You have surely been in certain instances when you saw people playing old Nintendo, Sega, or even PlayStation games on their PC. But when you search those games in a stream, there’s nothing. This magic is done by Emulator. This may be a bit confusing for beginners and you may have a little knowledge about it but that’s fine. This is not mainstream cultural knowledge. Here given below you can find how to play retro console game using PC Emulator. 

Things required to play retro console games:

To play retro console games on your computer you just need two things: an emulator and a ROM. 

1. Emulator: It is a piece of software that copies or mimics the hardware of a retro console game. It opens a way to your computer to run these classic games. 

1. ROM: It is a ripped copy of the original game cartridge or disc of old times.

So basically, the work of an emulator is to run a program, and ROM is the file you open with the help of it. When these things are done your computer will run that retro console game. 

Emulators are generally built by fans. Sometimes it is done single-handedly or else it is an open-source community. They are free online. The developers try hard to make the emulators as accurate as possible, which makes the gaming experience like the original system. There are many retro gaming emulators out there. The best emulator setup is a program called gamulator which gives you a beautiful GUI to browse your games. 

Here’s a stepwise guide how you can play a game using Emulator:

You should know one thing about emulators, every one of them is different. But they serve one basic purpose: they let you load ROMs. Here you are going to see how emulators work using Snes9X as an example. 

Step 1: Windows software comes with installers, but generally emulators don’t come with installers. These programs are portable. They come in a folder with everything they need to run. This folder can be kept wherever you want. You need to download this emulator and unzip it.

Step 2: After unzipping the emulator fire it by double-clicking the EXE file in Windows. An empty window would come up to the screen. 

Step 3: There would be a File button on the top of the screen. Click it. A drop-down menu appears. Tap on open and just like this you can browse for your ROM file. Open it and it will start running immediately. 

Step 4: Immediately you can start playing the game. Most of the emulators use Alt+Enter to toggle full-screen mode in Windows. You can customize it as well. It generally comes under the “Input” section of the menu. It can be used to change the controls of the game. If you have a gamepad you can plugin and configure it. 

From now on you can play your game without any minor modifications, and it depends on the emulator as well. You can search for any emulator and go to its settings to find control over all these things. You can adjust the frame rate, modify its sound quality and things like changing color schemes and filters. 

There is very largely numbered variation between different emulators and it’s quite tough to cover all that in this broad overview. There are many forums, guides, and wikis that would help you if you search them on Google. But if you reach the point of some minor modifications, we recommend checking out gamulator, as it is the best overall setup. It would require some labor, but it is better than most of the different systems once you learn the basics.