There doesn't need to be any moral questions involved, although there are those too of course.
Simply how the game works can be very different.

I recently replayed the original Tomb Raider. Had I played the emulated console version, the game would have offered save points in certain places, but no free saving at will. And obviously there wouldn't have been any widescreen patch available.

Console emulators are good if you want somewhat authentic console experience without using the actual console, but the more you want to have freedom of doing and freedom of tweaking, you are much better off using the PC version in most cases.

If we want to get into more technical stuff here, there is a very big difference between DOSBox and console emulators.
DOSBox is emulating DOS, which was more or less standard operating system at one point.
Console emulators are actually emulating certain kind of hardware, and software that goes with it.

Whether that makes any practical difference is another thing, but simply thinking "it's emulation in both cases" doesn't cover the full picture.


And to answer the original question, I sometimes play some Commodore 64 games using emulator, although I have a real Commdoore 64 available as well.
I would love to play some Amiga games as well, but the last time I tried, the emulator execution was disappointing. The emulator didn't even offer 3x scaling option, which the C64 emulator fortunately does offer.
(Obviously DOSBox offers a great number of scaling options, most of which work as intended.)

Unfortunately, the emulator still emulates the load times, since apparently some PS1 games actually do rely on the timing of loads or something of that sort.

DOSBox is emulating hardware too. No difference there.

The only reason I've played that particular Zelda game as much as I did is that it was released for a portable system, and therefore I could play it at times that I couldn't play the other Zeldas. To be honest, I actually found this game to be a disappointment after the earlier games in the series.

Except that most well-known emulators offer save states, allowing you to save anywhere at any time.

(DOSBox is the one notable exception, here.)

I still play the old command & conquer games yearly. Then I get the urge play old games like Syphon filters, Strike series, Army men game's, and all sorts of retro strategy games.

Edit: I actually enjoy playing mostly games from 90s to early 2000s over modern games. Even boot up some games from the late 80s once in while.

I play Turrican 2 on a regular base, also some of the Arcade Retro games here from GOG.
I call a Evercade my own with a nice selection of games, but not all of them, my favorite platform was the Amiga and they don't have those, so I usually stick to FS-UAE.

ScummVM users usually play games that predate the PS1 by years. The PS1 was already modern knick-knack for us.



Actually there are DOSBox builds that have such a feature.

Sometimes, not very often any more, actually. Not too long ago I would fire up Fantasy General, Star General or M.A.X on a regular basis. Also, i still have an ongoing casual game in Kohan: Immortal Sovereign. I did buy some remasters, such as Starcraft and Command and Conquer but even those did not immediately hit home. Probably in wait for the right season.

Yeah, I emulate a lot of stuff and there are several games I play more often than others. Asteroids, Miner 2049er, Nightstalker, Robotron, Jumpman, Necromancer, Shamus, BurgerTime, Pressure Cooker, Choplifter, Exolon...I find that the old single-screen arcade games and a lot of 8-bit computer games keep a hold on me and have more replay value than games from the 16-bit generation onward.

You do know DD and DD2 both have pc ports right?

The negative with Dos Emulators is that they don't feature any proper upscaling or other graphic features, leaving you with the horrible early 3D Graphics and all you have is some shitty "filter" that is like smearing vaseline over your screen, while with for example Beetle PSX HW you can upscale the internal gpu resolution to 16x, change the dittering pattern, add some proper texture filtering, get a fix for the bugged geometry and fixes for color banding.
And if you have the ISO on a SSD and change CD Access Method to Pre-Cache you pretty much don't get any loading times whatsoever.

Dos Emulation sadly is still incredibly crappy and featureless compared to what console emulators can do. They are so good, i don't even bother anymore booting up my original consoles.

A few N64 classics do it for me, and I would like to see them properly ported to the PC, not just a ROM in an emulator.

I'm talking about the likes of Goldeneye, Diddy Kong Racing, Mario Kart etc.

Current emulators certainly don't do it well enough for me, so when desperate I just fire up the N64 and use the cartridges.

Here's why the game felt like a disappointment to me:
* Fewer dungeons than in aLttP.
* Later in the game, the game becomes too easy combat-wise. Also, you don't feel like you get as powerful as in earlier games (particularly since the only sword upgrade is both optional and something many players won't get).
* You have to do too much on the overworld to get to the next dungeon; it's not just exploring the way it is earlier in the series. Also, the game is a bit too linear, unlike 1 and aLttP.
* This is where the series started to shift from being combat-focused to being puzzle-focused. Getting stuck on a puzzle is not fun, and the combat ends up being too easy.
* Once you beat the 8 main dungeons, there's no real final dungeon, the way there is in previous games. All you have is a "lost woods" type maze and then the final boss.
* aLttP has one particularly annoying boss, one where you could end up falling and have to start the fight all over. In LA, not only did they bring back that boss, but they made it the *first* boss. Did they *really* need to do that? (A similar complain can be levied against The Wind Waker; not only did they bring back stealth, but they made it the *first* bit of actual gameplay.)

All valid criticisms (although I regard the greater emphasis on puzzles an improvement over previous entries). I can't really comment on the difficulty of the combat or lack thereof since I know the game inside out. Amusingly, I once talked to someone who had so much trouble with the Eagle's Tower puzzle that they flat out refused to believe I could possibly have solved it at the age of 8. It's not that hard.

The problem with puzzles is that, on the nth playthrough (for n sufficiently large), you already know the solutions to all the puzzles, so they're no longer interesting. Combat, on the other hand, remains interesting at that point, especially since there's the option of foregoing upgrades (though less so in LA compared to previous entries). That is one reason I prefer combat-focused gameplay to puzzle-focused gameplay in these games.

(It should not surprise you that I prefer Oracle of Seasons to Oracle of Ages.)