Of ROMs and Emulators Part 1

There has been a lot of debate in various communities about the validity and legality of ROMs which are the “images” of a game captured from the microchips on the cartridges or disks that contains them (for the techies out there I know this is a gross simplification, however I’m attempting to make this understandable to everyone).   First you need to understand that the typical set up for a ROM is the following:  A computer running at least twice as fast as the system its emulating, an emulator program, and the ROM.   The question that we are looking at however isn’t the legality of having the information since you have that on any cartridge that you own as I’ll explain.  Instead the issue breaks down in to a few different parts relating to the entire system (emulator program and ROM) as a whole.