Emulators on the other hand are purpose build to circumvent anti piracy measures (which is illegal even for your own use), even if piracy may not be their primary intention.

[–] Viking_Hippie@lemmy.world 10 points 9 months ago* (last edited 9 months ago)

Emulators on the other hand are purpose build to circumvent anti piracy measures

No, emulators are purpose built to allow you to play a game on another platform. That's literally what they're for.

Whether the game is legally purchased, pirated, shareware or abandonware is completely irrelevant to the purpose and function of an emulator.

Personally I have used emulators to play old Commodore 64/Amiga games from my childhood, ditto DOS games and one of the old Pokémon games to see what the fuss was about.

None of those games were available for purchase anywhere aka it was all abandonware and not piracy. I do my piracy with torrents of games meant for the PC like most people.

Btw, as someone pointed out elsewhere on this post, there's another good reason to use an emulator even for games available to purchase for the intended system: expensive peripherals that break and can't be fixed. Unlike some vastly superior ones made for playing on the PC.