I've written an emulator for the NES that I would like to post on itch.io with web and downloadable functionality. For the downloadable one, you would have to upload your own ROMS, and I'm not worried about. However, on the web version I would like to have a couple of ROMs preloaded so they can try it out. I own these ROMs and the games they correlate to, but I was wondering if that would even be allowed on the site.
Thanks in advance!!
Before you read this, keep in mind I’m not a lawyer.
To my understanding, you wouldn’t be allowed to do that. It’s not enough for you to own copies of the roms, each person that plays them should own a copy too, which you can’t enforce.
Unless of course you manage to find roms that are under a license that allows you to do that. I haven’t looked around a lot, but I bet there’s some open-source NES games out there, begging for any kind of attention, maybe you can see if some of them would allow you to do what you are trying to do?
Not all open-source licenses would allow you to do that, when in doubt, you can contact the developer of each project.
Hope that helps!
