Emulators and ROMs: What you need to know
Welcome to the shady side of the internet gaming community. Emulators and ROMs are easily the best way to play any classic console game, or even some of the newer console games, for free. I know what you’re thinking, those of you who are new to this topic. Sounds too good to be true right? Playing Zelda: Ocarina of Time on you’re PC, along with Donkey Kong Country, Super Mario Kart, etc. Well it is and it isn’t. You can access all of these games, and you can do it quite easily. It is illegal though. Let’s break this up into sections.
Emulator Info
An emulator is a program that runs on your computer that emulates a specific console. For example, if you install a Super Nintendo (SNES, super nintendo entertainment system) emulator, you just installed a program that enables you to play SNES games. Some of them can be a little tricky to navigate for a beginner, and generally have a lot of options (technically it can do much more than the console it emulates, but most of that you won’t ever need to use). The basic rule of thumb is, you start up the emulator and a small black box pops up on your desktop. You should click file, then open, and browse to the location of the ROM you wish to load. Once loaded, you can now begin playing that game using the emulator. Also, look for the options, controls, or keyboard menu item. You can change which keys on your keyboard perform the specific button clicks needed by that console. You can also configure a joystick to work as well.
Here are a list of some of our favorite emulators for PC (Mac emulators are available as well) as well as the site to get them from. Note that most of these emulators can be played on basically any old computer, except for the N64 emulator. This one may require a more recent computer to play lag free, or an older one with good speed/graphics capabilities. Also note, there are many more kinds of emulators available than shown here, from Sony to Arcade to Xbox. If you can find the ones below, I’m sure you can find those too.
Emulator Zone
NES (Nintendo, Nintendo Entertainment System)
FCEUX
NESten
SNES (Super Nintendo)
Snes9x
ZSNES
GBA (Game Boy Advance)
Visual Boy Advance (plays older game boy games as well)
N64 (Nintendo64)
Project64
ROM Info
ROMs (as the meaning pertains to you) are the files you can download that contain the game you are trying to play. These are what you load into the emulator. A great website for downloading roms is romBay, because its simple once you have an account, and you’re guaranteed not to be blasted with ads or spam or popups. Most of you who have done searching for ROMs online know that A LOT of websites look really sketchy, and wading through all the fake links and popups to find a game you want sometimes just isn’t worth it. The majority of the ROMs on romBay are free, and only require creating an account in order to download. A few of the larger ones require an upgraded account, which is one inexpensive payment and enables you to download more ROMs for an entire month, and you don’t have to worry about canceling because there is no recurring fee. If you want more ROMs a couple months down the road, just kick in a few more bucks and download for another whole month.
When you download a ROM, it will usually come in a .zip file. These files cannot be loaded into the emulator directly, they need to be extracted first. All you have to do (if you are using windows) is right click the .zip file, and click extract. This may vary from person to person, depending on what software you are using to extract the file. Windows comes with software to extract .zip files, so you shouldn’t need to download anything extra. Once it extracts, you should be able to see the game file inside the folder it creates!
Playable ROMs Online
There are websites that allow you to play Nintendo games online like flash games, so you don’t need to find and download any emulators or ROMs. Believe it or not, this is actually not my preference. You have a lot more control via the options of the emulator if you download, and this method obviously requires an internet connection. A lot of my time spent playing ROMs in the past has been out of boredom, like traveling in a car using my laptop with no internet connection. The online method obviously wouldn’t have worked for me then.
A popular website for this is…
Virtual NES
Although it claims to be legal on the home page, I still find that highly questionable. I’ll go ahead and link to them anyways, and explain about more legal stuff below. Keep in mind, all the legal stuff only pertains to emulators and ROMs from Nintendo or Sony or other game companies. Some of the arcade ones are actually legal, but they aren’t as popular.
Legal Stuff
Like I mentioned above, no matter how you slice it, using an emulator with ROMs you’ve downloaded on the internet is illegal. You may have heard that its okay to download and play ROMs as long as you erase them within 24 hours. You may also have heard that if you own a copy of the original game already, it’s okay. To clarify, the 24 hour rumor is flat out crap. The second, and more feasible of the two, actually stems from some truth. It stems from some law or ruling basically saying the owner of a game has the right to a backup copy of that game. I’m not sure whether this law carries over into games on cartridges, but even if it did the law states you are entitled to a backup copy of your game, not the backup copy of someone else’s game. In order for you to legally own the backup copy of someone else’s game, you also must own the exact physical copy of which the backup came from.
Hope this helps!
-Kyle
