Emulation is not illegal. The main purpose of emulators is not to provide the means for people to play console games on their PC that they illegally downloaded. The ability to play games is a side-effect of accurate (or at the very least, near-accurate) emulation of the target hardware. It just happens that most of those who are using emulators are using them the illegal way. The legal way of emulator use would mean to only play public domain games and/or run test carts to see if the emulator is accurate enough to pass hardware tests and different memory map/RAM/ROM checks. Nothing more, nothing less really. Well ok, if you own the original game cart and dump it yourself, I think it's legal for you to run the ROM image in the emulator. Except that copiers are a gray area. If emulators were illegal you wouldn't be seeing any posts about new emulator versions, links et al. At least not on this board.