Emulators

Flycast is a SEGA Dreamcast, NAOMI and AtomisWave emulator, forked from reicast, and made by flyinghead.

DuckStation is an simulator/emulator of the Sony PlayStation console, focusing on playability, speed, and long-term maintainability. The goal is to be as accurate as possible while maintaining performance suitable for low-end devices. "Hack" options are discouraged, the default configuration should support all playable games with only some of the enhancements having compatibility issues.

Dosbox-X is a fork of the DOSBox project, a cross-platform emulator. It focuses on greater accuracy in DOS emulation and its hardware environment, and adds support for Windows 9x (Windows 3.x, 95, 98, ME). The goal is to provide a complete and accurate emulation package covering all pre-2000 hardware scenarios. It will allow retro-programming with the certainty that the program works well on real hardware. It supports the mouse, provides menus and internationalization (keyboard localization for example).

DOSBox is an emulator program which emulates an IBM PC compatible computer running a DOS operating system. Many IBM PC compatible graphics and sound cards are also emulated. This means that original DOS programs (including PC games) are provided with an environment in which they can run correctly, even though the modern computers have dropped support for that old environment.

Supermodel emulates Sega's Model 3 arcade platform, allowing you to play a number of ground-breaking arcade classics on your PC. It uses OpenGL and the SDL library, and can run on Windows, Linux, and Mac OS X.

bsnes-hd (formally "HD Mode 7 mod, for bsnes") is a fork of bsnes that adds HD video features, such as:

HD Mode 7

Rendering the rotated, scaled or pseudo perspective backgrounds at higher resolutions. This does not involve new custom imagery or upscaling algorithms. It is a higher resolution version of the process the SNES uses.

Widescreen

Mostly for Mode 7 scenes, but also works for some other scenes/games here and there. Some setting tweaking required...

BlastEm is a Sega Genesis/Mega Drive emulator developed primarily for Linux (though it's also available for macOS and Windows). BlastEm aims for cycle accuracy while also hitting lower system requirements than Exodus; it is one of the only emulators to properly run Overdrive 2, a demoscene production by the group Titan meant to showcase the capabilities of the Genesis through digital art. The first Overdrive demo runs perfectly which only Genesis Plus GX can also claim. Commercial game compatibility is close to, but not quite at, 100%. It is the only emulator other than Exodus that can properly display direct color DMA demos and to pass all of the tests in Nemesis' VDP FIFO Testing ROM.

bsnes is a standalone SNES emulator, utilizing the higan SNES core, but with a much faster multi-threaded PPU renderer.

The bsnes project is also going to focus heavily on ease of use, providing support for direct ROM file loading, automatic gamepad mapping (where possible), soft-patching support, etc. The goal is to provide all of the recent higan SNES emulation improvements and the SNES preservation project work to a wider audience.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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

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

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

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

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.

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.

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!