@RK7 @PurpCat @xianc78 >fully reverse engineered games
Due to copyright law, those are proprietary software and often are illegal to distribute - the source code is no good if you don't have the 4 freedoms; https://www.gnu.org/philosophy/free-sw.en.html#four-freedoms

Free software clones of games written from scratch are good, as they respect the users freedom and often are functionally better than the original.

>older hardware/software typically wasn't really capable of the same sort of spying/telemetry
Yes, older hardware and software didn't have spying, but this was due to technical limitations only - if the internet was more accessible at the time, they would have done what is being done at the moment.

Old hardware and software was full of digital handcuffs, it's just that most of those handcuffs have now been broken or are bypassed.