Comic Strips

To add to what Skull giver said, the current retro market only exists because of the emulators that Nintendo has been fighting for over 25 years. There would be no SNES Mini console without snes9x or zsnes. Neither would there be a Nintendo e-shop for their old games on new consoles. The knowledge base to even make that work would not exist. Archiving old copies of games may not even exist.

Nintendo's position is highly hypocritical. They have benefited from emulation far more than they've been harmed.

Nintendos's (wrong) opinion is that all emulators are piracy. Current emulators are likely violating at least a few piracy laws by including DRM busting keys and such in the software, but this could be resolved quite easily (for some reason everyone is dumping encrypted ROMs so emulators need the keys to decrypt them, but that's just out of convenience for existing emulators).

Maybe in Japan, with its draconian copyright law, they're not even wrong. In the USA they're definitely wrong, emulators are perfectly legal. I don't know about any emulation cases outside the USA, but I believe the result of any emulator lawsuit should end up the same, or even worse.

The "current emulators are illegal because of keys" problem is made even more complicated by the fact that in countries like France the inclusion of keys isn't necessarily a violation. The reason the world can play and rip DVDs is that there's a French guy legally maintaining a DVD decoding library that nearly everyone else reuses.

As for IP laws: this depends per country. In some places, dumping your own games is completely legal, in others you can even legally dump borrowed games, but there are countries where games simply aren't allowed to be ripped or copied even if you bought them with your own money.

Downloading games off the internet is piracy, obviously. It's illegal and everyone knows it. Nobody cares about someone downloading a copy of Wii Sports, though. I don't think anyone thinks the prices Nintendo asks for basic ROMs are remotely fair, but the law is on Nintendo's side here. Buy a game, dump it, resell it, that's the only way to build an affordable collection of old games.

Ethically, I don't think piracy of Nintendo's shit is wrong. They knowingly abuse copyright law to infringe other people's rights (illegal DMCA takedowns on videos showing someone playing a emulated game, for example) so I don't see why anyone should care about their rights.

Luckily, Nintendo's piracy prevention system is generally quite incompetent, so pirating their stuff is quite easy to do.