Bug#95807: ITP: zsnes -- Free Super Nintendo emulator
On Tue, May 01, 2001 at 01:18:01PM -0400, Wolfgang Sourdeau wrote:
> Requiring users to depend on proprietary data is not as bad as
> requiring them to depend on proprietary programs. But it is still a
> bad thing to do.
There are free ROMS for SNES. Have you considered that SNES can be a
fun architecture to write games on? Its hardware is much more capable
than a VESA board. zsnes is actually extremely useful for developing
and testing free SNES roms.
> For what I am concerned, I would prefer seeing free software
> games appear for the GNU system rather than emulators requiring
> proprietary game roms. That is the whole philosophy of free software.
> If you don't accept that, this means you either don't accept it or
> either don't understand it.
Have you heard of assembly language?
ZSNES itself would need to run under an emulator on, say, sparc.
There's no reason why emulators are only useful to run binary-only
software. They are a necessity in development and testing, and run
free software for other platforms (unfortunately not all software is
portable - even zsnes itself only runs on 386).
Philsophical issues of emulators vs. native code can be debated later,
but as per Debian policy I see no reason why emulators shouldn't go in
main, especially if they include sample applications.
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