Guys, let's cool down a bit. Like I said, feel free to share your opinions of piracy (regardless of what they are), but let's try to refrain from insulting each other or calling each other twats and the like. You can still say piracy is a terrible thing and say there's no excuse if you wish, without resorting to name-calling.
are you even putting off try-before-you-buy?
Who, me? Honestly, I'm not sure at this point. For the past month, I haven't pirated really, mostly since I've had so many legitimate games to play. Also, I got tired of dealing with piracy. I'm tired of dealing with update patches and battery drain on the SuperCard DSTwo, And I'm tired of the incompatibilities and slowdown of using emulators for legacy consoles and handhelds. And though there's no real "disadvantage" to pirating WiiWare and VC for the Wii, if I'm going to cut the rest of my piracy, might as well cut that too and stay clean, on principle. You know what I mean?
Anyway, I'm definitely not pirating DS or WiiWare anymore (the only current-gen games that I really ever pirated), but I'm not sure about legacy consoles. On one hand, I don't see how I'm hurting anyone if the original company isn't making money since they're not selling them anymore. That said, companies like Nintendo do sell many games as virtual console, which I never owned even in their original form. I'm thinking that my personal rule will be that if I own at least one "license" to a game, then I'm fine with emulating it on other mediums. Id est, if I own a copy of Super Metroid for either the SNES or Wii VC, then I see no problem with emulating it for free on PC or smartphone (assuming that I'm being honest and only keeping the legitimate copy to myself).
Lately I've actually started buying DS games and NES and GB favorites on the 3DS eShop. It's nice to have the stability of a Nintendo-licensed emulator along with some of the benefits of unlicensed ones, like save states. And those save states are limited, so you're less tempted to cheat (another thing I disliked with pirating). And in all honesty, it just feels GOOD to know that I have the games legally.
As for your question about try-before-you-buy... well, yeah, sure. I'm going to start a retro collection of NES and SNES games, and I'll definitely be testing games out via emulator for about 20 minutes to see if I really like them (especially since SNES games can be so expensive!). Same with DS games and WiiWare. But that's about it.