So my sister has a TI-84+SE, would it be legal for me to use the emulator for that calculator? Technically its available for my usage in real life so please leave your opinions below

I would say to wait until you get a professional answer (i.e. not me), but I'm sure it needs to be your calculator.

I'll point out three facts as food for thought:
* the 84+SE OS upgrade can be freely downloaded from TI's site;
* the TI-Z80 community emulators with OS upgrade import support contain a special boot code for emulation, usually known as BootFree;
* people have been emulating the TI-Z80 family's models for more than a decade and a half.


FWIW, having a boot code is superfluous for emulating the TI-68k series, the freely downloadable OS upgrade is enough. Not only superfluous, but downright counter-productive, since booting from the boot code requires a valid dump of the Certificate memory, which none of the standard ROM dumpers obtains. The existing Certificate memory dumper works only on AMS, not on PedroM or Punix OS.

Many among us, especially myself, feel that WabbitEmu is making a big mistake to include that feature. Although they haven't directly addressed it, I have inferred from people that I've spoken to at TI that this sort of emulation is the one that they're most against (not that that's an official line or anything). I believe that rom8x-esque ROM dumping is the sole semi-legitimate way to emulate the z80 calculators. On the other hand, APotato's original question is more linked to the fact that legally-speaking, at least in the US, we interpret the law as saying that you can only emulate devices that you own, and his sister owns the calculator in question. IANAL, but it seems like a grey area: if she can loan you the physical calculator, perhaps she can loan you the ability to emulate it at the same time? I'm not saying that's the case, of course, merely surmising that that might be one possible interpretation.

We agree to disagree here.
IMO, making it more convenient for users to perform usage of freely downloadable content (making the freely downloadable content more valuable to them, in a way) is rarely a mistake


As I recently found, and later saw confirmed in the http://forums.bannister.org/ubbthreads.php?ubb=showflat&Number=94942#Post94942 thread, MESS mandates a pedantically correct boot process, even when it strongly flies in the face of usability for end users: no single ROM dumper will dump all of the Flash memory, including the Certificate area. Enhancing the libticalcs ROM dumper has been a wish list item for a while, but it's very unlikely to ever get fulfilled.

In this day and age, with few TI-68k programmers left (many, many more consumers than producers, that is), such a philosophy, while respectable in its own right (and certainly desirable in some cases), makes MESS pretty much a non-starter for end users aiming at emulating TI-68k calculators. And that's before I mention the incompleteness and bugginess of MESS's TI-68k emulation, as well as its lack of support for e.g. sending files to / retrieving files from MESS the way VTI, TIEmu and the JS TI-68k emulator provide it...

So you believe that giving people the opportunity to enhance the TI software ecosystem is a mistake? Better software can mean more sales. Lets say that a student could not afford a graphing calculator of any sort but their homework for some reason required one. So you feel that is a "mistake" for the kid to get a good grade instead of getting Fs on their homework through no fault of their own. What WabbitEmu is doing is no mistake. It is a wise choice that has benefits many people. Even if this is really illegal what is to happen to the violators? If TI sues them they will lose more money hiring lawyers than they lost from one less calculator sale. Also maybe they write some software that encourages more sales so it evens out in TI's favor or they end up purchasing the calc because they tried it in the emulator first. Also if they did get sued or railed because of it this has the potential to ruin their lives maybe even for the whole entire family.

What Kerm is trying to say is that the legality is not the strongest here. By using BootFree, you are using the TI-8x calculator without TI gaining any money from you using their OS on a system that is patterned directly off of an actual TI calculator. TI has not had the best history of being kind to the hobbyist community (see: TI-Nspire), and no one wants TI to mess with the TI-8x line so that the usage of it is closer to an Nspire.

Just as I got editing my post you added your post. I added a note asking what should happen to the people who violate this. Are the police going to show up at your house. Do you really think anyone is going to find out that you used that feature? Also I pointed out that it will even out in the end as for how much money TI gets. Please take note of that. If this really is illegal it appears as though TI is choosing to make it illegal using harsh copyfright copyright laws that apply only to the United States. Am I correct in saying this?

Don't you still need a ROM to get WabbitEmu to work? IIRC, it only lets you load an OS if it's for the calc you loaded a ROM for and if you try to load a BootFree ROM, it doesn't let you run applications (it shows a BootFree message instead)