alt Hacker NewsI wonder is there any way to use this or rather get games to play on the emulator legally????
It really is the only thing that keeps me from them. I’d pay to play quality retro games. Heck it would almost be educational for my kids.
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The most legitimate method would be to buy a physical cartridge and dump it with a cartridge dumper. You'll probably need to clean the pins with isopropyl alcohol and sometimes also a fiberglass pen to get them to read reliably.
I don't have a specific cart dumper to recommend from experience, I have dumped GB/GBC/GBA games but not SNES. A quick search found some options, though.
https://github.com/X-death25/SNES_Dumper
https://stoneagegamer.com/retrode-2.html
Also found some discussion here recommending the Sanni Cart Reader, but it's a 5 year old thread so there are likely cheaper or better options.
https://www.reddit.com/r/Roms/comments/obrxg3/best_nessnesn6...
That being said, I do not think there is really an ethical problem with grabbing someone else's cart dumps, whether you have a cart of your own or not, and legally I would be very surprised if you had any issues in the US at least. The coolest part about cart dumpers to me is for carts with save files, you can "rescue" them from the hardware and preserve your progress. In some cases the save relies on a battery that could go dead at any time.
If you do end up collecting physical cartridges, I would also encourage you to get the actual console, and explore mods for it, get the best video signal out of it you can (RGB or component rather than composite). Playing on real hardware is cool. I'd also recommend getting a flashcart even if you do collect original cartridges, so you can try out homebrew, romhacks, fan translations, and ports. There's a guy who has been porting NES games to SNES.
Search archive.org. All old games are archived. Since the games are no longer selling, imo this is fair.
just get the roms online
"Don't copy that floppy!"
Nobody cares when you play abandondend games from the 1980s and 1990s downloaded from a shady ROM dump site. At the worst Nintendo will go after the emulator project itself.
If you're really concerned about legality, then I guess homebrew games do exist for the console:
https://itch.io/c/1537684/snes-homebrew
https://www.reddit.com/r/snes/comments/j6gguc/what_are_some_...
Most of those are distributed as .smc/sfc files that can be run in emulators like this.
But in 2026, it's probably not worth getting too bothered by the idea of downloading ROMs for a 20+ year old console.