> But I agree with you, I'm surprised Steam doesn't have a way to get old ROMs.
Not quite old ROMs, but gog.com sells old computer games prepackaged for Dosbox, which because of that work on Windows, Mac and Linux. That's basically the old PC computer equivalent of what I believe Nintendo does by shipping the emulator with the ROM when you buy it through the Virtual Console so it runs as a whole.
GOG has been earning a lot of my praise recently for not only hosting binaries - but actually putting labour into making sure their games run on modern systems. This is particularly important for games from the era of weird sound cards that can't render audio quite right without a vintage soundblaster - but also goes for games that were simply designed with DOS expectations in place.
Back in the day I was a big fan of an SSI game called Imperialism - this game pretty much refuses to run on modern software - it needs DOSBox to run smoothly and even then it does custom cursor stuff that tends to screw up very obviously on modern systems - the GOG version of the game runs smooth like butter.
Why would I ever pirate a copy of Imperialism and spend a day actually getting it set up to run sorta decently on my machine - when I can grab it off GOG for 1.89 CAD? A day of my time, even an hour of my time (even my leisure time), runs well above 2$ at this point - the convenience is there so pirating becomes a bad value proposition.
IANAL, but yes. If you don't copy something, copyright is not invoked.
In many jurisdictions (AU, UK), it would be legal to copy them to another device you own, such as a hacked PSP, under the "format shifting" exemptions.
Those games are an interesting case: it’s very likely Activision or Warner owns the rights for them, but since ownership could be in the hands of at least one other party and the games themselves aren’t popular nowadays, it isn’t financially worth it for them to do the work to verify it, even though people have tried to work with them in the past.
The Sega Genesis games they sell are basically just ROMs. You can go into the folders where they are installed and grab them to use in a different emulator.
But I agree with you, I'm surprised Steam doesn't have a way to get old ROMs.