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Yeah. Most of the emulators out there use hacks to get them to run smoothly on today's hardware. There's a lot of emulators out there that don't run exactly as the old hardware did. Some emulators like BSNES actually try to run the machine code exactly the same way the old consoles did, while others take short cuts and there fore might only work with the most popular games.

There's even a fair number of N64 emulators that can't play Ocarina of Time properly. There's a part very early in the game where you have to pick a path based on the direction path the song is coming from. Most of the emulators fail at this and just play the song the same no matter which path you go down.

I'm still looking for a list of files, but for that size, it might be EVERY MAME ROM in the MAME database of over 7000 ROMS.

What I've got that I can find quickly, these will even show you how to build the arcade cabinets for individual ROMs.

http://translate.googleusercontent.com/translate_c?hl=en&ie=UTF8&prev=_t&rurl=translate.google.com&sl=auto&tl=en&u=http://www.mamechannel.it/pages/bios.php&usg=ALkJrhh2HqT-Dm9Szquc1fgWTubW-OSIXw (Italian)

Same link English

http://www.mamechannel.it/pages/progettosnaps.php

http://www.emulator-zone.com/doc.php/arcade/mame.html

I guess you missed the memo but you see they have these things called emulators and as the homebrew guys get a better handle on a system it doesn't take them long to create a good working emulator.

Oh and unlike your Sony and Nintendo products thanks to emulators you can play every game from the NES-Wii on the Nintendo side and PS1-PS2 on the Sony side (PS3 is still in development which is understandable because of the Cell SPU) so you don't have to worry about losing your old games just because you got a new system. BTW I still have PC games I bought in the late 90s and guess what? They play just fine. In fact its been ages since I actually ran across a game I have trouble playing, no matter how old, and thanks to GOG I didn't even have to mess with DOSBox tweaking to get my Redneck Rampage and Blood fix as they had both preconfigured. Just gotta love that backwards compatibility.

Video game console emulator

Emulator Zone

It all depends on what you really want to get into.

DOSBox - For all your old DOS based games, this emulator works wonders. The only part you need to worry about is getting them off those old 3.5" and 5.25" floppies. If the floppies don't work anymore or you just don't have a floppy drive, you can always hop over to the various Abandonware sites and try to get a full copy of the game from them. My favorite site is Home of the Underdogs.

Emulators - For your old console systems, you can easily pick up any number of emulators. There are plenty of places like The Emulator Zone that let you grab both an emulator and various game roms for any number of console systems. Most of them let you install a USB Gamepad of some sort that gives you an even more old game style feel. Many of them are pretty good these days and a lot of computers are more powerful than some of the even more recent consoles. I use a PS emulator to run all my old PS1 games and they look better than on my PS2.

Online - An absolutely amazing number of games and other things have been ported to an online version of the game. A quick Google search for "DOOM online" returns a Flash based Doom Conversion. My experience has shown that most of the online versions of games don't play as smooth as on emulators, but they are usually free and no installation is needed.

There are plenty of other solutions out there as well. You could probably track down an older computer on ebay if you looked hard enough and what does it hurt to let it sit in a closet or your attic when you want to pull it out. If you need to ask these questions, you haven't been looking hard enough. Many others have forged this road long before you came to it and they have freely provided their solutions to all.

In a manner of speaking

derp?

the Xbox is a just another Von Neumann machine, right?

Now run your comparisons based on 64 bit code instead of 32 bit.

What's so special about 64-bit code? I can buy a 64-bit gaming computer for under $25 shipped. And I'd bet that any of the Intel and AMD CPUs reviewed in this article can emulate it.

As a tabletop RPG - shadowrun was one of the games that I will always have a fondness in my heart for. The rules were cryptic, battles took forever, but that didn't seem to make a difference. The world was described so clearly with so many things that were logically futuristic it didn't seem like were you playing a fantasy sci-fi game - you were just role playing in the future.

Neither was I willing to purchase just to play a game that would probably ruin my memory of the weekends rolling dice.

I concur. This is a good list of the dawn of personal computing. I disagree with other posters about vintage mainframes and minicomputers (such as PDP/11) since they were not widely accessible. For those system not available, emulators are a good choice:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Emulator
http://www.emulator-zone.com/

These sites have good descriptions of the history and the classics (my favorites at top):
http://oldcomputers.net/
http://www.old-computers.com/news/default.asp
http://www.vintage-computer.com/
http://www.obsoletecomputermuseum.org/
http://www.computercloset.org/
http://www.sinasohn.com/clascomp/

It is important to keep the history alive. Although for us old timers, it just seems like yesterday, many youngsters do not realize the history of their shiny new laptops, etc.

I still go with the age old adage of "You have to learn how to crawl before you can walk" or maybe it's walk before you run, look before you leap? Whatever....

Anyway, I'd say someone should start small and work their way up to the more modern languages. So my suggestion would be:

1. First learn something like the Apple ][+.

1a. Learn Applesoft and maybe some DOS 3.3 or ProDOS assembly. This will make you thank god someone came up with floating point math processors and disk drives that don't require knowledge of how to time when to read/write something to a disk drive.

2. Then learn something like the Apple //gs, Atari, or Amiga.

2a. So you can learn that color really makes a difference. Here you can learn Pascal, about compilers, and the like.

3. Then try the Macintosh and try out Windows.

3a. And ask yourself why Apple, after going all the way to the //gs with color suddenly decided that black and white was all the rage. You can also learn a lot about structured programming, handles, Pascal, C, FORTRAN, COBOL, and lots of other useful information.

4. Then try Linux and you will go - why didn't everyone go with this to begin with? You can also then learn OOP, C++, Ruby, Python, PHP, and everything else.

If you give six months to each of the above you will be a lot better off knowing why some of the things that are still drawbacks to OSs are still in there. Some are just carry-overs from yesteryear. The important thing though - is that you will at least have a grasp of the "why" certain things happen like they do. (Or maybe at least you'd have a hint as to the why.)

For languages I'd say Applesoft Basic first, then maybe QBasic (which I hear is now free from Microsoft), then FORTRAN (to learn the separation of variables into float, int, etc...), then Pascal (to help with the structuring), then C, then C++, then into Python, Ruby, whatever.

The thing is - if you do not get the basics, then you wind up like the System Programmer I once met. Didn't even know how to make a cursor move on the screen. "Duh....the terminal does that. I can't control what it does." Ever hear of ASCII control codes? "Nope. What are they?" Ever hear of the curses routines? "Nope. What are they?" Yeah. System's Programmer.

Or you get the System Operators who were running the computer at a company I used to work with. They were running a program that slowly but surely gobbled up all of the memory on the system and then the computer would crash. (This was a mainframe system with something like 10GB of memory on it back in the late 1980's! Although at the time I think they referred to it as 10,000MB of memory. Each person on the computer gobbled up 100MB each because of the program they were running and there were 300 people who kept trying to use the program.) I went over, looked at what they were doing and told them to run a program (which was in their manuals) that would recover the memory let go by programs. "We can't do that," they said, "it might crash the system." I looked at them and said "And the alternative is....?" They wouldn't do it and so I just went "Well, it's not my system so crash away!" They did - on a daily basis. Sometimes two or three times a day. Their solution? "WE NEED MORE MEMORY!"

Although I've set her up with nesticle and a generaic d-pad, it's not a Nintendo controller so she doesn't like it.

1. NESticle is SO 1998, dude. (And I'd be embarrassed to refer to it by name in front of my mother...)

There are so many better NES emus available today. My favorite is the open-source FCE Ultra.

2. If having the authentic NES controller is an important consideration, it's worth the dough to splurge for a RetroPad. They're actual NES controllers, retrofitted for USB.

info here and download here.

Back in the day, there was a copy called Bleem that essentially sold emulators for the Sega Dreamcast that allowed it to play selected Playstation games, such as Gran Turismo 2, etc.. You would have to buy the appropriate "Bleem Pack" to play a given set of games. Perhaps Xbox 360 backwards compatibility will take this approach. The Xbox would download the appropriate patches and settings to play a given previous generation game. If they can support say the 50 most popular Xbox games, then they may be able to get away with it. Heck, the PS2 does not play 100 percent of the first generation Playstation games either.

In any case, if the end user has to go out and buy a title again, then backwards compatibility is a lie and I sincerely hope that Sony and Nintendo pummels them mercilessly! Seriously though, I think Microsoft will pull it off somehow. They have more than enough resources and talent to do the job. Yeah, I know, this is /., MS is evil! But they _do_ have a lot of talented and passionate people working on this. So I think they'll pull it off.

Some feel that the N64 actually wasn't really 64 bits though http://www.emulator-zone.com/doc.php/n64/ for instance and they were not even the first to make the claim as Atari had claimed that for the Jaguar http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Atari_Jaguar

> Current generation XBox uses X86. Where's your evidence?
...

No, the fact is that Sony and Microsoft have joined with Nintendo

Well here's something for you to chew on.

I don't claim to be an expert on such things, though, so what I said was based on bits and pieces I've heard elsewhere.

I'm just not really a console guy, ya know? My computers can actually play an enormous selection of games already ... and that's good enough for me.

> selecting the PowerPC because it gives far more bang for the buck than any other processor family.

Truly, I find this prospect fascinating. Perhaps you would deign to come and show us where to buy them?

This doesn't surprise me at all. As an emulator author myself (jzIntv), I've worked closely with other emulator authors to reverse engineer and understand all the corners of my chosen system of interest.

I've worked with the authors of Bliss, IntvWin/IntvDos, Nostalgia, IntvPC, Kinty and the MESS Intellivision driver to work out emulation bugs and understand the various odd machine details. The authors of those emulators also have worked with each other--it's not like I'm some central focus here. It's a friendly community.

It'd surprise me more if the emu authors couldn't get past their egos to such an extent that they simply didn't talk to each other except to flame.

I have always had console gaming systems for when people come over and want to play games and the PC for when I want to game alone or online. However, the average gaming pad can do wonders for some games on the PC and makes it useable by more people who will not even touch a mouse/keyboard combo. We run MAME and the Ninendo emulators on an old 1 GHZ Duron in the living room and currently it is getting more play with 2 wireless USB controllers than our XBOX or PS2.

The other xbox emulator in the works, Xeon, can already play Halo to a large degree. Check it out

I just got through playing with the demos on the site and it works pretty good. Give it a try on the excellent emulator Visual Boy Advance. Seems like the official emulator site is down, but you can get the latest visualboy emu here

If the PS3 is really as powerful as planned, surely it would be possible to emulate the PS1/PS2 in software?
There are already projects galore that emulate all kinds of console systems. According to this there are no PS2 emulators yet, but it stands to reason that Sony could create one for the PS3.

How hard is it to create an emulator for the XBox? Unlike the other major new next generation consoles I think the XBox will probably be the easiest to emulate. The architecture and operating system of the XBox so much resemble a Windows PC that it may be possible to simply convert XBox games to Windows. That is, replacing the system calls of XBox applications (the games) with substitutes when emulating it. This may seem hard and impossible to do (converting executables to work on other, but similar operating systems for similar architectures), but in fact it has already been done before: Project Odin allows Windows applications such as Quake 3 or Starcraft for example, to be run on IBM's OS/2 Warp.

• MAME-X What do you mean, 70+ games for the XBox? Try over 3000! This is a port of MAME for the XBox which allows you to play tons of arcade classics on the XBox.
• GNUboy Yes! The all time favorite handheld is here! This is the Xbox port of the Gameboy emulator.
• Handy The Atari Lynx emulator has been ported to the box... If I could only fit it in my pocket...
• Stella The known atari 2600 emulator has come to the xbox!
• Daedalus The N64 emulator is progressing well on the Xbox too!
• Snes9X That's right... SNES on the xbox!!! snes9x..only 12-x years late!
• GBA-X GBA on the Xbox...
• X-Nes NES on the xbox.
• SMSPlus Master System/Game Gear emulator.
• FCEU-NES NES emulator. known for accurate emulation of offensive language

Hope this helps. Enjoy emulating on your box!

Then what the hell is it? An emulator?

Bochs is an emulator. TuxNES is an emulator. DGen is an emulator. SNES9x is an emulator. Transmeta's Crusoe uses Code Morphing, which is an emulator. But WINE is not an emulator but "an implementation of the Windows 3.x and Win32 APIs on top of X and Unix. Think of Wine as a Windows compatibility layer" for FreeBSD, Linux, and Solaris. It's also a complete Windows application server that uses thin clients called X11 terminals.