What is Game Emulation ?
Game Emulators are computer programs that
makes your PC behave like the actual hardware of the game system itself. There are
Emulators available for all kinds of game systems: Arcade Games, Nintendo Systems, Sega
Systems, Sony Playstation etc. There are also Emulators available for computer
systems, and just about any other microprocessor driven system you can think of, down to
the microprocessors themselves.
Emulators use the actual ROM (Read Only Memory or
microprocessor instructions) from the original system, so the interpretation or
playability is exact. This ROM information is typically contained inside a chip on a
circuit board in an arcade game or game cartridge.
In order to use these emulators, you need the ROM
information for the game you want to play. ROM's are available form a variety of places on
the net, but there are some legalities involved with possessing them. To make a long story
short, in order for you to legally posses the ROM, you must actually own a copy of the
original. For Example, if you want to use a Nintendo Emulator to play Mario Brothers, you
must own a Mario Brothers game cartridge.
The most popular game emulator is a Web Wide project called
MAME (Multiple Arcade Machine Emulator). The work of many talented programmers throughout
the world, it was originally started in 1997 by a man by the name of Nicola Salmoria. You
can read more about it here.
The project is for documentation purposes, so that when these
old arcade boards are finally shot, they can be remembered through emulation. The best
part is the side effect of the project, it allows you to play all these games with
features far beyond the original versions. You can cheat, skip levels, even record your
game as you play. Just about any added feature you can think of has been added and
implemented into MAME.
MAME is a DOS program. There
are several 'frontends' available to make using it more user friendly. There is also a
project called MAME32, that ports the
emulator to the Windows environment.
