It is up to you whether you want to ignore the law, as most of the games are not and will not ever be sold again. Some people say that the copyrights have expired or that you can download it if you delete it after 24 hours, but they are wrong. But remember: Downloading pirated BIOSes/images that you do not own is illegal.

There are many BIOSes/images sites on the Internet, using a search engine should turn up the ones you want. Unfortunately, a lot of people came along who just wanted to download free games and did not care about preservation, and gave the emulation community a bad name among software companies. Now, originally emulation was just for hobbyists who had all this special equipment, but some of them put these BIOSes and images up on the Internet for people to download, on the honor system that people would only download the BIOSes and images that they owned the original software for. These media get transferred into files on the new computer. It is possible to build special cartridge reading devices for console systems and hook up old computers to new ones to transfer floppy disks.

Obviously there is a problem here - how do I get that software into my PC so an emulator can use it? Folding up old 5¼” diskettes so they fit in a 3½” drive will only break your disks. No matter how hard you push, an Atari cartridge just plain won't fit in your computer's floppy drive. In most cases, old software is physically incompatible with modern computers.

Mame 0.137 roms