So, at some point, I want to try my hand at a screenshot LP of some kind, but I wanted to ask about this before doing anything. Are there any specific rules regarding the use of emulators to capture footage/screens/etc.? I obviously wouldn’t be doing anything with emulators for games I don’t own, but just wanted to double check what the forum says about emulators, if anything.
Emulators are fine here. I’m sure there’s a lot of threads that grabbed footage from them. (I know mine does.)
There’s nothing wrong with emulators themselves. It’s just linking to rom sites that is against the rules.
I’m inclined to think it’s a “Don’t ask, don’t tell” thing. You shouldn’t really be using emulators but you also shouldn’t be using a camcorder to get your Game Boy footage either.
For me personally if I ever did a console game I’d have to use an emulator, because I don’t have a capture device that’s worth a darn.
Related: What’s a capture device that’s worth a darn but also not super expensive?
edit - thought there might be a FAQ thread on stuff like this and there is, so disregard this
In the majority of cases it’s better to capture from an emulator than from the console itself. The graphics will look much better, and if it’s an older game you can go with PNGs to keep the file size down significantly.
Main exceptions are platforms where emulation isn’t quite there yet, or where emulation is glitchy in general (hello N64). Otherwise, I’d go with emulators, especially since many have AVI recording built-in, which will ignore any potential hiccups that screen-recorders would otherwise catch.
Emulators are totally fine. Basically so long as you don’t tell everyone about this sweet rom site you found (which they could find themselves with a minute’s Googling anyway), the folks here won’t care. We’ll just thank you for the free entertainment.
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I obviously wouldn’t be doing anything with emulators for games I don’t own
I don’t see why people online feel the need to insert this statement when discussing emulation when 99% of the time it’s blatantly false anyway.
Anywho, emulators are perfectly legal pieces of software (in the US, anyway), so it doesn’t surprise me that talking about them is fine here.