Emulator expert Robert Broglia bringing entire catalogue to Ouya

No one is going to buy Snoopy for GameBoy anymore, so get real.

And no one is going to download Snoopy for Gameboy either. The games people would download are likely still being sold by IP holders via digital means already.

Granted, there are still many titles that aren't available which is where emulation shines.


And Broglia needs to look into the Wii U and PS4. They've made some massive inroads towards opening up development to everyone. Though given that emulators are his specialty, his work would be one of the few that get blocked.

Edited 1 times. Last edit by Jim Webb on 28th March 2013 10:10am

Irony from GamesIndustry.biz getting two of the most prominent female developers mixed up while pushing for more recognition of female developers?

Irony from GamesIndustry.biz getting two of the most prominent female developers mixed up while pushing for more recognition of female developers?

The irony continues as I believe you've posted in the wrong article.

@Michael: Quite right. Thanks for the spot

An awful lot of talk about emulators on Ouya this week, telling me that its a fairly popular thing among the community. Personally, I've never been interested and I'm looking for original content only.

Matthew: None. Broglia charges $5 for emulators that have been free for PC for decades, all on Android. Furthermore, the only reason to buy them is to play (technically) illegal ROMs, unless you believe all of that "public domain" crap. Forgetting that issue that Robert Broglia is a scumbag who took the work many others did as a hobby, effectively stole it, and profits off of the piracy of others, I don't see people buying a console to play old video games when they can get the same effect by hooking up a PC with a DVI cable to any modern TV.

The casuals don't care, and the hardcores like me (I've historically been one of the staunchest classic emulation advocates in the games press) are offended. Doesn't leave much of a market for what is largely an experimental system.

...unless you believe all of that "public domain" crap.

Err....the whole point of granting government-enforced monopolies on IP, in the form of copyright, was to get more works in the public domain.

If you want to argue that, say, a 30 year monopoly (meaning all those early '80s games would be in the public domain now) wouldn't have provided enough incentive for the creators of the time to create those games, that's well within the spirit of copyright law.

But if you want to argue that these monopolies should be granted in perpetuity (meaning that someone, somewhere, would still be controlling reproduction to the works of Shakespeare), you've gone right off the rails when it comes to the purpose of copyright law.

And from a historical point of view, long copyright terms and harsh limits on fair use (including, but not limited to, the DMCA) tend towards permanently destruction of protected works. If everybody really obeyed the law on works embodied in, say, old coin-op machines, most of those games would vanish from history long before their copyright terms expired. Is that really what you're looking for?

@Curt: You misunderstood what I was saying. Emulators are historically put out with the stated understanding that 1) no one play games that they don't own, and 2) that people play publically created ROMs, placed in the public domain, with their emulators that emulate the Super Nintendo.

It's a "wink wink" in the console emulation community that no one buys, for good reason: it's bunk. No one is downloading that Super Nintendo emulator to play Timmy's First SNES Game. They're doing it to play Mario World.

@Christopher: Some emulators were originally created for homebrew developers, hence why they have debugging features (something you don't just tack on).

The No$gba emulator was kept private from the public for years before being released (allowed only for professionals paying a fair amount for the software), but yes there is a bit of a "wink wink" in the scene because the homebrew community is very small compared to the piracy crowd.

I've seen a homebrew game of mine appear in a torrent of gameboy games. Can't say I wasn't chuffed, though I doubt anyone played it!

@Christopher, surely every bugger has owned a legit copy of Mario World at least once? Probably goes for most games people bother emulating: they're doing it mainly for nostalgic value and will therefore likely have forked out money for the thing somewhere down the line...

Peter, that's one hell of an assumption to make. Many emulator users weren't even born yet for the games they are downloading.

And even if some of them were only downloading ROMs they once owned on cart legitimately, do we open the illegal flood gates for everybody just for that small segment that stays legal?