If you are looking for an emulator which can be used for running old-school games on a modern computer, you might be interested in picking Retroarch which is one of the best pieces of software you can come across today.
How is Retroarch working?
One of the best thing about this software is the fact it contains all of the possible platforms you can imagine in one place. How all of these works is categorized under cores. In order to play the platforms you will have to download the core. For instance, if you wanna play Nintendo Entertainment System, you have to navigate to the load core under main menu, and look for download core. Then wait for all of them core to be listed under this category.
Now you will have tons of platforms at your disposal. All you have to do is to pick the one you are looking for or have been looking for and voila! You are ready to play. But hold your horses! This is not it though. You may have the core, but how on earth the core is going to know which game you are looking for and wanna play?
How can you play a particular game with Retroarch?
So now comes the part of playing your games. Retroarch’s core does not know the game you want to play. Best move for you here is to look for the game you want, google look up, type in the name of the game you are looking for and end it with ROMS. You will be presented with a list of results. Get into one of those links and download the ROM of the game.
Look for some popular websites allowing their guests to purchase or get old-school games for free. Make sure you are getting a legal copy of a game since there are planet of places where such games are spread illegally since many of them are what is called abandoned software. Even such software should be downloaded in a legal manner.
Download the game you would like to play. It may come in as a zip file. Note that some of the files will require unzipping, some of them may not require you to unzip them. Best would be read the instructions for the cores or the games. To keep things tidy you might wanna create a separate folder to keep all of your games separate and platform based.
Start your game with Retroarch
Now you are ready to go. Select the core you wanna play with.
Now navigate to the load content in the main menu. Look for the directory where your games are. Select them and you are ready to play, however, in order to keep things really old-school, you might want to hook in a controller. In this case, check first if you have the right driver for the controller. If not, then go ahead and download the driver and if so, go to settings under main menu.
Now look for ‘Input’. You will see there are multiple bindings such as ‘Input User 1 binds’ and so forth. select it and go to device index. Retroarch should automatically detect your controller, if not, then go to device index under same path and look for your controller there. If it is detected , then go down there and set your joypad as you wish.
Retorarch has a fantastic GUI (Graphical User Interface) as of Sony’s. This could be your go to Emulator once you get a hang of this Emulator.