What are 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Emulators are programs that allow you to play outdated video games such as Super Nintendo or Atari on your computer.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 or Read-Only-Memory. They are comparable to 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 the best emulator for your operating system. One of the 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. 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, or setup a controller, or even play online against your friends.

If you are still having trouble getting everything to work, head over to the forums or 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!