Activision and Atari is on board so where's "Activision Anthology Remix" and "Atari 80 games in One" respectively?

I'm down for some good old Atari VCS action.

I think you need to look up the term straw man argument.

It is different because we all know who owns the code and why they stake ownership of it. Sega is releasing emulated games on PC because they're out of the console business. Sony, Nintendo and MS aren't. All three have marketplaces on their current consoles and are unlikely to forfeit any selling point they may have.

No, it's still a strawman argument, apparently you need to look up the argument as you're deliberately attacking a weaker point that was never claimed by anybody other than yourself. Nobody in this thread has suggested that Mr. Gog start releasing games that aren't licensed. And for reasons I have already outlined it's questionable if Nintendo has any right to restrain the developers from licensing decades old games for sale by somebody else.

It doesn't matter whether Nintendo, Sony or MS still have marketplaces for their games. It's still almost certainly an illegal restraint of trade even if the contracts that were originally signed included exclusivity forever. Which is rather unlikely, if they intended for that to be the case they likely would have just sold the rights outright rather than licensing the rights.

There may be some games which were exclusive to the platform, but the ones that weren't are definitely not going to be so encumbered. Even the platform exclusives are not likely to be so exclusive at this point given how long the platforms have been out of production.

OLD. I agree. ;)

Where did I claim that anyone suggested GOG was about to try and sell games without proper legal grounds to do so? You know, for someone so in need of learning what a straw man is, you've just provided a fine example - such as it is.

I 'attacked' a weak point because it was just that - a weak point. It's actually a major hurdle that seems to be something of an elephant in the room in this thread. If GOG is unsure about releasing EA expansion packs when EA's confused as to why, then I hardly think GOG's about to go around kicking hornets nests.

But that's beside the point. I'm not saying that any game is unable to be sold here. I'm not saying that's the case at all. The problem is that it can't be the console version sold as is.

As long as any proprietary code is removed first then it would be fine. But what you'd be left with would be more akin to a port than an emulated game. A port takes a lot more work.

Emulators are not.
But ROMs are, unless of course either the game's copyright has expired (which isn't likely), or you own a copy of said game in physical format (at which point it becomes a wee bit of a grey area, but ultimately I believe would fall under the 'backup' category).

In essence, this makes most people's use of emulators illegal.

problem with this kind of gaming is way to expensive to pull off console games had always problems with local licencing if im correct. Like ps 1 games there were a lot of games not licenced in europe ect. But i can be wrong.
problem is game companies force the consumer to use it. There was an era most games never came in europe and the games were not region free.

Read up on MAME, there are exclusions to even the whole copyright thing. They claim to exist in one of those exclusions (specifically the research one). MAME is an extremely high profile project and has not been shut down.

ROMs are not illegal either, unless they are obtained illegally. The Zelda Collector's Edition disc for example contains a bunch of emulated ROMs. You can of course buy and download ROMs from Nintendo's Virtual Console service as well.

Emulators or the use of emulators are never illegal. The only thing that's illegal is some fo the methods games are obtained, and that applies not only to console games but also PC games as well. There is nothing illegal about either emulators and ROMs, only certain methods that ROMs can be obtained.

As I said, it renders -most peoples- use of emulators illegal :p

Technically, that's not100% true, I admit. It's a somewhat questionable area as to if the use of something which is legal, to run something which is not legal, is legal or not in and of itself.

There are legitimate ways to obtain ROMs, yes. However, 90% (or more) of the people who obtain them, are not doing so legally. There is no "grey area" that makes ROMs legal when you do not otherwise have legal rights to duplicate, use or distribute the copyrighted material. Things like that are just ways people try and justify copyright violation. :p

(That being said, I think copyright laws are somewhat insane, and should either expire sooner, or work such that if you stop doing anything with the copyrighted materials for X amount of time, you lose the copyright. Thus, a best-selling author would keep his copyright to his book because it was continually being printed and sold. But a nobody schmuck author who wrote a book and just left it alone for 10 years because no one wanted it, wouldn't.)

So I am guessing Microsoft does not have rights to Oddworld: Stranger's Wrath otherwise they would have tried to sell it on the Xbox Marketplace and keep it an Xbox exclusive.

Necroing but

NO! HELL NO!

Where the hell did you get this idea? The logic in custom control chips is copyright to the system designer so unless you have a clean room implementation of said logic an Emulator can be illegal. For example the case that made this fact fairly well known..
Bleem!
It was one of the first comercial emulators it was sued into bankruptcy for using actual PS1 rom images rather than clean room implementations. Do not fool yourself Emulators are not always legal in any way shape or form...

Bleem! won their case. The costs of the case were too much though.

A note about emulators which I learned hanging out at TASVIdeos; console BIOS files are also illegal to distribute. Found this out when I started watching emulator movies in PCSX and PSXjin, both of which require an external BIOS file.

they won 1 of 3 points.. they got confirmation that the actual act of emulation is legal they lost on 2 copyright infringement cases