Anyone
who would love a trip down 8-bit memory lane can take one thanks to a
range of emulators that have been developing for several years. The rise
of virtualisation has also heralded a new era of emulation with
powerful desktop PCs from Apple and Windows offering platforms for the
retro gamer to exploit.
There are a number of options to consider when attempting to run retro games on your Windows PC or Mac...
If you're Windows-centric, then DOSBox
is certainly the way to go, and has become somewhat of an unofficial
standard when running DOS-based games. Getting your games to run will
mean acquainting yourself with the terminal and the C: prompt, but you
will be able to play all of your favourite games once again.
Another option is MAME (Multiple Arcade Machine Emulator). Again, MAME is a command line emulator. If you want something a bit more user friendly, Turbo MAME offers just that.
Mac users have a similar application called Boxer that offers a drag-and-drop approach to classic gameplay. In essence Boxer takes DOS games and makes them behave like an app.
Of
course you can already get Android and iOS versions of many classic
arcade games. However, if you want to run your existing games this is
possible with a DOSBox. Apple users who don't want to jailbreak their devices should check out iDOS. The app comes with a set of classic games including Duke Nukem. The file manager iFunBox also enables you to add new games.
And it is possible to use the very latest in low cost computing to get your retro gaming fix. The Raspberry Pi computer together with Emulation Station is a great way to get into low-cost retro gaming.
Choose your platform
If want to play specific games, there are a number of resources to choose from: Atari aficionados have AtariAge, Hatari is an Atari ST/STE/TT/Falcon emulator for GNU/Linux, BSD, Mac OS X, Windows and other systems which are supported by the SDL (Simple DirectMedia Layer) library, and Emuparadise.
For ZX Spectrum games you have a number of options - developed using the Microsoft .Net framework, there's the zxspectrum4, Spectaculator, and Fuse ZX Spectrum Emulator, all of which offer great emulations of this classic computer.
The
Commodore 64 was also a highly popular gaming machine with hundreds of
classic games available during its heyday. Emulators include: CCS64, Zzap64, VICE and Micro64.
When
visiting emulation websites you'll often hear ROMs mentioned. This is
especially true of games emulation. Many of the classic games that you
may want to play - Atari games are a good example - are still
copyrighted so getting hold of their ROMs in order to play the games is a
matter that has to be approached carefully. A website like CoolROM is a great place to start as they have legal ROMs that you can use with your emulator, including Atari game ROMs. ROM World has a host of ROMs, too.
Another
term that you'll need to understand in your emulator vocabulary is
'disk image'. These tend to apply to emulators of computers such as the
Amiga - they aren't real disks in the sense that you can pick them up
and slot them into your floppy drive. They are virtual copies of the
drives that the original computer had, such as its floppy disk drive.
These are created on the host PC's hard drive and then used by the
emulator to read and write data to, and are usually created
automatically by the emulator itself. But check before you install the
emulator you want to use just in case you have to manually create this
drive for the emulator to work properly.
Before the IBM PC changed the computer world forever, for many the pinnacle of personal computing was the Sinclair ZX Spectrum,
Commodore 64 and the BBC Micro. For gamers these computers defined the
first screen generation. As an object of desire the ZX81 may not have
won any design awards, but for many it was their first true computer.
