The idea of simply mounting a filesystem and selecting from a list of titles which roms to download and add to your local games, unloading them and transparently re-downloading when you need to free up space, all without relying on a centralized host even for the file index, is pretty appealing. You can do similar things with torrents but it's not quite as "natural".
Most of the emulator frontends I've seen are pretty against integrating this kind of ease-of-piracy stuff, though, accepting recognizing and filling in metadata for well-known roms, but not making it easy to integrate with remote libraries of roms... except tools that run on "hacked" consoles, which seem to love just giving you a list of games with a "tap A/X to pirate" UI.
You can use fuse-btfs [0] for mounting torrents as filesystems! Last I checked it was a fairly mature piece of software so hopefully it doesn’t feel unnatural.
It's because that crosses the line of plausibly legal. In theory you could use an emulator with only titles you copied from your own physical copies which is legal. But if they implement a download mechanism it's clearly illegal.
At any rate you can replicate the same thing by just hosting the ROMs on your own cloud storage and using something like macos virtual files which will do this transprent download/delete to manage storage.
Most of the emulator frontends I've seen are pretty against integrating this kind of ease-of-piracy stuff, though, accepting recognizing and filling in metadata for well-known roms, but not making it easy to integrate with remote libraries of roms... except tools that run on "hacked" consoles, which seem to love just giving you a list of games with a "tap A/X to pirate" UI.
You can use fuse-btfs [0] for mounting torrents as filesystems! Last I checked it was a fairly mature piece of software so hopefully it doesn’t feel unnatural.
[0] https://github.com/johang/btfs
At any rate you can replicate the same thing by just hosting the ROMs on your own cloud storage and using something like macos virtual files which will do this transprent download/delete to manage storage.
You can make an archival copy, but it is copyright infringement to use that copy in an emulator.
For newer console generations (decrypted) backups are not legal due to needing DRM circumvention.