One of the great things about computers is that they can really do just about anything you want them to, even play games not for computers (that’s right I’m talking about emulation). Of course, a lot of emulators out there are by no means practical for really playing the games (too slow, only works half the time, etc.) and even a great emulator will only run smoothly on a computer with considerably faster hardware than what is being emulated. But if you want to play some old school console games (or newer ones if you have a really badass rig that can compensate for slow emulation), there are emulators out there for everything (in multiple emulators for many things). So I thought I would do you all a favor and tell you about my personal favorite emulators.

1. Project64 is in the best emulator I have ever found. It emulates the Nintendo 64, and is the only program I recommend you ever do that with. Every other N64 emulator I have tried has been absolutely terrible. The engine runs smoothly for me, and should on any decent set of hardware. In fact, it even does a great job of improving the game rendering (that’s right, they actually look better). I have run it at 1680 x 1020 (and the images were actually rendered to that man pixels, not just stretch), with no problem. Also, it has features for smoothing shapes and filtering the bitmaps. Project64 is great all around, and has worked with every ROM I have tried it on.
   
   
2. Visual Boy Advance is an extremely close second (it mostly lost because it emulates older technology). It does a wonderful job of emulating any Game Boy, up to the Advance. It runs very smoothly (without the throttle it easily jumps to 2000% speed on a cheap desktop). I like that it too has filters to improve the picture quality. There are some ten or so different ones to choose from (though they cannot do as much as the Project 64 one does because the games are only two-dimensional). It is supposed to work with any ROM you can get, and automatically detects what kind of Game Boy it is for. There is a built in GameShark type feature which works great (but is really confusing unless you know nerdy stuff like me). Recently a version with the added ability to “link” with other instances of itself for multiplayer was released, but it is not officially supported and still in need of serious refinement (but I think it’s really cool and will keep an eye on it).
   
   
3. Dolphin is the last of the emulators I have found that is exceptional. It is a GameCube and Wii emulator (because they actually are the same thing in terms of emulation). The GameCube aspect of it works much better than the Wii one though. It is not nearly as refined as the other two I talked about. It runs smoothly most of the time with GameCube games without too much hardware. Playing Wii games takes a bit faster computer than people may have, and is not always that smooth. The main thing is that emulating a Wii for the purpose of playing games is rather pointless right now in my opinion, because you cannot use a Wiimote (which is the whole point of the Wii’s existence basically). People have tried to come up with a Bluetooth hack to couple a Wiimote with a computer (which would make things better, but still not great without the sensor bar), but there has not been any success yet. But if you want a GameCube emulator, Dolphin is the way to go. The only downside with that is you have to use ROMs with it (I couldn’t get it to work with an actual game disc which is annoying cause discs can actually work with computer emulation, obviously).

In case you are wondering, there are emulators for things besides Nintendo products. I just never really use them. Some of them are fast enough for actual gaming like these are, and there are other uses for emulation besides just playing games which don’t require as much speed (but they aren’t of much interest to the average gamer). So yeah, emulation is great and any of you who are interested now should definitely look further into the subject.