Hardware emulation is a basic pillar of history. It allows us to preserve and learn about older devices in a way that wasn't possible before computers: we can achieve perfect replication of the original hardware in another medium (software), so even if the original breaks or disappears the emulated version will still be present and functional.
In this page you'll find a list of the emulation software I use or have used in a not so long past, either with Linux, Windows (my main gaming OS), or even macOS (mostly computers emulation). It is not exhaustive [1], but as long as something works well enough I'll keep using it. Note that I have only included links to emulation software itself, not to BIOS nor ROMs/games.
Arcades
- Multi-system: MAME & MAMEUI, RetroArch, FinalBurn NEO
Computers
- Commodore AMIGA: FS-UAE
- MS-DOS: DOSBox, DOSBox-X ScummVM
- Spectrum: Fuse
- Windows & Linux: VirtualBox if Linux host, VMWare Fusion Pro if macOS host (now free for personal use)
Consoles
- Microsoft XBox 360: Xenia & Xenia canary + Xenia canary game patches
- Nintendo 3DS: Citra (download no longer available)
- Nintendo GameBoy & GameBoy Color: higan, BGB (for development/debugging), VGB, RetroArch
- Nintendo GameBoy Advance: higan, VGBA, RetroArch
- Nintendo GameCube: Dolphin
- Nintendo NES: higan, RetroArch
- Nintendo SNES: higan, Snes9x, RetroArch
- Nintendo Switch: Ryujinx (download no longer available)
- Nintendo Wii: Dolphin
- Nintendo WiiU: Cemu
- Sega MegaDrive/Genesis: RetroArch
- Sony Playstation/PSX: RetroArch
- Sony Playstation 2/PS2: PCSX2
- Sony Playstation 3/PS3: RPCS3
- Sony Playstation 4/PS4: SHADPS4
- Sony Playstation Portable/PSP: PPSSPP
Miscellaneous
- J2ME: freej2me
[1]: If you want an exhaustive list, you can try for example Awesome Emulators.
