How to Play Emulators on Your TV, With Boxee

If you’re rocking a home theater PC with Boxee, MakeUseOf has some helpful hints for turning your entertainment rig into a convenient launcher for classic video game emulators. Boxee, if you’re not familiar, is a free program that lets you watch Web video, listen to Internet radio or connect with social networking sites in a TV-friendly interface. Unfortunately, the software lacks any official way to play video games. By downloading Boxee’s Launcher app and taking some time to set up to set up your ROMs, you can get an entire library of Nintendo, Super Nintendo or Sega Genesis games running through Boxee’s list of apps.

Disclaimer time: Running a whole bunch of games that you don’t own is probably illegal, and the legality of even downloading ROMs of games that you do own likely lands on the wrong side of the law, not that anyone’s paying attention. But here’s how MakeUseOf justifies this little trick:

Perhaps someday Boxee will arrange deals with the companies that own the rights to our favorite retro-games, giving us the option to legally purchase games for Boxee. I’d be more than willing to pay for such integration. For now, however, I’ve managed to turn Boxee into a ROM launcher perfect for my needs.

Amen. [MakeUseOf via Lifehacker]