Jos（ユース）With Nintendo's attacks on emulation for the past two years, I've had to do a good bit of thinking about why independent emulators should exist, weighing it against their supposed reasons why they shouldn't. I know others have written about it too
When I started using and contributing to Dolphin back in 2014, I didn't have any ideological opinions about emulators. I just started because I wanted to contribute a fix to a problem a TASer said they were having, and then I continued because it was an interesting project
Nowadays, I do have opinions about it. We should have emulators. Sure, we could ask everyone who wants to play old games to buy old hardware that might fail at any moment. But is that really realistic? It's not prohibitively expensive now, but working consoles will only get rarer as time passes. Connecting them to modern TVs will only get harder. And if you want to be able to play old games from many different consoles... well, that's a lot of consoles to fit in your living room
Yes, having a Wii is by far the most practical way to dump GameCube and Wii games, so it's hard to use Dolphin legally without having access to a Wii. But you only need to have access once. If working Wiis become rare in the future, you can at least use someone else's Wii to dump your own games, and they'll keep working forever after that
aldelaro5That Nintendo is doing GameCube emulation on the Switch 2 is nice in that the games selected for inclusion get a bigger audience, but they've announced... what, 10 games out of over 640? And it's not like you can migrate game discs you've bought in the past. No, you have to subscribe to a paid service. And that service will probably go poof someday, leaving us with no Nintendo-sanctioned GameCube emulation until Nintendo reinvent the emulation wheel on their next console
Also, I just think being able to play GameCube and Wii games on your PC is neat. And improving their graphics. And using whatever controllers you want in place of Wii Remote waggling. And having savestates so you can practice speedruns. And having a debugger to help with mod development. And getting to watch all those cool TASes people out there make
demize@JosJuice and frankly, when the only real argument against emulators is “they’re piracy”, that highlights more of a problem with how we think about copyright than with emulators
there’s a reason I have 
in my bio, amongst the stars
Trif@JosJuice personally I feel like emulation & ROM-sharing should just be legal past some reasonable time threshold, e.g. a couple years after the console's lifespan or something
let game companies profit off their work while they support it, then hand it over to the passionate fans to enjoy tinkering with and preserving
let game companies profit off their work while they support it, then hand it over to the passionate fans to enjoy tinkering with and preserving