Losing the EmuParadise

Nintendo's attitudes towards emulation has always been something they have frowned upon. In the last month, they ordered a 100 million dollar lawsuit that saw two sites shut down. While EmuParadise was not in that suit, it shut down itself to avoid any issues. These attitudes from the Japanese offices are not going to help them.

While I understand they are within their rights to stop emulation and ROMs, Nintendo has done nothing. So far with the Switch, it has produced no classic games from their library of consoles. Sure, there's Donkey Kong, but that's the arcade game and Arcade Archives footing the bill. As far as EmuParadise goes, people have lost more than just the Nintendo stuff. It means losing every Sega system. PlayStation brands up to PSP. Basically, anything between the Atari 2600 up to PSP. Not only are those lost, but so are Arcade ROMs and DOS games, which is a major blow.

I target Arcade and DOS for a reason. The former, there aren't many arcades in the United States. Not to mention machines may not be well maintained. No one is going to fork over a lot of money just to get a board of OutRun or Final Fight. Regarding the latter, there are a lot of games that don't see the light of day on modern systems. The same can be said for consoles, but for computers, not every title is going to make it to GOG or Steam. Also, not everybody uses Virtual Machine or whatever they can do to use an older operating system.

Consoles don't have it bad, and I don't think it's a huge blow. That being said, I do think a word of caution is needed. One thing that helped EmuParadise was that it wasn't a torrent site and it didn't give you viruses or malware. It's going to be tough because what sites are you going to trust. Much like the DOS stuff, there are plenty of games that don't make it to modern systems. In that regard as well, there are also Japanese and European games that may intrigue people. With emulation, it exposes them to a bigger (or smaller) library that fit with a certain part of the world.

I'm not against emulation as I do think it's important. I do understand Nintendo's frustration, but to milk the same NES and SNES games for the fifth or so time, what's the purpose? I could understand GBA and up, but for 8 and 16, maybe 64 bit era games?  The Japan offices of this company are out of touch with understanding fans and doing things. It's a losing battle. Emulation may have been given a big blow recently, but there will still be plenty of sites to find ROMs and ISOs.