The future of emulation is going to make such lawsuits irrelevant once more capable AI are here. That and decentralized emulation projects which I am shocked are not already a thing.
I could see AI being very helpful in the painstaking original target console RE’ing effort. A capable system could make short work in a process that takes years manually
But AI has no actual intelligence of it’s own. It’s not going to magically just figure things out. All it can do is spit back what it has been fed.
AI is the future of everything tech and while today it is stumbling to really deliver on the promise, it is clear that the trend is towards more and more powerful AI. Given that it can code fairly well already and near instantly means someone is likely already using it in their emulator development to help speed things up. I personally use AI for coding daily and over the past year it went from hardly usable to some dang impressive responses on even larger scripts and even multiple interdependent scripts. Still has a ways to go but if this trend continues as is, there is a point in the near future where an AI agent will be able to make you anything with code you desire including an emulator.
From my experience anything beyond hello world and the simplest scripts AI is absolute garbage. Even if what AI makes compiles it will commonly give either the wrong output or is so poorly optimised that it’s easier to start from scratch than try to fix what AI cobbled together.