The best way to get Nintendo, playstation and other old system games are from emulators (I won’t mention any sites) but I have an emulator and it works fine all you need to do is down load it and have a game pad and your all set.

Absolutely wrong, emulators are not illegal. What is illegal is downloading ROMs for an emulator without paying for them. Some people claim that if you already own the original game, then downloading the ROM is perfectly legal, but to my knowledge that has never been declared in any court or law.

You wouldn't happen to have any links, would you? ;)

I got reminded of this comic.

Yes they are. Most of them are using modified console BIOS which is copyright violation. You think how they are emulating the console? Using it's modified engine. Which is a violation. (I am 100% sure PSX and PS2 emulators use SONY's BIOS for emulation, don't know exactly how things are for nintendo)

Using an emulator when you actually paid for a game AND console? maybe not illegal, dunno.

No, pirating a BIOS is illegal. Emulators are not, however some emulators require a pirated BIOS to work. It doesn't make the emulator illegal.

You're right about Playstation emulators requiring a BIOS. This BIOS isn't distributed with the emulator in the same way that ROMs aren't.

VisualboyAdvance mostly runs fine without the GBA BIOS because few games actually used it in any way. There is an option to load the BIOS, as AFAIK there were a couple of games that wanted it.

Ok. But who would want to use emulator without BIOS which is required to work? :P

But I see you point and you're right.

As far as I know this is only true of more modern systems (PSX and onwards). Also, emulators such as PCSX (as in the original, not pcsx2) actually don't require the BIOS (they have their own implementation).

And you're sure this implementation is crated legally without violating SONY's copyright?

People who have the system and games and would simply rip ISOs to their PC so they didn't have to change discs? ROMhackers? Homebrew? People who would prefer to use a 360 gamepad for a PSX game? Quite a few people, I would imagine.
I would assume it doesn't break copyright, since they don't distribute the second with copyrighted BIOS, I can't see them distributing the first with them.

They still cannot use emulator WITHOUT pirated BIOS.

I think they are missing a huge market to not sell ROMs. However, from their point of view, if you want to play the game, you have to buy their hardware which is money for them. Then they can also sell from their back catalog.

One of the main reasons I'm doubtful I'll buy a PS4 is because of their move to remove the backwards compatibility from the PS3. Shortly after those units were removed from market they started re-releasing HD versions of the PS2 games for the PS3. Seems they not only want you to have to buy the hardware, but they want you to buy the software more than once. Highly, HIGHLY doubtful you will ever see LEGAL versions of console games outside of the console. Only exception I can think of is the atari classics that were released at retail a few years back.

Oh, I see. I didn't know you can "extract" bios directly from console legally.

As long as you don't sell the console while keeping the BIOS file.