Is emulation/ downloading ROMs ethical?

in agreement w/ all your above reasoning and you didn't even have to get into archiving/preservation, modding (in many of the flavours it comes in), and graphical or optimization improvements beyond the scope of the original hardware

in a lotta cases where games r just no longer produced or widely sold i cant see a reason not to emulate or pirate games. even in games that r still produced if you want to avoid supporting a shitty publisher/developer i dont see much of an issue. personally havent figured out emulation jus yet but its important for a lot of digital preservation rn

i'm of the same mind as people who want to conserve these games. with new formats coming in and going out, there are a lot of gems that get lost to time. and idk, i'd like future generations to be able to experience the things we grew up with. what people now are growing up with. it's a nice little peek into the past.

for a lot of these games, there's probably no "legal" way to experience them, especially for games from the nes, genesis, and arcade games like polybius (ok maybe not that one). unless there are official ways to play these games, i think emulation is fine.

I thinks it's ethical when the system and it's game are discontiuned and no longer supportted since what your doing isn't gonna hurt the console makers or developers wallets

im really not too concerned with the legality, for one it allows me to play old games, second I don't have access to a console at the moment. Also after what Nintendo is been doing to modders, or anyone who talks about their game (plus basically trapped some dude into debt for the rest of his life) I think pirating their games is always morally correct

of course! preserving old games is incredibly important. if anything, companies like nintendo trying to get rid of any type of game preservation are morally wrong. 

i totally agree with your points! i think if there's no more support on a console, especially no digital game shop, then it's free real estate for emulation and modding. sometimes older games just run better on modern hardware anyway. 

Is nintendo really losing money if you download a rom of f zero gx or kirby airride (they dont sell these games anymore)

In my case I started in emulation without even knowing it since they used to sell CDs with several games that were emulated, but thanks to that I could know many games that I didn't know their existence because video games were not something that you could find or see easily. Even now I don't even know where I could get a physical game in my country
Emulation mainly I've used it to play retro or obscure video games, I've even been able to play old PC games that I thought I would never be able to play again. There's also the fact that some games have been getting translation patches over time so I also end up using emulation, mainly because I wouldn't know how to be able to make them accessible to the corresponding console and secondly because I don't own any consoles The only one I've come to own, which I shared with my sister and cousin, was a famicom knockoff if I'm not mistaken.
Although I've also come to use emulation to see if a certain game I would like enough to buy its PC version or if I had the possibility to get the console buy it original.
But generally I use emulation for quite old games and some more modern ones.
(Use translator because I'm green with written English )