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Emulators: All the fun of a video game system without cracking out the ol' dusty game system and finding those cartriges! And the good thing about these - they usually load on the first try, no resets for you. There are two things you must first know about how to play such games on say, an Super Nintendo game.

The first is an Emulator - an emulator is a program that lets you run a game system's releases (Not limited to Super Nintendo) with the use of ROMS.

The second is a ROM - a ROM is a data file that contains the game information of the game you wish to play.

Sound good? All you need to do is set it up.

First, find a good Emulator to download. For the example (and purpose of the title), search for a SNES emulator(Or scroll to the bottom where I have provided links.) The best emulator that I have personally seen is Snes9x. There are others, with ZNES coming in second, but I won't list them all.

-Note-
Most emulators come in a .zip format. Do not be alarmed, it isn't a virus. It's a filetype that stores many files into one file for extraction - if you don't have winzip or winrar, get it.

Make a folder for your emulator to go in, and possibly a subfolder for your ROMs. Then, all that's left is to find the ROMs to download.

-Note-
When looking for a ROM website to download from, beware of the fake websites that forward you to webpages to make you vote for them. They will often send you to pornographic websites, or non-friendly spyware sites.

Once you have downloaded your ROM, open the Emulator, and click File - Load. Then browse to where you have saved the ROM. If it is on your desktop, follow this path:
C:\Program Files\Documents and Settings\[Your User Name]\Desktop
Of course, replace [Your User Name] with the login name that you get into your computer with (Don't put in the brackets).

The Emulators for Atari, SNES, NES, GameGear, Gameboy, and Sega Genesis all follow this similar pattern. However, if you lean towards the new 3d Genre Systems (like Playstation 2 or XBOX), you will need more files - these include a BIOS, graphics and other support software. Check the resources at the bottom.

-LEGAL NOTICE-
The information provided is for educational purposes. Please keep in mind that downloading a ROM is downloading a copyrighted game from its mother company, not from 'the website you download.'
Though you may hear that if you own the ROM for 24 hours and then deleting it is ok, I cannot see how this is so. I'm not aware of a law such as this.

-Roms and stuff-
www.nerologic.com <<<Dedicated to setup and troubleshooting of the PS2 Emulator

Learn more about this author, Michael Monzon.
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