Emulators- Legal or not?

I decided to clear this up as I have seen a lot of fighting on if emulation is illegal or legal and after long hours of research and contacting law firms I have cleared things up and will talk about them here.

Emulation it turns out IS legal under the case of Sony V Connectix when they copied the Sony Playstation BIOS to reverse engineer the Playstation to make the emulator. The courts decided nothing illegal was going on as long as they did not provide copies of BIOS images or ROM images they could use it. Emulators in themselves are not illegal as they fall under the Fair Usage terms.

ROM Images are legal ONLY if you own the game and its a backup for YOU and ONLY YOU. EX. If you have Zelda Ocarina of Time on the N64 and you want a back up and you get a ROM image of the game IT IS LEGAL. It is a backup of the game for you to have and therefore it falls under the Fair Usage Terms. If you distribute the ROM image around then it becomes illegal.
         
Quoted from multiple sites and 3 different law firms

Section 117 of the US Copyright Law gives the owner of a software package the right to make an additional copy under certain provisions. If you adhere to the provisions then making ROM images is perfectly legal. However, legislation has been passed to prevent software piracy that makes game copying devices illegal. Using such a device to create a ROM image makes the resulting image illegal as well. Also you have to remeber that there is a large amount of freeware / public domain roms that you can download from the internet, and only way to play them is to use emulator or a flash card!

ROM Images only become legal to distribute and such if it is for a discontinued system that manufacturers cannot make money off of and the copyrights for said system and ROM images are lifted due to the company no longer existing OR if the ROM Image is a public domain game or homebrew. EX. Arcade ROMS and Atari 2600 ROMS are legal due to the system being discontinued so no money whatsoever is being made on any part.

Flash Carts such as the R4 ARE legal if they are being used for legal purposes AKA Backups or public domain games and homebrew. They only become illegal if the flash carts are being used to play illegal copies of the games.

Hopefully this cleared up a bit and this blog post is now officially the longest researched post taking 3 weeks of intensive research.