Can we have an emulator thread?
I was wondering which libre emulators any of you use/would recommend.
Also where is the line drawn on emulators? Virtualbox is a GPL x86 emulator which can run windows games with a pass through. Is that too far? If people do use emulators, which emulators do you think are acceptable and why?
To play devils advocate you didn't need freedom on an arcade machine because it serves one function, it was built to play a game and that's it. Essentially making the software, soft circuitry, like in modern microwave ovens or coffee makers. This same logic can be applied to emulators of even modern console games such as Dolphin, as the games are essentially drop in soft circuitry for the emulator which serves one function, to play the games.
Now obviously the major flaw here is that we don't have access to the source code for these games. In an extreme but plausible situation a proprietary console game released today could even escape its' emulated environment. This has been observed with windows malware which can recognise a virtual environment and infect the host cross platform.