Emulation is the practice of using a program (called an emulator) on a PC to mimic the behavior of a video game console, in order to play (usually retro) console. On this channel, you can see the work of emulators game consoles Sony PS2, PS3, PSP, Nintendo Wii, Microsoft Xbox and others, and their setting. CEMU is Nintendo Wii U emulator for PC.
You’ve seen it. Maybe it was on an airplane, maybe it was at a friend’s house, but you saw people playing old Nintendo, Sega, or even PlayStation games on their computers. And yet, when you searched for those particular games in Steam, nothing comes up. What is this witchcraft? What you saw, my friend, is called emulation. It’s by no means new, but you shouldn’t feel bad for not knowing about it.
This isn’t exactly mainstream cultural knowledge, and can be a little confusing for beginners. Here’s how emulation works, and how to set it up on your Windows PC. What Are Emulators and ROMs? To play old school console games on your computer, you need two things: an emulator and a ROM. An emulator is a piece of software that mimics the hardware of an old-school console, giving your computer a way to open and run these classic games.
A ROM is a ripped copy of the actual game cartridge or disc of yesterday. So an emulator is a program you run, the ROM is the file you open with it. When you do, your computer will run that old school game. Where do emulators come from? Generally, they’re built by fans.
Sometimes it’s a single obsessive fan of a given console, and sometimes it’s an. In almost all cases, though, these emulators are distributed for free online. Developers work hard to make their emulators as accurate as possible, meaning the experience of playing the game feels as much like playing on the original system as possible.
There are several emulators out there for every retro gaming system you can imagine. And where do ROMs come from? If a game comes on a DVD, like the PlayStation 2 or the Nintendo Wii, you can actually rip games yourself using a standard DVD drive to. For old cartidge-based consoles, special pieces of hardware hardware makes it possible to copy games over to your computer.
In theory, you could fill a collection this way. Basically no one does this, however, and instead downloads ROMs from a wide collection of websites that, for legal reasons, we will not be linking to. You’ll have to figure out how to get ROMs yourself. Is downloading ROMs legal? We, actually.
Broadly speaking, downloading a ROM for a game you do not own is not legal–just like downloading a pirated movie is not legal. Downloading a ROM for a game you do own, however, is hypothetically defensible–at least legally speaking. But there really isn’t caselaw here. What is clear is that it’s illegal for websites to be offering ROMs for the public to download, which is why such sites are frequently shut down.
The Best Starter Emulators for Windows Users Now that you understand what emulation is, it’s time to get started setting up a console! But what software to use? The absolute best emulator setup, in our humble opinion, is a program called. RetroArch combines emulators for every retro system you can imagine, and gives you a beautiful leanback GUI for browsing your games. The downside: it can be a little complicated to set up, especially for beginners.
Don’t panic, though, because we have a and an. Follow those tutorials and you’ll have the best possible emulation setup in no time. (You might also check out, which has great recommended settings for NES and SNES in RetroArch.) Having said that, RetroArch might be overkill for you, particularly if you only care about one system or game. If you want to start with something a little bit simpler, here’s a quick list of our favorite easy-to-use emulators for all the major consoles since the late 1980s:. NES (Nintendo Entertainment System): is easy to use and will have your favorites running smoothly in no time. SNES (Super Nintendo Entertainment System): is simple and decently accurate, and should run well on most systems. It should be noted there is heavy debate about which SNES emulator is truly best–but for beginners, Snes9x is going to be the most friendly.
N64: is decently easy to use, depending on the game you want to play, though to this day Nintendo 64 emulation is full of glitches regardless of which emulator you use. Might help you find the right settings and plugins for the game you want to play (though once you get into tweaking Project64’s settings, it can become very complicated). Sega Genesis/CD/32X, etc: runs all of your Genesis favorites, and all of those Sega CD and 32X games you never played as a kid because your dad didn’t want to spend money on peripherals he didn’t understand. It even runs Game Gear games as well.
Game Boy: runs Game Boy, Game Boy Color, and Game Boy Advanced games, all in one place. It’s simple to use and quite accurate. Nintendo DS: is probably your best bet, though at this point Nintendo DS emulation can be glitchy under even the best of circumstances. Touch controls are handled with the mouse. PlayStation: is the best-maintained PlayStation emulator.
If you have a CD drive, it can run games directly from there, though ripped games typically load faster. Emulating PlayStation games can be very annoying, however, as every game requires settings tweaks in order to run properly. And what settings you’ll need to change in order to run them.
PlayStation 2: supports a surprising number of PlayStation 2 games, but is also quite annoying to configure. This probably isn’t for beginners. And what settings you’ll need to change in order to run them. Are these the best emulators for any given platform? No, largely because there is no such thing (outside RetroArch, which combines code from all these emulators and more). But if you’re new to emulation, these are all relatively straightforward to use, which is important for beginners.
Give them a shot, then look up alternatives if you’re not satisfied. If you’re a Mac user, you might want to try. It supports a ton of different systems and is actually pretty easy to use. How to Use an Emulator to Play a Game Every emulator outlined above is a little bit different, but serve one basic function: they let you load ROMs.
Here’s a quick tour of how emulators work, using Snes9X as an example. Emulators generally don’t come with installers, the way other Windows software does. Instead, these programs are portable, coming in a folder with everything that they need to run. You can put the folder wherever you want. Here’s how Snes9X looks when you download and unzip it: Fire up the emulator by double-clicking the EXE file in Windows, and you’ll see an empty window.
Here’s Snes9X: Click File Open and you can browse for your ROM file. Open it up and it will start running immediately. You can start playing immediately. On most emulators, Alt+Enter will toggle full screen mode in Windows.
You can customize the keys used to control the game, generally under the “Input” section of the menu. You can even plug in a gamepad and configure it, if you have one. Is cheap and great. From there, you should be able to play your games without tweaking too much (depending on your emulator). But this is really just the beginning.
Dive into the settings of any given emulator and you’ll find control over all sorts of things, from framerate to sound quality to things like color schemes and filters. There is simply way too much variation between different emulators for me to cover all of that in this broad overview, but there are plenty of forums, guides, and wikis out there to help you along if you search Google. But once you get to the point of tweaking, we recommend, since it’s really the best overall setup. It may take a bit more work, but it’s a lot nicer than learning 10+ different systems once you get past the basics. Image Credit: /Flickr.
Site News December 12, 2012 Christmas came early for all of our loyal users. Introducing our new 635 GB Nintendo section! August 10, 2012 Heads up - our server will go down for approximately 30 minutes after 9 PM PST tonight for a SSD drive installation and RAID-1 buildup. This will give the site more redundancy moving forward!
June 22, 2012 After a long time of uploading, not to mention running into a string of server problems, I am proud to finally preset to you our new section! Included are 1,691 full ISOs totalling over 440 GB!
The Playstation was my favorite console growing up, and looking at the list of titles brings back many fond memories as a kid. I hope it has the same effect on you - enjoy! June 17, 2012 How do you play the Commodore 64 ROMs we just added without any emulators?
Therefore, we have created a new section! We also went ahead and updated all of our emulators to their latest versions. June 7, 2012 Due to the recent surge of traffic to both our web site and, we have outgrown our current single server. This has caused, as you may have noticed, a significant slowdown when accessing and browsing our forums. In order to keep our user experience high, we had another server (with a SSD drive) implemented just to handle our forums' MySQL database. This should greatly improve forums speeds in every way, and the lessen the load on the main site server. Thanks for continuing to support CoolROM - we strive to be your favorite emulation community!
June 4, 2012 Due to your numerous requests, we have now added a section totalling 5,656 files! Enjoy and stay tuned for more updates; we're not done quite yet. June 1, 2012 It's June 1st, so you guys know what that means. It's time to announce our fourth contest winners! Here they are: Grand prize: Austyn B. Second prize: David G.
Third prize: Jerome C. Winners: please check your email for gift card prizes or further instructions. Thanks to everyone who participated - the turnaround was truly amazing. For those who didn't win: there's always the next contest! April 16, 2012 We have just updated our collection to the latest version: 0.145! This brings our collection up to 18,550 files totalling 44.6 GB!
April 3, 2012 Gamers rejoice! Our mobile optimized site is now online! You can check it out here: (mobile devices only).
Make sure to bookmark it and tell your friends. Also, as a way of saying thank you for the support throughout the years, we are keeping the mobile site ad-free for a limited time! February 25, 2012 2 more prizes were added to the contest for more chances to win! Check them out! February 24, 2012 It's been a while since I last said this, but I am proud to present CoolROM.com's fourth contest! This time, we are giving a way a brand new PS Vita (ever heard of them?) and Uncharted: Golden Abyss!
Learn more about our contest. Good luck everyone!
February 24, 2012 After quite some time, CoolROM is finally on Twitter! Please to receive the latest updates and ROM additions. Now, I know there are alot of you who browse CoolROM on your iPhone and Android devices, so we are developing a mobile friendly site for yall! Stay tuned:).