I feel like a lot of people on Neocities are putting too much emphasis on the ILLEGALITY of emulation; like, to the point they're creating crime where none exists: the idea that even TALKING about piracy is illegal. At the very least, they're instilling a sense of fear of breaking the law, and at the worst they're espousing the corporate feudal ideal of thoughtcrime. It depends on how you take it, obviously, but either way it doesn't bode well. I mean, this is Neocities! Where ELSE are we supposed to talk openly and earnestly about piracy??!
One of the things I've always tried to get across in all of my talk about data preservation is the existence of abandonware. This is an area of copyright law where you're pretty much completely safe downloading ROMs and ISOs. You'd be surprised at how much totally mainstream stuff this applies to! Every game ever made for the Nintendo GameCube! The original version of The Sims! Other stuff! Basically, if it isn't sold in stores or available from some DLC service or another, it's abandonware and you can download it without worrying about any sort of repercussions.
A widescale crackdown on emulation like the RIAA witchhunts from the turn of the millennium isn't very likely to happen, because if that fiasco taught the corporate feudal state anything, it's that copyrighted material is on too many computers in too many far flung locations for piracy to be totally stamped out. Nintendo talks a big game about anti-piracy in order to scare people into not going to downloadnintendoshit.eggsalad.rom and downloading their entire roster of NSO+EP games. Their shareholders are not going to accept an expensive plan to stop all emulation everywhere all at once because of the pop-up nature of pirate sites. They simply do not have the time or the money to continually play Whac-a-Mole with emulationists. And, when they DO eventually get 'round to suing someone, it's the operator of the server where that stuff was stored in the first place.
"Oh, but the FBI--" Forget it. When they passed the USA PATRIOT Act, no one really realised just how much data a human being generates in a day. Especially with the advent of social media. The federal spy agencies get literal EXABYTES of data dumped on them every single day, and there's no AI process in existence that can possibly parse through all that information in a timely enough manner to do them any good. They have to pick and choose what they pay attention to, and there are a lot more threatening targets than some rando from the sticks torrenting No-CD cracks of Electronic Arts games.
We all need to get real comfortable REAL FAST with breaking the law, especially in the US, UK, and EU, because a LOT of new crimes are gonna come up in the next few years relating to data and online privacy. If the corporate feudal theocratic complex can convince you that emulation is a serious crime, it won't take much more goading into making you treat privacy as a crime, too. Once they've done this, they've won. If the first step against total destruction of personal privacy is playing Nintendo games on your computer, then WHY ARE YOU RESISTING IT?? Holy shit, why is this still something we need to talk about?
Plus, like, to anyone paying even token attention to the American news, it's becoming increasingly clear that the police decide you're guilty of something and they arrest you and shop around for a judge who's personally attached to whatever they're accusing you of. Then you get the chair. If you're concerned that you'll get added to some police list of potential lawbreakers by discussing pirated Steam games, well, hey, you're already on that list by existing. It doesn't matter if you break the law or not, they'll SOMETHING to pin on you.