Hypothetical question related to sale of Dolphin and license

[hooby3d]

I have been thinking about this topic and wanted to get ideas:

-Dolphin is licensed under GPLv2+
-This license encourages redistribution of software with or without a fee as long as the code and license are available

There is a wave of 'retro' embedded emulation gaming systems coming out now, and inevitably cheap hardware in the near future will be fast enough to run Dolphin well.

1. If a system is sold that contains Dolphin offering HD GameCube/Wii gameplay that abides by the GPL, how does that sit with developers?

2. What, if anything, would be an appropriate way of repaying the developers for their work which enabled this?

3. What, if anything (other than respect), could stop this from happening if it was undesirable?

*For the purpose of these questions, assume the system can read GameCube and Wii discs in addition to being able to play backups. Also assume that Nintendo doesn't step in.

[mstreurman]

I thought about this too, but the issue is that you can buy a wii/wiiU to play any of these games. I wanted to do this too, build machines that run emulated games. It is just NOT allowed except maybe in china or somewhere there is no real copyright laws and you need a very specific DVD/GC drive to make them to run original discs... these things are very expensive. Best thing you can do is contact Nintendo and see if they will allow it (my guess: NOPE)

I did quite some research on the American, Dutch, Hungarian and South-African laws about this and you can get arrested, fined and or jailtime.

Also: you are not allowed to distribute any games/roms without consent of all the owners. So you would actually be building "normal" computers with dolphin (or whatever other emulator) pre-installed and configured.

[JosJuice]

1. If a system is sold that contains Dolphin offering HD GameCube/Wii gameplay that abides by the GPL, how does that sit with developers?

Sounds fine to me, but I can't speak for the others.

2. What, if anything, would be an appropriate way of repaying the developers for their work which enabled this?

Complying with the GPL. I'm fine with not getting anything beyond that, though if they make any improvements to the emulator, it would be nice if they tried to upstream it.