Emulators with bundled ROMs, possibly.

Most people aren't skilled enough to build one.

How many PC drive firmwares work with Friidump?

For one thing, not a lot of parents have the money to keep a gaming PC for each household member and visitor, including the children and an occasional classmate, up to date. For another thing, few LAN games support spawn installation nowadays.

As I understand your post, "native" means "using one of the GUI toolkits included with the operating system distribution". In that case, KDE apps aren't "native" on Ubuntu, no full screen game is "native", and Microsoft Office 2007 isn't "native" either.

Dumping as a service is illegal in the United States. See UMG v. MP3.com.

When I heard the name, my first thought was that there'd be a Black Ops and a White Ops, just as Pokemon is getting a Black Version and a White Version. But I haven't had a chance to post about this yet.

How are the widgets in QuickTime and iTunes not native? Are they written in Java bytecode or something? Are they PowerPC, and run under the equivalent of Rosetta?

But is it really much different from the United States' ban on private competition to USPS First Class Mail?

If I were building and installing home theater PCs for customers, then my lawyer would probably strongly advise me not to take such an attitude. There's a conception that PC gaming is either single player, online, or illegal, and I don't understand why it has to be this way.

It won't scale. The majority of gamers probably don't know what a "microcontroller" or a "resistor" is. Many think "transistor" means "battery powered", as it did with the first transistor radio receivers. And it can often be a female dog to find the right female connector to take a cartridge's edge connector, especially for the NES's non-standard 98.4 mil (2.50 mm) pin spacing.

Native games run more efficiently on low-end hardware, such as the netbook that you hooked up to the HDTV, or low-end nettops built and marketed more for H.264 playback than for real-time gaming. True, the 2D consoles are emulated "well enough" on netbooks, but a game with direct access to the system's 3D API (even if it's on Intel's Graphics My A* GPU) can offer far more sophisticated graphics and physics than a game made for a 1990 console and will therefore be more desirable to certain segments of the market. It's like the difference between a Wii by Nintendo and a Vii by KenSingTon.

If the copyright owner provides ROM dumping with a bundled emulator as a service, it's a "classics compilation", like Namco Museum or Midway Arcade Treasures. But not all games are available this way, such as Mother series. Even those that are are often single-console exclusives, such as Nintendo's releases of its own past games in Virtual Console in Wii Shop Channel, or multi-console releases excluding the PC. If anyone else does it, it's copyright infringement. UMG v. MP3.com.

How do you dump your Atari 2600 cartridges and Wii discs to make ROM files for the emulator?

But once you get someone on Luigi, Yvan, and Wolley, you end up with twenty-four buttons. Boop, boop, boop. It's uncommon to see a PC platformer designed for two to four USB gamepads; platformers are "for consoles." And it's even more rare to see a game designed for multiple keyboards or multiple mice connected to one home theater PC; the Raw Input API is too obscure.

The USB hub in question is self-powered (that is, it plugs into wall power through an AC adapter), and various DirectInput test programs read all gamepads fine. An emulator running a homebrew game also reads all gamepads fine. And it continues to work even when I yank the AC adapter and make it bus-powered. It's just that far too many native PC games have deficient implementations of multiplayer, allowing only one player per PC.

Say a car is expected to have a 15 year service life, and a bus pass costs $45 per month (source: fwcitilink.com). This means taking the bus for the life of a car might cost $8100, which in theory is cheaper than buying a new car + registration + fuel + oil changes + insurance. But people who own a car cite a few advantages:

• City buses have next to no cargo space.
• No fifteen minute walks to and from a bus stop, possibly carrying all your groceries or other cargo, possibly across busy highways.
• No hour waits for a bus in the weather.
• Buses don't run at night, on Saturday evenings, on Sundays or any of seven annual holidays (New Year's Day, Memorial Day, Independence Day, Parade Day, Labor Day, Thanksgiving, Christmas). They don't run on Saturdays at all in some parts of town (source: fwcitilink.com). The taxi fare for that day can add up close to the bus fare for the whole rest of the week.

Then so is professional sports.