Emulation is nothing new and has been around for decades. If you want to learn more about emulation simply read on.

New to emulation?
Emulators are programs that allow you to play outdated video games such as Super Nintendo or Atari on your computer. These games are known as ROMs short for Read-Only-Memory. They are software copies of your Sega Genesis cartridge or your Sony Playstation CD.

To get started, you will first need to decide which system you want to play. Let's pick the old 8-bit Nintendo for example. You will need to head over to the NES Emulators page, and download an emulator for your operating system. One of our old favorites is NESticle. Download this file to your computer, and extract(unzip) all of the programs files. Next, head over to the NES ROMs page and pick out your favorite Nintendo game (that you own). Download that to your NESticle directory.

The rest is pretty simple. Just run the NESticle(or whichever emulator you chose) program, and choose "Load ROM" or "Open ROM" from the File menu. Pick the ROM you wish to play and open it. You are now playing a ROM on your computer! From there you can modify your emulator a bit, and assign different keys to the buttons, setup a controller, or even play online against your friends.

If you are still having trouble getting everything to work, head over to the frequently asked questions pages for more help.

Please note that you must own the original game cartridge or cd and you also must own the system or console you are emulating. These games are not free and are here for educational and backup purposes only. If you do not own any of the games here then go out right now and buy more video games!


Advanced Users
Already mastered emulation? Want to start collecting games? Want to learn some more things that emulation has to offer? Read on.

The first cool thing about emulation is translations. Since certain games were only produced in Japan and not USA, or vice versa, people have actually modified these games to be playable in a different language. So that long lost Mario 2 or Final Fantasy game can now be yours with a simple downloadable translation.

Another nice feature of emulators is the ability to save your spot at unlimited points in the game. If you are tired of having to play through the whole level just to get killed by the boss again, simply save your 'state' right before you fight the boss, and you can instantly reload it and try again. People have even saved very important spots in popular games, and distributed them to the emulation community. So, if you're just plain lazy (or bored), you can go right to the level 9 bowser courtesy of some random kid by downloading a saved state.