Faster emulation?

[PSmonkey]

Roms are illegal regardless of whether you own the game or not; those disclaimers you see at the top of rom sites saying that ownership makes it legal are just to keep you coming back. That being said, you would probably never get caught, and pirating a game you already own isn't exactly something anyone's going to care about.

The thing is, using that line of logic, what's the difference if you're stealing intellectual property or modifying it...both are illegal, and you likely wouldn't get caught doing either. If you've ever been to a rom site, you'd see there are tons of hacks of pretty much every major commercial release, and I don't see Nintendo showing up at their doors with cease-and-desist letters.

You're half correct. Rom sites are illegal. Yet Title 17 of the copyright laws allows you to make a backup of your stuff for archive purpose. If you actualy rip the rom your self from your own cart then you are legal. Yet if you download the rom you are illegal since you are downloading someone else rip of their game. Thus it's not a personal backup.

[MonoLoco]

Ok, I guess you have a point, but AFAIK (I was never a part of the N64 homebrew scene, if it even existed), you need special hardware (that expensive dex drive crap?) to extract the data from an N64 cartridge, right? Chances are most of us have no ability to do that, so any roms we'd have would've been attained illegally.