Video games always used to be an economic way of entertainment. With an amount equal to a restaurant dinner you could be entertained for hundreds of hours.

Nowadays, video games follow the trend of enshitification. Low quality, repeated material, bad gaming experience, data hoarding, the need to be always online even for a single player game and of course, the "you don't own, we can take it away anytime we want" mentality.

According to the court rulling, if you essentially want to play retro games, you should find a way to access the original hardware and run the software in mostly proprietary mediums like cartridges that could be damaged or corrupted. And the reason you can't do it is because you may actually have fun!

This ruling is so bongers it blows my mind.

So you should never, ever ever

Use emulators like Retroarch
Find the ROMs of various systems you like in various "archives" through the interwebs for research purposes ofcourse
Use a frontend like ES-DE or launchbox to make things look beautiful.
Scrape content through screenscraper or something similar to make your frontends even more beautiful. 5.Keep in mind that this combo ( Retroarch + frontend) works in mostly cross platform (windows, Linux, android etc.)

After all, as a researcher you have to be able to tinker a little bit.

Enjoy your research ;)