It's unlikely that VGS will injure the PlayStation’s reputation – a bad emulator only makes itself look bad. Promoting sub-standard performance? Unlikely as it might seem, Mr. Sony, crap games have been around for years. Surely the aim of VGS is simply to bring the PlayStation brand into new areas? It’ll be interesting to see how Bleem, a PlayStation emulator for the PC, fares on its release in a few weeks' time.

On the same day that Sony filed their lawsuit, the emulation world was rocked by the release of the UltraHLE emulator. Developed by two programmers in just three months, it enables near-perfect N64 emulation on the PC. Such was the demand for the emulator and illegal ROMs, UltraHLE was withdrawn within hours.

The creators, RealityMan and Epsilon, had intended it only as a technical exercise to advance emulation technology, not as a piracy tool, and condemned the use of illegal ROMs. As far as they are concerned, the project is on indefinite hold and might well be discontinued.

Within two weeks, Nintendo announced they were taking legal action against Reality Man and Epsilon for distributing ‘a product designed solely to play infringing copies of copyrighted works’. Nintendo went on to condemn emulators as a whole for the damage they cause to the games industry.

This too could be an important turning point; in the past it was illegal ROM sites which were targeted, now it’s the people who make the emulators. Whatever the outcome, UltraHLE caused a huge upheaval in the emulation community. And, despite Nintendo’s legal action, the first UltraHLE update was released this week.