Emulators

mGBA is a new generation of Game Boy Advance emulator. The project started in April 2013 with the goal of being fast enough to run on lower end hardware than other emulators support, without sacrificing accuracy or portability. Even in the initial version, games generally played without problems. mGBA has only gotten better since then, and now boasts being the most accurate GBA emulator around.

PPSSPP can run your PSP games on your PC in full HD resolution, and play them on Android too. It can even upscale textures that would otherwise be too blurry as they were made for the small screen of the original PSP.

Snes9x is a portable, freeware Super Nintendo Entertainment System (SNES) emulator. It basically allows you to play most games designed for the SNES and Super Famicom Nintendo game systems on your PC or Workstation; which includes some real gems that were only ever released in Japan.

Snes9x is the result of well over three years worth of part-time hacking, coding, recoding, debugging, divorce, etc. (just kidding about the divorce bit). Snes9x is coded in C++, with three assembler CPU emulation cores on the i386 Linux and Windows ports.

Mednafen is a portable, utilizing OpenGL and SDL, argument(command-line)-driven multi-system emulator.

PCSX2 is a free and open-source PlayStation 2 emulator for Windows, Linux and macOS that supports a wide range of PlayStation 2 video games with a high level of compatibility and functionality.

Dolphin is an emulator for two recent Nintendo video game consoles: the GameCube and the Wii. It allows PC gamers to enjoy games for these two consoles in full HD (1080p) with several enhancements: compatibility with all PC controllers, turbo speed, networked multiplayer, and even more!

Play! is an attempt at creating a PlayStation 2 emulator for the Win32, Linux, macOS, iOS and Android platforms. The compatibility is, for now, only around 7% but Play! is currently the only available emulator for Mac.

MAME is a multi-purpose emulation framework.

MAME's purpose is to preserve decades of software history. As electronic technology continues to rush forward, MAME prevents this important "vintage" software from being lost and forgotten. This is achieved by documenting the hardware and how it functions. The source code to MAME serves as this documentation. The fact that the software is usable serves primarily to validate the accuracy of the documentation (how else can you prove that you have recreated the hardware faithfully?). Over time, MAME (originally stood for Multiple Arcade Machine Emulator) absorbed the sister-project MESS (Multi Emulator Super System), so MAME now documents a wide variety of (mostly vintage) computers, video game consoles and calculators, in addition to the arcade video games that were its initial focus.

XEBRA is a Japanese Playstation emulator coded by Dr. Hell. It focuses on accuracy and only outputs in native resolution.

Mupen64Plus is a cross-platform plugin-based N64 emulator which is capable of accurately playing many games. Included are four MIPS R4300 CPU emulators, with dynamic recompilers for 32-bit x86 and 64-bit amd64 systems, and necessary plugins for audio, graphical rendering (RDP), signal co-processor (RSP), and input. There is 1 included OpenGL video plugin, called RiceVideo. There are 3 other excellent video plugins being maintained by wahrhaft, called Arachnoid, Glide64, and Z64.

DeSmuME is a Nintendo DS emulator developed by YopYop156 for Mac, Windows and Linux. He has stopped working on it in the beginning of April 2006 and passed the torch to Yabause team of developers.

melonDS is a work-in-progress Nintendo DS emulator aiming for better performance than DeSmuME and to emulate Wi-Fi and local multiplayer capabilities. It's developed by Arisotura (formerly know as StapleButter), a former contributor to DeSmuME.

NO$GBA (pronounced "no cash GBA") is a Nintendo DS and Game Boy Advance emulator for Windows & DOS. It is one of the first Nintendo DS emulators to successfully run games, as well as being the only known DS emulator for DOS. NO$GBA was developed by Martin Korth.

It is not an emulator but scripts used by Romstation to allow local management of macOS games.

It is not an emulator but scripts used by Romstation to allow local management of PC games.

Redream is a work-in-progress Dreamcast emulator, enabling you to play your favorite Dreamcast games in high-definition on Windows, Mac and Linux.

Genesis Plus features very accurate emulation of the original Sega Genesis, even to the point that some software which has problems on the real hardware (Sonic Crackers, for example) exhibits the same behaviour under emulation.

Yabause is a Sega Saturn emulator. It currently runs on FreeBSD, GNU/Linux, Mac OS X, Windows and Dreamcast.

pSX (psxfin) fully emulates the Sony Playstation. Compatibility is fairly high. An R3000 debugger is contained which may be of interest to people working on translations. An interesting emulator when it was released.

ePSXe (enhanced PSX emulator) is a PlayStation video game console emulator for x86-based PC hardware with Microsoft Windows or Linux, as well as devices running Android. It was written by three authors, using the aliases calb, _Demo_ and Galtor.

Nestopia is an open-source NES/Famicom emulator developed by Martin Freji and designed to emulate the NES hardware as accurately as possible.

Project64 is a Nintendo 64 emulator written in the programming language C for the operating system Windows. This software uses a plug-in system allowing third-party groups to use their own plug-ins to implement specific components. Project64 can play Nintendo 64 games on a computer reading ROM images, either dumped from the read-only memory of a Nintendo 64 ROM cartridge or created directly on the computer as homebrew.

higan is a multi-system emulator that is known for emulating its underlying hardware very accurately. It can run every SNES title ever released. It started as a SNES emulator but currently supports over 10 systems.

VBA-M is a fork from the now inactive VisualBoy Advance project, with goals to improve the capatibility and features of the emulator.

VisualBoyAdvance (commonly abbreviated as VBA) is a free emulator of the Game Boy, Game Boy Color, and Game Boy Advance handheld game consoles as well as of Super Game Boy and Super Game Boy 2.

DEmul is a Sega Dreamcast, NAOMI, NAOMI 2 and Atomiswave emulator for Windows, developed by Wind, DreamZzz, MetalliC, ajax16384 and CaH4e3.

nullDC is an open source Sega Dreamcast and NAOMI emulator for Windows, developed by drk||Raziel (currently under the nickname skmp) and ZeZu.

Gens is a win32/unix Sega Genesis / Sega CD / Sega 32X emulator.

Kega Fusion, also shortened as Fusion and initially named Kega II, is a multi-system emulator for Windows, Linux and Mac OS X developed by Steve Snake. It is the follow-up to Kega Lazarus, and is the last in Steve Snake's Sega emulators after KGen, KGen98, Kega and Lazarus.

A 3DO open-source, low-level emulator based on the FreeDO source code.

ZSNES is an open-source Super Nintendo Entertainment System emulator written in x86 assembly, C, and C++. Bleeding with cutting edge SNES emulation, ZSNES is easily comparable to other leading SNES emulators, such as Snes9x, SNEeSe, Super Sleuth, and bsnes.

Special thanks to the Snes9x team for all of their help and also for the excellent SNES emulator they have developed. We wish them the very best of luck!