[Dastardly]

In this months EDGE magazine an interesting article caught my eye in the 'REDEYE' section.

From EDGE magazine issue 122

.....The videogame industry has a curious relationship with emulation. On the one hand we are always told that ROMs are a bad thing, that they are piracy and that owning them without owning the original cart is a lot like, well, you know, home taping and so on. But Redeye's yet to meet a developer who doesn't appreciate the beauty of XBOX MAME or a games journalist (who cares about games) who hasn't got a massive collection of emulated software somewhere on their writing machines hard drive. Besides, there is an argument for emulation that goes above and beyond the need for entertainment. There is a historical need for them.

.....The path that the videogame is taking is continually branching, and at present, that path is only being archived by amateurs, by the underground, and our reward to them is potential prosection. We can curse the pirates as much as we want, but in 20 years time those perfectly labelled ROMs will be the only coherant record we have of what weve been doing.

I thought this was a very good article and although it talks about ROMS rather than ADFs, the points made are equally valid.

Why do we collect these games? Is it for personal reasons or to stop them disappearing forever?