Very cool. I have to wonder if they've ever been contacted by Nintendo over this though - many recent-ish games have been in a playable state for several years now and you'd think functional Wii emulation attract negative attention.
They have certainly noticed, but likely won't do anything about it. IANAL but I am not even sure if emulation of this kind can be considered illegal. And if I were in their shoes I would much prefer a group of random people create a playable open source emulator of my old hardware. If they ever decide to leave the hardware business it makes going down that path themselves much easier.
As long as you are doing black-box reverse engineering. If you tried to disassemble the gamecube or wii software, then you likely are breaking the law.
A similar situation comes up with Gnash, the GNU adaptation of flash. They require developers to have never installed flash, which requires signing the EULA, which includes a clause about reverse-engineering the program.
Disassembly is actually explicitly legalized for the purposes of reverse-engineering. It's just distributing any software that circumvents copy protections that's illegal, whether it's the result of a disassembly or not.
People avoid disassembly in clean-room implementations out of an abundance of caution. If it's evident that the logic was ripped from disassembled executables, you'll have a harder time defending against patent claims or frivolous copyright claims.
