Lunchtime Discussion: Emulators

As regular readers will know, I’m nearly 80 and like nothing more than dragging out the ol’ Spectrum 48k and having a blast with some classic 2D platformers like Everyone’s a Wally, Dynamite Dan and Rollercoaster.  It’s a pain, though, to have to sit through 5 minutes of whirring and chirping as the Speccy does its magic, so most of the time I’ll play said games on an emulator.

So, with our recent Lunchtime Discussion on Piracy reaching 250 comments, let’s take a different route on a similar subject: games that have been out for around 25 years surely aren’t still making money for the publisher, even if they still own the rights to the IPs (Codemasters, Rare et al), so should we feel guilty about playing these games having downloaded them?

Certain sites, like WorldOfSpectrum, remove titles from their download database if the author or publisher asserts their rights to the games in question, but some of the classics from Ultimate, such as Knight Lore and Alien8, are still ‘found’ on the internet and downloadable, and at 48k unzipped don’t exactly tax your bandwidth either.  Should we feel guilty about this?

Have you downloaded copyrighted ‘classic’ 8-bit games for the Spectrum and Commodore 64, even ones you actually own on cassette, and how do you feel about it?