Except this isn't true.....or, more accurately, it isn't necessarily true. It's a frequent misconception that emulators are illegal, but they're not; if that were the case, hardware manufacturers would have slammed emulator developers with cease & desist letters long ago. What is illegal, however, is the online distribution of a console's BIOS and the ROM/ISO images of games, which is why emulator developers do not provide those and strictly forbid their distribution on their websites. If you dump the BIOS from your own console and ROM/ISO images from your own games and use those with an emulator, then you haven't done anything illegal.

Granted, there are many people who couldn't care less about the rules and will download BIOSes and ROM/ISO images from illegal websites. But if one wishes to play games on emulators legally, it's perfectly possible to do so.

I will say, though, that emulation alone doesn't cover all console needs. Due to the difficulties related with reverse engineering a system and making it work on completely different hardware, it can take a very long time for someone to develop a reliable emulator, especially if that hardware functions in a way that is difficult to replicate on a regular computer. Due to how complex the task of replicating the Emotion Engine was, It took almost a decade of work before we got a reliable PS2 emulator...and even then, it can be faulty and requires tweaking depending on the game. As such, I have no doubt that it'll be many years before we see a reliable PS3 emulator. So anyone who wishes to play PS3 games at this time pretty much has no choice but to do so on an actual PS3.

In any event, to actually reply to the OPs statement, I agree that this "next generation" is quite lacking....but not for the reasons stated. In fact, ports have always been quite common during the early days of a console. A big reason for the success of many early consoles, particularly the Atari 2600 and NES, was the ability to play arcade games at home. So it's not even the least bit surprising that the PS4 and Xbone are primarily getting ports right now; in fact, that's pretty much the norm with new consoles.

No, what makes this new generation disappointing is that it doesn't really feel like a new generation, but more like an extension of the old one (a "Generation 6.5", if you will). Forget ports, even the "new" games give an enormous sense of deja vu as they are the exact same sort of games that were used to push the previous generation of consoles. Furthermore, this new generation has (so far) failed to shake up the prevailing practices and attitudes in gaming.

Overall, rather than feeling like a bold start of a new era, the new consoles just feel like "same old, same old".As such, it's kind of hard to get excited.

Let's see. Can you, legally play, say, Link to the Past on the PC without owning the cartridge in question? No. The program itself might not be illegal, but emulating commercial games can sure as hell be.

I'm not sure what point you're trying to make here. I already specified that you require the actual system and games from which to dump the necessary components in order legally emulate games. Yes, if you downloaded a ROM image of Link to the Past from a pirate website, then you're doing an illegal act....but if you dumped a ROM image from your copy of Link to the Past, then you are perfectly within your right to play the game on an emulator.

Either way, the point I was driving at was that emulators and emulation in general aren't illegal. The fact that some people use them for illegal activities doesn't change that.

The point I'm trying to make is; phaolo said you don't need a console, as you can emulate everything on the PC. That is incorrect.

Oh, I see. In that case, that is indeed for the most part incorrect, at least in terms of legality.

However, one thing that is worth adding here is that sufficiently advanced emulators of certain older platforms (like SNES and GBA) literally have a clone of the BIOS within the emulator itself, thus not requiring a person to dump the BIOS from an actual system. In those cases, it's actually possible to just buy the games, dump their ROMs on to your computer and play them on an emulator without having to own the actual console.

Yes, I'm aware of that, but some day in the future Playstation 2 and similar consoles will be as old as NES, SNES, MegaDrive are now and there will be no guarantee that the new emulators will contain the BIOS of the system.

Really? I think that we needed next-gen now. The Xbox 360/PS3 generation was the longest console generation we have ever had (8 years). It was about time.

They do have time, the beta dev kits are released a LONG time before the console. Of course dev kits change over time as they are still deciding on the console's final specs (for example, the Xbox One got higher GPU clocks a few months before release), but they are there. Not to mention that developers usually build a custom PC to reflect what a console will have in the future. I read an interview from Ubisoft developers about the development of Zombi U for the Wii U and they said that they built the game on a custom built PC based on the specs given them by Nintendo before they got official dev kits.

Look at the next-gen consoles, for example. Both the PS4 and the Xbox One use a x86 architecture. Developers COULD have started developing for it a LONG time ago since it will be much easier to port games built on PCs to these consoles thanks to the architecure being the same. In the last gen all the consoles used custom CPUs (the Xbox 360 had the Power PC from IBM and the PS3 had Cell), which made things harder.

The point is: developers COULD have started developing for next-gen consoles a long time ago, but they DON'T want to invest so much in a platform without a big installed user base. There is always a period of "transition" between current gen and next-gen. We are currently living in this "transition" period. Games are currently being released on both next-gen and current-gen consoles. The user base for the next-gen consoles is still too small compared to last gen. Releasing a game exclusively on a next-gen platform is not a good business decision at the moment (except for Sony, Microsoft and Nintendo, for obvious reasons).

I call BS on that. Emulators are only good for a few famous consoles and the most famous games. For example, the 3DO, the Jaguar, the Saturn and the first Xbox still don't have decent emulators (the 3DO and the Jaguar are 20 years old already). If i recall correctly the Xbox emulator runs ONE commercial game: Turok Evolution. Not to mention that consoles got much more complex. For example, i doubt we will get a PS3 emulator in the near future without a HUGE upgrade in the current processing power we have on commercial PCs. That console is a bitch to program for thanks to Cell, let alone emulate it. Heck, even emulating the SNES with accuracy requires an extremely powerful PC (http://arstechnica.com/gaming/2011/08/accuracy-takes-power-one-mans-3ghz-quest-to-build-a-perfect-snes-emulator/).

By the way, good luck playing an obscure SNES game on a SNES emulator.

And i'm not even mentioning the legal issues.

There's actually one emulator (still in early stages) for the PS3: RPCS3. So far it's able to run a couple of games (Disgaea 3 and Arkedo Series), but at incredibly low frame rates. Although chances are that it'll probably end up like the Xbox emulator if the PS3 is that complicated.

Ok sorry, I wan't aware that owning the games wasn't enough to use emulators for ancient systems. (why everything is always so difficult..)
I still have the old consoles, but, anyway, are the bioses sold anywhere? I hate using old hardware when everything could be simply digital on a single machine..

Hemm..ok, then the emulation solution isn't perfect for everything.
Luckly for me, I totally don't need those bad systems or obscure games.. :P
(except maybe the Xbox, but the only famous exclusive game I know is Halo..)

I don't know, for sure no one sell those bios.