Is this stuff LEGAL?

[Ihatewindows]

I saw some pretty good emulators out there for free, they're mainly older ones, though. And they're free. Ok, I understand that fairly well. The game ISOs and ROMs are free. Huh? Why would I fish around for a Xbox that's around $500-$600 when I could get emulators and all the ROMs and ISOs I want for FREE? Is there something I'm missing?

[marko]

I guess you mean emulators like MAME? The ROMs are technically illegal because they are games whose rights are still owned by the original companies. The emulators themselves are completely legal as they are code written from scratch and were reverse engineered.

There are a small number of public ROMS (the owners signed off their rights) but they tend to be games that no one wants to play anyway.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MAME#Legal_status

[Adunaic]

Absolute legal minefield as far as I can tell. I am not sure most of the "claims" that something is legal are actually true (although it probably depends on the country you are in).

I recently came across somethign called abandonware (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Abandonware), I think most softwar like isos / roms fall under this category. There are some websites out there that list games that were once paid for, but are now freeware (A good example is Tiberium Sun and Red Alert; These were made free to premote RedAlert 2 or 3).

[Ihatewindows]

I think abandonware is free because they are DOS based. Nobody uses DOS anymore.

[Adunaic]

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of...ed_as_freeware

[Maryyy]

Claiming nobody uses DOS anymore is as relevant as me saying I'm not entirely hetero - such information is simply without any meaning.

There is no offcial statement that DOS is not used and even if it was, it would still not matter at all.

Stuff called abandoware is mostly games where copyright holder is hard to find or is confirmed to be out of bussiness. But still, rights may have been transfered to some other entity. E.g. quite a few games from many AW sites (like Abandonia) are not AW anymore, because the now GOG.com has the right to sell them.
One never knows what will be the next game to be excluded, because of new confirmed holder on the scene. You simply never know and you can never be 100% sure this or that game is 'free' to use if it was once commercial title.

ROMs are easier to deal with. None of them are simply free, unless the initial creator says so.
E.g. all Amiga ROMs are illegal to get for free with one exception - if you still own let's say old A500. There is a rather cumbersome, but possible way to transfer them.
If you don't own Amiga anymore, you can legally obtain them only through Cloanto's AMIGA Forever.
Possibly also through some old magazine-included Amiga game packs, which usually also included the ROMs and emulator.

I seriously feel bad when stealing stuff which was hard to produce, especially gems.
Getting 'abandonware' version of Another World e.g. is probably worse than calling Buddha a Christian.
No, 'abandonware' is not FOSS and web 2.0 is full of stuff that is 'free', but of course purely illegal.