Many of them own the actual game, even if they don't literally dump it themselves. I wouldn't call that piracy.

I have physical copies of the games I play in Ryujinx, and don’t dump the ROMs myself. I suspect I’m in the minority however.

I agree with you. However, now that you bring it up, I wonder what the law says? My guess is it's technically still not legal, at least in the US. :(

It is 100% legal in the USA to use an emulator to run ROMs you dumped from legally purchased games.

I believe GP was talking about downloading a rom which someone else dumped, but which I myself did not dump from my copy.

Emulator users are generally only pirates because they cannot just buy the software and dumping carts is costly due to proprietary formats. There is tons of evidence that most piracy is due to unavailability.

I would 100% pay $70 to buy Zelda that just runs on PC at 4K...but nope, gotta have it at 720P @ 28FPS.

Modchips are available for every switch console now, and the early ones can be softmodded pretty easily.

It's a bit hit or miss on other consoles, but it's often pretty straightforward to dump your own games. IMO, it's kind of dumb to make people "do a little dance and magical incantation" to make what they're doing "more legal" especially when there's little case law about it.

Also, everything on the switch is ID-tagged. If nintendo wants to, they can ban carts, consoles, controllers, accounts, and more for arbitrary reasons.

Messing with modchips is a lot harder than simply visiting a rom site.