Ouya Tries To Dispel Fears That The Console's Nintendo Emulators Will Promote Piracy

March 26th, 2013, 00:50 Posted By: wraggster

Yesterday on the unofficial Ouya console forums, forum administrator Ed Krassenstein announced that several emulators will officially be available on or near the launch (March 28) of the Android-based console. The additions of said emulators to the upcoming console have been in discussion since as early as July of last year (here, here and here). When released, these emulators can technically run classic Nintendo titles.



Wait, rewind. Is that something the creators of the moddable console can do? There's some legal grey area here. The hope, I imagine, is that Ouya owners will be able to play SNES, NES, N64 and other older Nintendo titles (like potentially N-Gage games, according to the forum and this tweet) through legal means, aka the proper IP licensing, or that they can play homebrew games made for those platforms.
This isn't necessarily new, as we've seen the Google Android store flooded with all sorts of emulators. But to have a representative of a rival console promote emulators for Nintendo's tech—the kind of emulators that traditionally are associated with piracy as much as they might be with homebrew—is strange.
When I reached out to an Ouya representative to figure out exactly what the boundaries and legality of these emulators are, they had this to say:

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