How come DOS games aren't free for emulation?

What made you think that?

Emulation is legal and tons of dos games are available as legal downloads, commonly referred to as abandonware. Alien Trilogy is easy to find as abandonware and works with dosbox.

Of course I do.



Just to clarify: creating or using an emulator is perfectly legal; an emulator itself doesn't violate any copyright laws. So, if I download a Saturn emulator, then use it to play one of my original Saturn cds, I'm not violating any laws.

But downloading games is still very illegal, of course. So, MeleeMonk, there's no problem in downloading and using DOSBox, which is the most used DOS emulator around. But downloading a DOS game that you don't have is still piracy.

As Armored Core Raven says, though, a lot of DOS games are considered "abandonware", which means their developers either ceased to exist or outright abandoned the game. This is a gray legal area, and most people see no problem in distributing games whose copyright owners doesn't even exist anymore.

If Alien Trilogy is a DOS game, you may look for it in abandonware sites (if that's its case) and then use DOSBox to play it. By the way, I have the Saturn version; it's not a great game, but it's a somewhat fun FPS.

Do you know the names of sites where I can download abandonware games? (I assume you've done this yourself at some point)

Cervantes No, that's not what I was referring to. I just have a poor understanding of emulation, but you've helped shed some light on the subject, so kudos for that.

I'll check out abandonia.com, thanks!

By the way, how often do you think people get caught downloading ROMs? Tool Assisted Superplays and Speedruns are all over Youtube, but I've never seen any action taken against the uploaders or their videos (although I did hear one story about Nintendo taking down a speedrun a good while back, but that's it).