Ever wanted to play Nintendo on your computer?
Now you can! Read on to learn how.

Emulators are programs that run on your PC and imitate other machines. These machines can be arcade games (like the ones in your local arcade), console game systems (like Atari, Playstation, Nintendo, etc.) and even other computers! With computer speed doubling about every 12 months, the popularity and technical advances of emulators has been phenomenal!  Here at CpuJunky.com, I will focus on arcade and console emulation, providing you with the best emulators for each emulation type, and organize a large number of games to play. These sections are split up into the sections listed at left.

What is an emulator?
An emulator is a program which mimics other systems. These emulators usually work by translating or interpreting the original program code of the original game and make it work on your PC. The original game is usually stored in a ROM file. Some console emulators, for instance Playstation emulators, can use the original game CD so no ROM file is needed. 

What is a ROM file?
Most classic games are stored on cartridges (example: NES, Super Nintendo, Atari etc.). On those cartridges are special computer chips called ROM chips (Read Only Memory). Now linking such a cartridge with the PC is not very easy, so people have developed devices which can download the contents of catridge to a PC in the form of a ROM file. Certain CD based consoles (Dreamcast, PS2, Playstation, etc.) do not have rom files and the emulator uses the original game CD.

So what do I need to play emulated games?
You will need an emulator for the system you want, and the ROM files (or CDs) of the games you wish to play, both which can be found in the sections at the left.

What to do after I've downloaded everything?
Well most files will be in the ZIP format. If you don't know how to unpack these files you can download a ZIP file unpacker from here.

I suggest you unpack the emulator and the ROM files in the same directory. With many emulators such as FCUltra, ZSNES or SMYGB, you simply run the emulator EXE file and select Load in the menu to load the ROM file (or CD) and start playing. Otherwise, read the README.TXT file for more information or visit the author's homepage. 

Happy Emulating!