I talk a lot on this website and others about how you should emulate all of your videogames rather than pay a whole bunch of money every month to some corporate content-delivery network. Emulators are just another kind of computer software; they're not inherently criminal and, in some cases, they're the only way you can ever play certain games again. As long as you keep to abandonware and games you have physical copies of, no one can ever prosecute you for piracy. But, before we can talk about games, we need to talk about the emulators; how to install, run, and configure them.
The first obstacle is finding them. Since everyone has been programmed to believe that emulators are full of malware, they're afraid to search for them. And, yes, there are a lot of malefactors who run websites claiming to have emulators, "just install our convenient installer for one-click access to games!" Yeah, no. Most emulators don't need installers, and those that do should only be downloaded from the official project website. One of the most trustworthy emulator databases on the internet is Zophar's Domain. It's been around since 1996 and offers emulators for pretty much all the game consoles released throughout time.
In this section, we'll test out emulators using Snes9x, the most popular Super NES emulator. Why not Stella, the Atari VCS emulator? Because we've already covered that one.
Snes9x has the added complication of needing some outmoded DirectX runtimes in order to work properly, allowing us to have a look at how to address a somewhat advanced computer problem. First, though, grab the 64-bit Windows version from here. Next, make a new folder in your Documents directory and call it "Snes9x". Open the ZIP file you downloaded just now and extract the file called "snes9x-x64.exe" into the Snes9x folder and launch it. The very first thing it will do is complain about a missing DirectX 9 runtime file. For the time being, Microsoft still offers the old runtimes for previous editions of DirectX because new software occasionally requires it. In case you closed the ZIP file with the "snes9x-faqs.txt" file in it, here's the link to Microsoft's DX9 runtime installer. Once you've installed that, run it. It's a fairly simple fix, but, as it turns out, most computer problems have simple fixes that only need a little first-page internet search to find. You're going to see errors of this kind happen a lot in casual computer use; don't panic, just remember to take a screenshot of your error messages so you can refer to them later.
Once the install finishes, run Snes9x again to verify the problem is fixed. At this point, all the major issues to at least running the software should be fixed, but each use-case is different. If another error shows up, search DDG for the answer. Once the software is shown to run without error messages, now we can concern ourselves with controller input. At this stage, we will definitely want a gamepad. The Logitech F310 is a USB Type-A wired gamepad that only costs about $15 US. Its wireless counterpart, F710, gained notoriety in mid-2023 as the main dive control on the Oceangate submersible. I don't like those, they tend to cut out on me. Whatever you choose, a controller of some kind will make it much easier to use the game software you plan to run. Until then, however, we can configure Snes9x to respond to keyboard input.
Now, we need a game to run. Go to this Internet Archive collection
and download only the file called "Aaahh!!! Real Monsters (USA).7z". Please resist the urge to download other files. In your Snes9x folder, create a new subfolder called "games", then use 7Zip to extract the Aaahh!!! Real Monsters SMC file into it. Attempting to select the unrecognised SMC filetype will bring up a prompt where Windows will ask you what program you want to associate that filetype with; select "Browse...", then find snes9x-x64.exe and select it. Now, open the game file to verify that you can hear sound and you can control the game. Congratulations! You can now play Super NES games on your computer!
The process for installing other emulators is largely the same—create a folder for it, extract the files it needs to run, get games and associate their filetypes with the emulator software in Windows.
WARNING While it may be tempting to download every game available for every system without a thought to intellectual property infringement, playing console games on your computer comes dangerously close to being a federal crime. When looking for games to play on your emulator software, avoid the titles on this list
, unless you happen to own a physical copy. If a game does not appear on this list, it is considered abandonware and may be downloaded and played without legal censure.