Is it legal to download ROMs 4 unofficial games?

ROMs are a touchy subject. I know that downloading ROMs is generally considered wrong. However, does that apply only to games officially released? Does the law also extend to Chinese bootlegs? For the most part, I pretty much swore off High rating games, but there's this one pirated game I'm somewhat interested in. Since it's this is not an official game and it was released by a Chinese bootleggers, downloading something like this would not seem to be very damaging. At the same time, I want to ask around just to be sure before I do anything.

Oh yeah, let's assume we are talking about a completely original game. By there I mean a game made from scratch as opposed to a hack or a translation of a game that was officially released. The game can still be a pirated game based off an existing franchise like Mario or Pokemon, but it is not a hack or translation of any game that already exists.

Not very damaging, maybe. Illegal, yes, technically; why even ask this? Of course downloading bootlegged anything is going to be technically illegal.

Whether or not the entity owning the rights to said medium possesses the means to prosecute you or even exists anymore (bear in mind even if they don't a new company can always purchase and pick up the rights and rerelease it, it's been happening a lot lately with popular abandonware) is another story entirely, however straying into that discussion is a clear violation of this forums rules.

Tl;Dr: all that you can really get from this discussion without breaking the forum rules is the answer: yes, it's illegal.

[mod]We don't condone nor discuss about piracy here, so I'm closing this thread.[/mod]