Category:Emulators

Note: This category is not intended to catalog every emulator in existence, only those emulators which stand out and which people wish to write about and support on StrategyWiki. For the links to known emulators and headlines about new emulators, please visit Emulation 9. (Please be aware that while Emulation 9 is a Japanese page, it is entirely navigatable by an English speaker.)

Definition
Emulation has a couple of related definitions. For the purposes of computers and video games, it means running a program that can properly play back software that was programmed for a different system than the one you happen to be playing on. The most prominent emulator among emulation fans is MAME, which allows you to play many programs that were written specifically for arcade games on your personal computer. In essence, MAME takes each instruction contained in an arcade ROM, translates the instruction from the machine language that it was originally written in to your processor's equivalent instruction, and executes that instruction allowing your PC to play a game that was not originally designed to play on your computer's hardware.

Besides arcade games, emulators have been written for a variety of home console systems (such as the NES, Super Nintendo, and Sega Genesis), and a great number of earlier home computer systems (such as the Atari 800, C64, and Sinclair ZX Spectrum.) Emulators have even been written to allow older (and slower) DOS based PC programs to run properly in a Windows environment. Emulators have also been written to run on a variety of platforms including other consoles (such as the Sega Dreamcast, Xbox, and PlayStation) and handhelds (such as the PSP and the homebrew friendly handheld GP2X).