Questions about emulators/roms

ImRyan · July 19, 2014

So I saw this YouTube video about emulators/roms and the comment read out at 1:33 got me thinking if I own the game for examples (Tony hawk's american wasteland for game cube and some other game cube games and PS1). Can use my legit copy of the game to make copy to play on PC and nvidia shield is this legal if so how do I do it.

Link to video

http://youtu.be/aK-oKNiyduU?t=1m33s

Vitalius · July 19, 2014

So I saw this YouTube video about emulators/roms and the comment read out at 1:33 got me thinking if I own the game for examples (Tony hawk's american wasteland for game cube and some other game cube games and PS1). Can use my legit copy of the game to make copy to play on PC and nvidia shield is this legal if so how do I do it.

Link to video

http://youtu.be/aK-oKNiyduU?t=1m33s

It's legal and you can do it by downloading a program called ImgBurn, then putting the disc for the games in your PC's Optical Drive, then using ImgBurn to rip an image of the disc to your PC's storage drive.

Then you just play it like normal in the emulator.

So, more detailed steps:

Download ImgBurn along with whatever emulator you want to use (I recommend ePSXe for PS1 games) and install both programs.
Put your game disc in your optical drive.
Open ImgBurn and make an image of the disc (it's fairly straight forward).
Open the emulator and set it up with your controls and such. You'll need a BIOS file to run it, but you have to get that from your console, as that's illegal to download. There are guides on how to get it off your console. I recommend google.
Start playing.

Note that Gamecube games can't be read with normal DVD drives. It's complicated ripping those, so I recommend downloading the ROMs for your games from a place like www.coolroms.com.

Note 2 to mods: This is perfectly legal as long as he owns the games. The illegal aspects of console emulation are the BIOS files (as they are copyrighted bits of software in the consoles) and downloading ROMs you don't own (pretty much same reason). That's about it. At least for the US & UK that's true. Not sure on other places.