Please Note: All downloads are on the ftp server which is only available 24hrs on Saturdays.
While surfing the web recently, I happened to come across a site dedicated to the program MAME - a PC-based emulator of the old original arcade machines of the 80's. Having not been a frequenter of these establishments back in those days, the only time I had played any of them had been while on holiday.
Fortunately, Space Invaders, Galaxians and Moon Cresta didn't claim any of my cash because I had equivalents on the Atari VCS system at home which I could play for free!
So there I was, looking at a web page in front of me with the chance to download a piece of software which, if the claims were correct, would allow me to play the original arcade machine games. NOT copies or rewrites, but the actual ROMS produced for the arcade machines. I was intrigued so I downloaded the file and a couple of ROMs.
Having installed the files and had a good play, I was very impressed with the results. Many of the games, which I still have for the old 8-bit VCS console - like Zaxxon, Joust & Defender seemed great at the time, though with hindsight were poor compared to the arcade originals. Even the sound is authentic. Galaxians, which I admit to having spent a few quid on while on holiday on Blackpool, sounds spot on.
Having got hold of MAME, there are a number of locations on the web where you can download game ROMs.
When I used to use the Atari ST years ago, I spent quite a bit of money on an emulator which was called PC Speed (if I remember right). It consisted of a circuit board which fitted inside the ST and emulated a lowly CGA 086 PC. I got to thinking how much more powerful my current PC is now and that it should be able to emulate lesser machines with ease - particularly 8-bit computers and consoles. I set out to investigate...
I was amazed with what a trawl through cyberspace was to come up with and to date, I have successfully transformed my PC into the machines shown in the table below.
Note: Some machines have been emulated by more than one author. If I have tested more than one emulator for a machine the .EXE name will be listed in the 'version' columns. The systems in red are the ones which are covered on this page to date. Over the enxt few days, all will be added - just check out what turns red every so often!
| Emulator | Best Version | Alt Version |
|---|---|---|
| Atari 2600 Console | Stella | Atari |
| Atari 5200 Console | 5200 | |
| Atari ST | Pacifist | Gemul8r |
| Atari 800/XL/XE | Xformer | Atari |
| Atari Lynx Handheld | Handy | Metalynx |
| Colecovision/Adam | Adamem | |
| Commodore 64 | CCS64 | |
| Commodore Amiga | UAE | Fellow |
| Intellivision | Preview | |
| MAME | Mame | |
| Nintendo Gameboy | Gb | |
| Nintendo NES | Nesticle | |
| Nintendo SNES | Snes9x | Snes96/97 |
| PCEngine | Pce | |
| Sega Gamegear/Master System | Massage | Mastergear |
| Sega Genesis | Genecyst | Genem |
| Sony PSX | Pse | |
| Spectrum 128 | Wspecem | |
| Vectrex | Vectrex |
There are others too if you look, this list is by no means complete. If you know of any other emulators worth including, please e-mail me with details and the web page where it can be found.
Well, first of all, the legal bits:
Much of this stuff appears to be a legally grey area - especially with many of the games not having been in production for many years now. What you read depends on where you read it. As far as I can work out, the actual games ROMs themselves are/were copyrighted but since many of the systems are long since obsolete (and thus the games are no longer available in cartridge form), the software companies are either no longer in existence either or aren't interested in the titles any more. So long as you don't sell any of the games, you shouldn't have any problems.
Another angle on this issue is with ROMs that are still available in the shops. For example, the Atari Lynx still has titles available. In this case, you are apparently allowed to have an emulator image ONLY IF you already own the cartridge version - Eg: you have paid for the software in some form or another. If you do not own a cartridge which is still available, in some parts of the world I believe you are allowed to use the image for 24 hours in order to evaluate it. After this time you must delete it. Local laws may vary.
Some emulators require additional Operating System files to work correctly. For example the Atari ST emulator needs a copy of the Atari TOS which is copyrighted and therefore not supplied with the emulator itself. Utilities are available which you can run on your own (or a friend's?) Atari ST which will dump the TOS to disk for use with the emulator. Similar restrictions apply to all currently available machines.
All material on this web site is to the best of my knowledge totally legal and has been downloaded from various sites on the internet. Please notify me of any infringements of copyright and the offending file(s) will be removed immediately and an apology will be posted. No responsibility can be inferred or accepted for the use of these files. Use them at your own risk.
I've decided to give each piece of software a 'rating', represented by a series of 'Barrie's Ticks', (sounds like a disease doesn't it?). The maximum any emulator can get is 10, though it's unlikely that any will. In the following reviews, I've only listed what I deem to be the best emulator for the machine in question. There may be others, but it's pointless clogging up your hard disk with say three SNES emulators when one is clearly the best and you only use that one.
The rating is an overall one based on a number of aspects:
Some emulators are Windows based. This allows you to load games and set option using the mouse while the emulator is running.
Others are DOS-based and while some give you nice menus to select the games from and keys to toggle options, others do not. With these, you have to enter all the options you want at the DOS command line.
While this isn't a major catastrophe with emulators which have few options, those that do can often result in you having to type in examples like:
emulname.exe games\frogger.bin -S -stereo -joystick1 -calib -screen4
... and worse!
That's where launcher programs come in. In either DOS or Windows, a launcher gives you all or most of the command line options on one screen with a convenient way, (mouse or keys), to toggle them on and off. The emulator can then be launched and the command line passed to it automatically. After the emulator is exited, you are returned back to the launcher ready to select another game or alter the settings.
Craig and I have both written Windows-based launchers for DOS-based emulators and they are available to download in the relevant emulator sections below.
Please feel free to download any of them and feed any comments back to me.
When run from the Windows icon, you are presented with a nice little control panel with a built-in directory/file dialogue which lets you select the game you want to play with a few clicks of the mouse button.
The game comes up in a window of which there are 2 sizes and when you are playing, on-screen buttons are used for: choosing another cartridge, switching between colour and black & white TV screens, switching left/right controllers, select, start, preferences and web links.
The sound is also as close as you can get to the original machine.
Author: Bradford W. Mott
Platform: Windows
Version: 0.7a
Zip Size: 133K
Classic Games: Adventure, Air Sea Battle, Asteroids, Combat, Centipede, Defender, Dig Dug, Frogger, Millipede, Pacman, Qbert, Space Invaders, Star Raiders, Vanguard & Yars Revenge
Emulator: 
Owners of this machine, may remember that it featured a lid in the top of the case which lifted to reveal two slots in which you could plug game cartridges, (the later 800XL only had one and if I remember correctly, the slot was dropped completely from the 'ST-looking' XE case). So the 800 simply lost the keyboard and became the 5200!
As far as the emulator goes, VSS plays all the classics, complete with authentic, if slightly warbly sound, (grating as any of them can be in these days of AWE and General MIDI).
From Windows 95, using it is a simple case of using the start button and selecting Run, browsing for the 5200.EXE file then entering in the command line, (name of cart and any required options). Luckily, all that is needed is the game cart name, as the default settings seem adequate on my system - including sound which is sensed automatically.
However, when you do run it, you get a Windows 95 warning asking if you want to switch to DOS mode to avoid problems. I always say no and it still works fine - it's just a nuisance having to click the box. The same problem occurs if you try to run it from the DOS prompt too, though having said that, you are advised to run it from proper DOS anyway.
An image of the BIOS is also required which isn't supplied with the emulator. But you can find one on the Internet after a quick search. The text file tells you what to do with it.
Author: Daniel Boris
Platform: DOS
Version: 0.71
Zip Size: 334K
Classic Games: Astrochase, Ballblazer, Defender, Frogger, Gyruss, Joust, Pengo, Space Invaders, Star Raiders & Xevious
Emulator:
Originally designed by Epyx and bought by Atari, it was the first hand-held with a colour LCD screen, though it ate through AA batteries like nobody's business!
Sadly, it went the way that all great Atari hardware tends to go... down the tubes through lack of proper marketing. (Remember the TT, Falcon or the Jaguar?...)
Handy is what I have found to be the best Lynx emulator, though it requires a Pentium PC, (recommended P133 minimum running NT or Windows 95 with 16MB or more memory.
Handy features sound support too, though it has to be said that it isn't brilliant and it is recommended that you don't enable it on machines that aren't P133 or higher, (or haven't got a sound card obviously). It also has the ability to save screen snapshots in both .BMP or .RAW format and this version now supports auto screen rotation for games like Gauntlet.
Run from a Windows icon, Handy gives you 4 screen sizes - normal, 2x, 3x and 4x. With Windows in 800 x 600 mode, the normal view is a little small and 2x is better. Being capable of 256 colours, it works best with Windows in 65K colour mode. These screenshots were grabbed while running in normal screen size.
The biggest hassle with all of the Lynx emulators is the old OS problem. The Lynx apparently has a piece of code which authenticates any cartridge plugged in and although it's only 512 bytes long, it's not easy to get hold of it. A dummy version is supplied with Handy, but it only allows you to use 'home brew' games, (files with .O extensions).
If you want to play the games shown in my screenshots, then you'll need to get hold of a proper lynxboot.img.
All I want to know now is how to get all my cartridges into .LNX files... anyone help?
Author: K. Wilkins
Platform: Windows 95/NT
Version: 0.40
Zip Size: 165K
Classic Games: Blue Lightning, Gauntlet, Mr Chips Challenge, Tetris, California Games
Emulator: Home Brew Games:
Being a full-screen DOS-based ST emulator which uses command line options, to make it easier to use from Windows there are a number of Windows launch programs available for it - my favourite being one called Paciload.
Pacifist needs a TOS image to run, and seems to be quite happy with versions 1.02, 1.04, 1.6 or 2.06, although being used to 1.02 that I dumped from my old ST, I find the startup delay with 2.06 quite annoying.
As with most emulators, you can point the floppy disks A and B to 'disk images'. These are files which sit on your hard disk and contain an identical copy of the contents of a floppy disk. A small utility will read the contents of an original ST disk in drive A and save it to disk as a .ST image. I managed to convert most of my ST GFA Basic floppies using this method. Alternatively, you can set up your PC's floppy to be the ST drive A and read ST files directly off ST disks. This worked OK for me, but I have read somewhere that a lot depends on the floppy controller in your PC.
Drives C, D and E can be pointed to directories on your hard disk drive. This means you can set drive A to an image file, drive C to a directory on your hard disk, then drag files out of the images onto hard disk. You can then zap the image files!
Pacifist can be booted in mono or colour mode and like the ST itself, you can flip between low and medium resolution.
The only drawback I have found with Pacifist is one common to all the ST emulators I have tried - the inability to format an ST disk in the PC drive. This may be a case of me trying to do the impossible though.
Author: Frederic Gidouin
Platform: DOS
Version: 0.46 ** LATEST VERSION **
Zip Size: 179K
Emulator: Launcher:
This version of Xformer is the best Atari 800, XL and XE emulator available... just! Another excellent emulator called XL-It! is also worth a mention, however, this one just has the edge for me due to it's ability to quickly flip between 800, XL and XE modes with a single keypress.Although a DOS-based emulator, Xformer will quite happily run by double-clicking on the program from within File Mangler in Win 3.x or Explorer in '95. However, you need to use Start...Run to specify any disk images you want to use at the command line prompt.
For example, Xformer.exe dos25.xfd demos.xfd would run Xformer with the DOS disk as D1: and the demos disk as D2:.
When the emulator is running, simply hitting the F12 key will cycle between the Atari 800, XL and XE and F10 will give you a system reset. Hitting F10 with the shift key held down will toggle the Basic cartridge on and off. Shift-F5 quits the emulator.
The documentation claims that on a 90 Mhz Pentium, Xformer 3.6 runs about 10 times faster than a 130XE and that even on the slowest 486 it still runs faster than the real thing. So, Xformer uses the Scroll Lock key as a 'speed toggle', giving you two speeds - normal and turbo. In turbo mode on my P166 it really flies! If the original machine ran as fast, I think they would still be selling today...
Again, the standard disk image format is used, (as described in the ST section above), only this time they are called .XFD files. A number of them are supplied in the zip file, including a couple of demo disk images with both Basic and machine code demos.
Who remembers the (at the time) jaw-dropping demo of the bouncing 'Amiga' red and white revolving sphere? Truly 'Power Without The Price? And how about the colour cycling waterfall, the walking mode 7 robot and the metalic spaceship? They are all here, along with DOS 2.5! You even get printer and modem support!
Author: Darek Mihocka
Platform: DOS
Version: 3.60
Zip Size: 179K
Emulator:
Adamem is a DOS-based emulator which emulates the Colecovision games console, including sound and although I never actually owned one, I believe it was released just after the Atari 2600 (VCS) and Intellivision consoles. It claimed to have far superior graphics and sound, plus would never be obsolete due to it's 'upgradeability'! Oh yeah, and pigs can fly!
On top of that, the emulator can also be used in Coleco Adam computer mode. In fact, the list of options which can be included on the command line stretches to a staggering 6 pages if you print out the help file!
So, if ever a launcher was needed, it's here. I couldn't find one anywhere, so I wrote ADAMem Launcher for Windows. It's in beta format at the moment and not 100% finished, so I'm looking for users to test it out and report back to me. The games cartridge side is working fine at the moment, but the Adam side has a bit of work to be done. Download it below.
In Win 95, use Start...Run or in Win 3.x use File...Run and locate the ADAMEM.EXE file with browse. Then type the required command-line options on the end.
Amongst the many, many command-line options you can enter, you will find:
Author: Marcel de Kogel
Platform: DOS
Version: 0.2
Zip Size: 467K
Emulator: Launcher:
The GameGear hand-held games console was simply a miniaturised version of the Sega Master System console - hence it's ability (with a simple cartridge adapter) to play cartridges off the Master System. As such, emulate a GameGear and you automatically have a Master System emulator! So, emulators for one tend to also emulate the other.
Simply run it - even from Windows File Mangler or Explorer - and hit F1 and you'll get a screenful of options, some of which have their own function key for direct activation.
Another useful feature is the ability to produce PCX screen dumps. The two above, Super Off Road and G-Loc were converted from such screendumps in GameGear mode and the one below, Mickey Mouse's Castle Of Illusion from in Master System mode.
Authentic sound is emulated and the screen size gets bigger automatically should the power of your PC support it, though you can force the size manually. Modes are switched automatically according to the cart type you load. Files with the .GG extension put you in Game Gear mode, while .SMS files put you in Sega Master System mode. Support is also supplied for joysticks and PAL (Pro Action Replay) codes from magazines.
Author: James McKay
Platform: DOS
Version: 0.73F
Zip Size: 105K
Classic Games: Castle Of Illusion, G-Loc, The Sonic Series
Emulator:
When you run the emulator without the launcher, a simple -gg/sms option sets the mode to GameGear or Master System. There are also options for sound on/off and quality, writing a game's soundtrack, a number of sync and delay options and loading a .GIF file as a background - the only one incidentally that I couldn't get to work!
One option that is missing, (but really needed) is one to slow it down! On my P166, games run far too fast to play them, hence MasterGear comes out with a lower rating than Massage. The speed problem doesn't occur on 486 machines, of which there are many still out there, whereas Massage prefers a faster machine.
Besides, I spent time writing the damn launcher before I found Massage, so the least you could do is download it...
Author: Marat Fayzullin
Platform: DOS
Version: 1.0
Zip Size: 208K
Classic Games: See Above
Emulator: Launcher: