Viruses

[HighwaytoHell13]

I appriciate your site and how it provides emulators for those of us who own game systems, but want a whole lot more out of it. But the problem is most of the things on this site arent tested, and allows viruses to enter when we download certain emulators. The two that I have experienced were the Jnes, and Kawaks Arcade. The others, Nestopia, Snesx9, Project 64, Visual Boy Advanced, they all work great. Try to fix these links/downloads and make sure they are safe.

[FatTrucker]

They are safe.

A lot of Anti-Virus software picks up virus-like heuristics from certain emulation applications and reports them as a potential virus or trojan.

[Lefteris_D]

The truth is some antivirus software may detect some emulators unsafe even if they are good. Can you let us know of the antivirus software you use?

[Zach]

More to the point, when this happens contact the author of the emulator and tell them about it, tell them what program and version number of the program you used to scan, so they can test it themselves and report any false positives to the anti-virus companies..

I know many people trust AV blindly, or take results at face value. But the fact of the matter is a lot of Virus definitions are blind cast nets, covering a wide array of code that can be potentially dangerous.. Some have even go so far as to accuse companies of conducting cyber-warfare on programs often used in illegal activities (emulators, CD-ROM emulators like Daemon-Tools, etc) just to scare people out of using them, or gain a competitive edge over some other form of software they compete against.

Since viruses assimilate and mutate code all the time, or just down to the natural process of things, legitimate programs and viruses can often share identical sections of code.. It doesn't necesarrily mean that code is malicious in nature, but more how it is being utilized..

We get these kind of reports every once in a while from people claiming our downloads gave them viruses, but truth of the matter is we've never had a major en-masse "infection" incident with people coming in large numbers claiming we did something, or that their PC's died because of us etc..

All in all as long as you get your emulators from a reputable and trusted, long established source (such as The Emulator Zone) you shouldn't worry too much about AV programs.. The Urban Legend that Emulators are illegal viruses that will screw up our PC's doesn't help in these situations either as the first thing they assume is someone did something evil to them.