Today, I’d like to talk to all of you fine folks out there who are trying to keep old-school gaming and nostalgia alive on the PC through the magic of emulation. Old gaming hardware is becoming scarcer and scarcer and the games that we all once knew and loved are becoming more and more difficult to find. There may eventually come a day when ROMs and Emulators are the only way to keep the passion – and the memory – alive.
Emulation is itself very much a morally gray area at the moment – at least, that’s what everyone likes to think. Words like "public domain" get slung around quite a bit, and as legality is concerned, asking five different people will get you five different answers as to whether or not your ROMs check out with the law. For the sake of safefy, I’m not going to tell you where to find ROMs here. If you’re looking to expand your library, you’ll need to look elsewhere.
If, however, you’ve already got yourself a fairly comprehensive library of ROMs and Emulators, I’ve an app recommendation that might catch your eye. It’s a platform known as Retroarch. See, constantly juggling a plethora of different Emulation paltforms can get a little confusing (not to mention headache-inducing). Retroarch is a platform-agnostic emulation system which serves as a frontend for pretty much every different retro gaming system you can think of, from the original NES all the way up to the Sony Playstation.
It’s designed to run on a variety of different systems (including PC, Mac, Android, and the Wii U), and it’s both simple to use and easy to install. The best part, though? It’s completely free. You can grab yourself a copy here.
