Must be nice for some people to legally hide behind words.
"Yes, your honor. We did build this thing that some may define as a bomb capable of destroying the entire planet, but our intention was just to build a big power source. We are very much against illegal use."
If society wants to prosecute people for making emulators without any infringing content in them, then they need to make laws to make it illegal. You can't hold people accountable to laws that don't exist, especially when laws are amazingly over-reaching as it is
I'm not sure we can draw a fair analogy between the nuclear arms race and software piracy. Not unless we're starting from a premise that every law is equally just and righteous.
Cui bono in Nintendo having the right to tell the world that nobody is allowed to build machines that interoperate with theirs, even after they've sold their machine?
Yet, many feel that they should be permitted to take hardware the purchased and tinker with it legally. If I were to write some code that allowed me to interact with a cartridge that I bought, why shouldn't I be able to share that code with others that might also wish to tinker with their cartridges in the same manner?
If you make emulation of hardware that doesn't infringe on copyright illegal, you stamp out a lot of legal and useful tinkering.
It seems misleading to imply that you NEED to dump them from a real device? Can't you just provide the files found on the internet?