often lumped together with piracy
Credit: Nintendo
Emulation isn't inherently illegal, as evidenced by numerous legal verdicts in favor of the technology. As long as the emulator doesn't use copyrighted parts of the original console's OS, the project is in the clear. Most emulators are developed without accessing the console's source code, a practice known as clean-room design; therefore, these projects are protected under "fair use."
The other piece of the emulation puzzle is the game file itself, which is where things get complicated. Most emulation projects ask end users to supply their own legally purchased ROM, which doesn't infringe on any IP. However, this does not stop publishers, mostly big guys like Nintendo, from aggressively pursuing legal action against these projects.
In 1999, the company threatened legal action against UltraHLE, a Nintendo 64 emulator that came out while the console was still on store shelves. The team behind it abandoned the project, but the emulator spread online anyway. From 2018 to 2021, Nintendo won multiple million-dollar judgments against popular ROM distribution platforms, limiting the proliferation of copyrighted ROM files.
The company also blocked the release of the Dolphin emulator on Steam, citing copyright infringement of its Wii decryption key. Then came the out-of-court settlements with Nintendo Switch emulation projects Yuzu and Ryujinx in 2024, with the company citing clear-cut instances of piracy.
Nintendo isn't the only one to pursue aggressive IP protection. Sony drove the company behind the Bleem emulator out of business over copyright-violation accusations related to the use of the PlayStation BIOS. The company also fought Connectix over its Virtual Game Station emulator, which made PS games available on Macintosh and Windows.
While the court ruled in favor of the emulation projects in both cases, the companies didn't survive the battle (Sony bought Connectix and shut it down). Even Sega sued Accolade, a developer that wanted to port their PC games to the Sega Genesis without paying licensing fees. They reverse-engineered the Genesis code, which is why the court eventually sided with Accolade, establishing yet another precedent for the legality of emulation.
While emulation projects might eventually win a legal battle, most don't want to go bankrupt doing that. Making enough money from emulation naturally puts a target on your back, something most teams aren't comfortable with. Major publishers don't always target emulators directly, but they keep going after illegal game distribution platforms and copyright infringement.
The alternative is preserving games as a non-profit, but that isn't enough to sustain long-term efforts and development costs. This puts the future of emulation in question as more and more projects go under or don't expand for fear of legal repercussions.
Thanks to native ports and FPGAs, emulation isn't the only way to preserve games
It's the wild west out there
Emulation's reputation may be in the grey, but it's not the only way to preserve games and make them playable across a wide variety of hardware. As I mentioned above, some landmark disputes between publishers and emulation projects were decided in favor of the latter because they reverse-engineered the console functionally without access to the source code. These efforts have picked up rapidly in the last few years.
You can reverse-engineer a game on another machine in two ways. Decompiling a game's code, function by function, into a readable language such as C until it matches the original compiled code, then building a port that runs on that codebase. This approach enabled the decompilation of Super Mario 64 as part of the n64decomp project, which was the first major development of its kind. It has brought widescreen support, uncapped FPS, mouse-and-keyboard support, and hi-res textures to many N64 titles.
The second approach is static recompilation, where tools like N64Recomp automate translating the original ROM into, say, C++, which a compiler can then compile for any platform. Although per-game tweaks like input mapping, graphics rendering, audio, and more are still needed, recompilation saves much of the manual effort involved in regular decompilation.
Both approaches are fundamentally different from emulation, since there's no virtual console running on your PC. It's all native code being executed on your modern CPU. Native PC ports enabled by newer projects like AnyPS5 have used Claude and other LLMs to shrink years of decompilation efforts into weeks. You can now play erstwhile PlayStation exclusives and delisted titles like Driveclub, Bloodborne, P.T., and Uncharted: The Nathan Drake Collection natively on your PC.
Since these projects don't distribute the game files themselves and only develop the "wrapper" around them, they operate in a legally defensible space. Besides, Sony suing them for preserving delisted games like Driveclub would bring bad PR to the company, though that doesn't always stop publishers.
Finally, FPGA-based emulation mimics older console hardware instead of the games. An FPGA board has programmable logic blocks where the circuits can be physically reshaped to match the electrical signals and clock cycles of the original console. The game believes it's running on the original hardware, letting users play NES, Genesis, or PS1 titles on a handheld retro console.
This approach is fundamentally different from decompilation or static recompilation, but it works perfectly for game preservation.
The industry will protect itself at all costs
No one's arguing for piracy or advocating that publishers let copyright infringement slide, but the differentiation between piracy and legitimate emulation needs to be made. Emulation projects, FPGAs, and native ports have given enthusiasts and gamers enough ways to bring software interoperability to life. What remains is a broad agreement on how game preservation and IP protection can coexist.