http://www.livefromplanetdeath.net/nintendo-wii-emulators-download/
roms and emulators info?
Are roms and emulators legal if i download the original game on the wii or do i have to own the actual game and Console because i do not want to get into any legal trouble with nintendo and the fcc
Firstly, to answer your question about owning the game on the Wii Virtual Console and not on the original cartridge: since there are differences in the binaries, it means you do NOT own the original content.
1. It’s not illegal to reverse engineer a microprocessor architecture. It doesn’t matter the console/device/computer. Even if the emulator uses nonfree images and steals the trademark of the video game company it’s emulating, it’s not your problem. It’s theirs.
2. As long as you own your original games (Virtual Console ports do NOT COUNT as owning the original games), receiving ROM dumps of them from other people is legal. Redistributing the games to anybody, however, even if the other owns the game, is illegal because it is in violation of the agreement you accepted when you took ownership of your copy of the game. It is illegal to redistribute copies of the program. No exceptions.
Now, if you receive your ROM dump through a peer-to-peer network like through a torrent or through Gnutella, most likely you were uploading to other peers as you were downloading. As long as someone has a log of you uploading to anybody else during this, they can use this against you and hold you accountable for redistributing the copyrighted material to others.
If you received your ROM dump by going to a website in your actual web browser and downloading it from an HTTP server, then since you did not redistribute it and you own your own copy of the material in question, it is legal for you and illegal for whoever hosted the copyrighted material.
If you ever have a ROM dump in your possession without owning the original content in hand, it is illegal. This means lending your game to a friend while you have a ROM dump on your computer is illegal.
How do I know that owning the game makes owning a ROM dump legal? Because you might as well have received your ROM dump by extracting it yourself, and there is no law that you broke by receiving the copy from a friend versus by yourself. Even if you made the ROM dump yourself and gave your original copy to a friend, that would be illegal because again, you now own the ROM dump without having the original content in hand as I stated above.
So to put it simply:
Downloading and using an emulator is legal.
Downloading ROM dumps on the internet is legal if you own the original content and you did not upload it to anyone else in the process (i.e. you downloaded it from a website on an HTTP server through your web browser).
Uploading ROM dumps on the internet is illegal. If you received your ROM through a peer-to-peer network like through a torrent or through Gnutella, you most likely uploaded the content to somebody and broke the law.
Giving a ROM dump to a friend, even if he owns the original game, is illegal because you redistributed it, which is illegal.
WiiSX Beta 1 (Playstation 1 Emulator 4 Nintendo WII) with Guilty Gear X
