The Distribution of Emulators with our ROMs

Are there any NES Emulators that are available under licensed to be freely re-distributed with ROMs?

The reason I'm asking is that there are acquaintances I have who I know would be play our game, but are not gamers and do not have prior experience with emulation. Thus, the hurdle of installing a separate program is enough to prevent them from trying it out.

Ideally, I'd like to have the option of a download that includes, for instance, a zip folder with an emulator and our ROM together.

If this has been discussed before, my apologies.

Maybe nester? It's not the most accurate emulator, but it's very easily modified to support the mapper you are using if it doesn't already. I have my own modified version which supports our custom mappers.

http://nester.sourceforge.net/license.html

I really like this idea, an option to download selected free homebrew games at the click of a menu button!

this may be of interest?

viewtopic.php?f=3&t=15373

Most emulators, including fceux?

Might it be a vague remembering of early proprietary freeware emulators that had "Do not distribute this emulator with ROMs" as part of the license, before GPL became the de facto standard?

I think most free emulators have a license that permits redistribution. Usually there is some sort of readme or other document file included with it that explains the terms, but in most cases the terms are no more severe than just keeping the files and licensing documentation intact. Even the stronger GPL license permits this.

Licensing becomes more of a problem when you want to build a custom version of the emulator that only runs your game. GradualGames' GGVm (already linked above) was explicitly made for this purpose, though.

id Software notably packaged DOSBox (GPL license) to release a few of their old games on Steam. They forgot to include the documentation at first, which was a violation of the license, but they corrected this quickly. GoG uses DOSBox for many of its releases too.