I don’t think emulation is going anywhere. Well, it may become more illegal than it already is, but that’s not going to stop many people from continuing. We are already too good at file/software sharing and preservation.
The ‘legal’ part of emulation (with precedent) is the development of emulator software through reverse engineering a console system. The angle Nintendo+co is most likely to attack is that emulator software allows users to circumvent first-party security restrictions that are meant to make games run only on authorized hardware, thus violating the DMCA.
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