Final Fantasy

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Nintendo NES

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Sega Genesis

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Super Nintendo

Most classic games are stored on game cartridges. For example the Atari 2600, Nintendo NES and Sega Genesis (among many others) use game cartridges. The games are stored on those cartridges using ROM chips (Read Only Memory). Some people have created special devices which can read the data from those ROM chips and which can save that data on a PC in a ROM file. In other words, a ROM file contains all data from a game cartridge. Of course for systems which don't use game cartridges, such as the Playstation, ROM files don't exist. In case of the Playstation you can put the Playstation CD in your CD-ROM drive to play games on a Playstation emulator.

An emulator is a program which mimics other systems, such as game consoles. Emulators try to translate or interpret the original program code of the original game and try to make it work on your PC. Games for emulators of cartridge based game consoles are usually stored in ROM files. Games for emulators of CD based game consoles like the Playstation however use the original game CD.

You will need an emulator for the system you want to emulate, which can be found on this site. Furthermore you need games to use with the emulator. If the system which you want to emulate uses game cartridges, you need to look for the ROM files of the games you want to play. For systems which use CDs (such as the Playstation) you need to put the game CD in your CD-ROM drive when you want to use the emulator. The emulator will load the game from the CD. Please don't email me about where to find ROMs, I do not accept ROM requests and I will not email any ROMs to you. Please also refrain from posting ROM requests on the forum.

Most files on this site are ZIP files. If you don't have an utility yet which can handle ZIP files, you can download WinZip from http://www.winzip.com/
I suggest you unzip the emulator and the ROM files in the same directory. If you have downloaded an emulator with a GUI (Graphical User Interface) such as bleem!, ZSNES or SMYGB, you can simply run the emulator EXE file (by double clicking on it) and select Load in the menu to load the ROM file (or CD) and start playing. Otherwise, read the README.TXT file which is included with the emulator (most of the time) for more information or visit the homepage of the emulator.

Alternatively most emulators can be run by typing this in the MS-DOS prompt from the directory where the files are located:

EMU.EXE ROMFILE.BIN

In the example above replace EMU.EXE and ROMFILE.BIN with the appropriate filenames or it won't work! For example:

ZSNES.EXE ZELDA.SMC

Final Fantasy

What is an emulator?

What is a ROM file?

So what do I need to play emulated games?

What to do after I've downloaded everything?