The U.S. Copyright Office denied an exemption from the DMCA to allow gaming historians to access out-of-print games they can’t legally get anywhere else.
Complete bullshit. Waste energy and make your own archives then I guess.
Honestly just use an emulator and download the roms. It’s the best way to play anything and if you are tech savvy enough you can actually get a custom handheld device that just runs emulators.
There is something to be said for experiencing the game on its intended hardware. Compare seeing the Mona Lisa to seeing a photo of the Mona Lisa. The image is the same, and for most people, that’s enough. However, there are some minor details you can only get from the real deal.
However, that doesn’t mean that piracy is off the table, just a bit more challenging. Most retro consoles have either an everdrive type cartridge available, or an optical disc emulator that will let you run ROMs on the original hardware with a minor modification to the console. Get one of those and a good quality CRT TV and you’re off to the races.
If you want a solution thats a bit more multi-purpose, then I recommend looking into the MiSTer project, which uses an FPGA to emulate the system at a cycle-accurate chip level, rather than software to read ROMs natively on generic computer hardware.
Mona Lisa is, alas, a terrible example. It’s a (small) painting famous for its very finely blended brush strokes, and yet it’s behind two layers of protective glass, a barrier about five metres away, and there’s generally about ten thousand tourists queuing up to see it. It’s something you go to have seen, rather than to see.
Unless you wanted an example of a retro game that you play to have said you’ve played it, not too actually play, in which case it’s a superb example. Plenty of games that were legendary at the time but who’s gameplay doesn’t hold up any more.
The Louvre has some massive rooms full of Raphael masterpieces and Gericault’s “Raft of the Medusa” just down from the Lisa - those are well worth seeing in the flesh, big pictures that reproduction doesn’t do justice to.