Filed under: Analysis / Opinion , Gaming , Odds and ends , Freeware , Open Source , Apple , iPhone , App Store , iPod touch Gizmodo recently posted this video , which is beautiful to any PSX-era gamers: it’s Final Fantasy VII running right on the iPhone, like buttah thanks to the 3GS hardware. How is this possible? Through the magic of emulation — ever since computers got powerful enough to pretend to be other computers, people have resurrected old consoles and hardware by writing code that makes old games and software think its right at home in the computer it belongs in (an old NES system, a Genesis, or even a Playstation or Nintendo 64). As a result, by loading up ROMs into an emulator program , you can play old games you can’t find (at least working) in the store any more. But the problem, as it usually does, lies in the legality. Even though those games are hard to find, companies still often own the copyrights on them (Square, for example, just released FFVII in an official emulator on the PSP , and they wouldn’t be very happy with someone else releasing it on the iPhone).

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The question of emulators