Emulators

With all my posts recently about retro gaming, I thought I should talk about emulators. In case you haven't heard the term before, an Emulator is a piece of software that simulates another computer. In our case that other "computer" is a video game console. So it's a computer program that lets you play video games without actually owning the video game console.

Emulators get into a gray area in terms of legality. Whereas the original games are covered by copyrights, I don't think it's illegal to emulate a piece of hardware. Also, many of the software companies that produced these old games are no longer in business, so those games should be public domain now. And finally, if you own the physical cartridge game, playing it on an emulator should be legal as well.

Legal issues aside, Emulators do have a place in retro gaming. They allow you to play games you couldn't play any other way. You can't exactly buy these games anymore, not to mention this hardware is really old and over time finding a working console will become more and more difficult. I do some emulation, but I also do a lot of physical gaming since I own the original consoles and games. If you decide you'd like to try an Emulator might I recommend the following:

FCEUX
FCEUX is an open-source emulator that plays the original Nintendo Entertainment System games. This emulator reproduces the games very faithfully.

Kega Fusion
Kega Fusion is the ultimate Sega emulator. This one emulator can play Sega Master System, Sega Genesis, Sega CD, Sega 32X, Sega Game Gear, and more. This emulator is also rock solid and has perfect sound reproduction.

Snes9x
Snes9x is the best Super Nintendo emulator I've used. I've run into a few problems here and there, but for the most part this emulator is pretty good.

MAME
If you want to play old arcade games, then Mame is the emulator for you. Mame supports several thousand arcade games.

Those are my preferred emulators. I guess I should point out, these are for Windows. If you use Mac or Linux, some of these emulators are cross platform, but you may be forced to try a different emulator. As for the ROMs (the games themselves), I won't post links here. Just use Google, you'll find what you're looking for.