I think ROM sites were an artifact of the internet speeds we had access to early on. Where it wasn't practical to just download an entire library for an older console. Downloading an N64 ROM over dialup still took a little longer than an mp3, whole collections of them were out of the question. Even early broadband in many areas was limited to speeds where a single ROM was more practical to download.

Complete ROM collections were, and probably still are, available for most old systems as torrents and on usenet.

Downloading entire ROM collections quickly becomes too much data for local storage, starting with Saturn/PS1 and escalating from there.

Nah, you just need to scale up your storage expectation; I think 8TB will cover most of a PS1 localization.

Sony Playstation NTSC-U dump is only 472GB.

Oh, and they're available on Archive.org :)

https://archive.org/search?query=Sony+PlayStation+-+%28NTSC-...

Maybe it was PS2 localization, but those quantities are well within the consumer reach to maintain archives.

It's just work, like anything else.

You don't need to do this. I bought a 1TB sd card because I heard that was enough space to store every retro game up to n64. I ended up copying over a small hand-picked selection of games rather than the full romset. We need some people to keep copies of the full romsets for the sake of preservation, but typical users only want certain, popular games.

Plenty of large rom sites are still very actively used and trafficked today.

Downloading N64 roms as ZIP files was not a daunting task. PSX ISOs, OTOH... those were badly ripped.

But most of the time you would just get Tony Hawk 2/3, the Zelda's, Mario 64, Jet Force Gemini, FIFA's, Wave Race and a few more in less than a week and the fun lasted months if not years.

ROM sites are different in that they are distributing the copywrited media

The only 'emulator' cases I've seen be successful are due to the same, they didn't get in trouble for the emulator, they got in trouble for distributing ROMs. I wonder if there's some firmware code being distributed here? that's a common annoyance when it comes to using an emulator.

AFAIK yuzu requires you provide your own firmware dump, so no redistribution happening

not true, just grab a copy of firmware files online and be gtg.

its just yuzus docs thats written in such a way, most likely to avoid nintendo suing them…

By "online" do you mean a random ROM website, or any Yuzu provided/hosted/whatever page? I.E. are they linked to such firmware and key redistribution? I was under the impression there was no affiliation, but I may be wrong there.

By affiliation I mean something like hosted on the same server but officially unlinked, not obvious affiliations. If a core maintainer redistributing them on their personal website.

i mean a random website, can be found with google

ROM sites are actually illegally distributing copyrighted content.

Emulators are usually not stolen and are just reverse engineered.

Modern consoles and arcades have anti-circumvention measures to restrict access to their internals. Software that bypasses such protections runs afoul of the DMCA even without any copyright violation.

Those sites are not illegal in all countries.

Sony also sued Connectix and lost. Sony purchased the rights to the emulator made by Connectix a year or so later. Connectix shut down 2 years after they sold the VGS to Sony but it isn't clear their fate was negatively impacted by Sony.

This move by Nintendo is typical and there is no intent for it to ever actually go to court. It is legal bullying/posturing. The ironic/hopeful part is that team behind Yuzu does have some financial backing and this is going to create goodwill for them and they might actually be able to put up a defense (perhaps with the EFF getting involved maybe?)