I guess because Nintendo are big enough to do so.
But if they don't have the rights to the games, surely they have no right to legal action either unless working on behalf of whoever does have the rights?
Personally, I'd expect to find that Nintendo still have the rights to the games as originally released and thus could still put out original Gameboy carts (for example), so long as they don't change anything about the game itself, like the code or the resolution. Only way I can see that not being viable is if there's something very specific in the contract like a time limit, or if another party has some kind of claim on the manufature of the physical media, perhaps?
But if the ROM is the same game from decades ago, do Nintendo not still hold the rights to it in that same state?
that doesnt really answer anything.
How much they'd
have to charge is probably immaterial, as they'll simply charge whatever they want anyway. More so, if they still do hold rights.
They wont be, let's not kid ourselves. websites arent the only source of roms, they are just the easiest to go after.
But also the easiest for people to access. If you drive such things underground, to places where you need to faff around with VPNs and things, a lot of people won't bother.
I think you are incorrect in that assumption, people have been running emulators on alternative hardware for decades, and it wasn't really anything to do with availability.
Oh they've
existed for decades, yes. But they would become popular once that was the easiest and most successful way to find old games, rather than hoping the cartridge comes up on eBay or something.
Or you can ignore the emulation side of it and just look at how prolific piracy in general was way back in the 8bit era. It wasnt because of a lack of availability, it was simple because they can, and people love something for nothing.
Within certain circles, yes. But only if you had the right kit and knew what you were doing... probably being fluent in 1337sp34k or something, as well.
I'll bet the average user of consoles wouldn't have the first idea about extracting a ROM... and even today, some professionally extracted ROMs still won't work.... or so I'm told, anyway!
Only once it became widely accessible to the majority of gamers did it become prolific and even then, I don't think I ever saw a pirated or ripped copy of a console game, until eBay really took off. Best I heard of was a hacking a console to remove the region coding so people could play imported editions of games, which didn't happen until they came on CD and usually resulted in a fritzed machine instead.
