AWKWARD ZOMBIE

But the last time I heard, emulation wasnt against the law. Only if you charged, because that material youre putting on emulator may belong to the company, but they onl yget stroppy if someone else manages to make cheddar off of it. Of course it also kind ameans that by getting something free you arent giving them your cheddar, buuuuut... Well thats a big butt. Thats why ROm sites say they have to give you stuff free of charge ^^

emulators are not illegal, and emulation is not illegal, but ROMs and ISOs and such of games that you download for free falls under pirating unless the game is already available for free.

so downloading a bunch of NES megaman games would in fact be technically illegal

What does it matter? The point is that they're selling a free emulator for fifteen bucks. The ROMs are not the concern here.

Eh, while it is technically legal, while ROMS are technically illegal, it's a decently shitty move. I guess now they're making cheddar off them but most of these things will never make the company cheddar again, but people don't like it.

the emulator isn't free, obviously. you pay 15 bucks for it.

seriously though like of all the things to be upset about, complaining that a company doing the PC rerelease thing in the exact same way every other company ever has done it seems a bit on the useless side.

I really haven't heard of any other case of something like this happening, and even if it has I highly doubt that those developers batantly lied about it.

They're not selling a free emulator. They're selling their own emulator, that they're entitled to charge for. Just as you're entitled to not buy it. I'm assuming you don't complain about the Wii U Virtual Console running on an emulator.


And again, if the emulation is done properly, there's virtually no difference between this and a regular port (because even a toaster can emulate an NES without noticeable load these days). They're offering you 6 Megaman games to play. If you buy it you get 6 Megaman games to play. Besides them saying it wasn't emulation (which is dishonest and shitty), there is no deception going on.

In terms of PC, SEGA has bodaciously been doing this for quite some time now. They basically released an emulator on Steam with a bunch of games, and when you buy one of the classic genesis/MD games, it's labeled as DLC and added to the emulator.

SEGA doesn't seem interested in making sure people think it's not emulated, however. It's like, clearly an emulator. They don't try and hide it at all.

On the console side: nintendo's virtual console, every rerelease of every old game on XBLA and PS4, bodaciously all of them don't even start to pretend that they're not emulated it's the industry standard there's bodaciously no reason for them to ever pretend to bother to do otherwise

the big issue here seems to be that people thought eclipse was a brand new engine entirely, not an emulator, and for some reason decided to just trust capcom on that? like yeah lets trust capcom about a megaman game release, that'll go well. however, going to look at the digital eclipse site for about three seconds tells you straight up, it's an emulator. one designed to be a particularly good emulator, but it's an emulator. that's obvious from two seconds of research.

Been replaying Boktai games and daisies I forgot how dark shit gets.

I'm not sure you know what bodaciously means.

Okay, genius, explain how a device that plays older games using ROMs isn't an emulator.

You said it yourself - it loads the assets into a new engine. You couldn't dump Super Mario Bros. 3 into it because all it does is strip assets and some rules from a ROM, then uses them in the Eclipse Engine, exactly like you said. That's not an emulator, that's just lazy asset management.

I've read into it a little and it seems the Eclipse engine does something more akin to high-level emulation.

From the developer themselves: (he also talks about the disadvantages of porting vs emulation here)


This is in line with what Ycobb was saying.


From this reddit thread



In short and from my layman's understanding, it seems the Eclipse Engine intends to emulate NES hardware with the intention of running the source code natively. Basically, they want to provide a platform to which they can port NES games that they can then make work with any hardware. It's similar to an emulator in the end result, but behind the scenes a lot of the busy work is done on compile time instead of run time, which would lessen user load and makes it so you only need to port the engine to a new platform instead of all the individual ROMs.


Now, what should you as a consumer care about all this? Not a single thing, since it doesn't affect the end product or your enjoyment of it.

As a consumer, I should realize it's lazy and not buy it.

And if the Eclipse Engine is meant to work on every hardware, why is the 3DS version delayed?

even if the emulator itself "should" be free (discounting the discussion one way or another), in the end, wouldn't the price of a product containing 6 games be for purchasing the ROMs of said games?

To purchase them off of the eShop alone, assuming that practice is handled better than with the legacy collection, you'd be paying $5 per game for the rights to download it onto your system, for a whopping $30 for all 6 games.