It surprises me the number of people who thought they could make money selling emulators, in what is and has always been almost exclusively dedicated to piracy.
Your comment is completely wrong. There is a cottage industry of emulation developers funding their development through Patreon. There is a huge number of emulation enthusiasts who are adults with high levels of disposable income willing to fund the development of emulators they enjoy using. Some of the larger emulators get tens thousands of dollars per month on Patreon.
They are not completely wrong. Crowdfunding a product is not the same as purchasing that product because often people only decide to donate because the resulting product is free. (For example, I give $5 a month to Lichess, but I am unwilling to pay for a Chess.com subscription.)
I can understand why one would want to donate if you find the product useful, but donating because it’s free doesn’t make any sense to me. Could you elaborate?
Lichess is not for profit, so donating to Lichess means that my dollar goes "farther" for infrastructure & helps subsidize the website (which has many features) for other people who may not be able to pay. The main developer only pays themselves $56k a year, when they could easily be making $300k+ in the valley.
Chess.com is for profit, so they have to maintain some profit margin and lock features behind paywalls to incentivize people to pay. The free experience is worse than Lichess.
I never had the PC version of Bleem, but I can confirm that a burned copy of Metal Gear Solid worked for the Bleemcast port of it.
My parents wouldn't let me buy M-rated games, so the easiest way for me to play MGS was on my Dreamcast with a copy of Bleemcast that I found used at Gamestop for four dollars with a pirated copy of the game.
I'm afraid I don't recall. I feel like it probably did if it was possible, as a defense against being called a piracy tool, but I'm not sure if there was any way for a consumer CDROM to check for the wobble groove. I owned a PlayStation and official games so I only recall using those.
P.S.: Some googling suggests that it played "backups" just fine.
They don't offer emulated games as standalone purchases anymore (and, frankly, the idea that they charged repeatedly for games is insane to me) -- instead, now it's tied to the Switch Online subscription service.
> and, frankly, the idea that they charged repeatedly for games is insane to me
I've been curious whether Switch libraries will follow you to whatever the next Nintendo console is. They haven't done that in the past, but online purchases might be so common now that they can no longer get away with not doing it.
My old boss used to be a game dev, and many people at is company used an unofficial DS emulator (I believe No$GBA but could be wrong) quite extensively for debugging/development purposes.
They even paid the developer several thousand dollars so that they would improve the debugger function.
This was all unofficial, of course - Nintendo had no idea and would not have been happy if they found out.
