April 8, 2009by Chris

Written by David de Niese in 2000 for his final year Computer Science project, NESCafe has been ehanced through many iterations to arrive at the most recent and stable release in 2007.

It is easily on of the finest Java based NES emulator available today.

NESCafe operates in any browser and will also run on the desktop. It faithfully emulates a high degree of Nintendo games and is a snap to add to any webpage.

NESCafe is currently operating at Max-Emulators at this page with 16 games.

For more information about NESCafe and how to implement it into your site - or just to play more online NES games, visit the author's website at www.nescafeweb.com.

Cheers to a mighty fine online emulator!

MaxEm 9.4

November 2, 2008by Chris

ZNES is the best Super Nintendo Emulator and is available for Windows, OSX, and Linux. ROMs are found all over the 'net but remain under copyright (you should at least own the associated cartridge if you procure a copy of the ROM - to fend off hungry lawyers).

CS 1108

The Super Nintendo

Nintendo rolled out the Super Nintendo Entertainment System in 1990 and it proved to be the best selling 16bit system of all time - but still did not equal Nintendo's success with the 8bit NES which sold 60 million worldwide to the SNES's 49 million.

Called "Super Famicom" in Japan, it was an instant hit. A lot of ground was to be gained on the main competitor - Nintendo fought it out with Sega in North America for four years before retaking the market in 1994. Ever since then, Sega has remained Nintendo's rival.

Shipping with Super Mario World in the USA and Canada, the SNES delivered the fun with the proven Mario side-scrollers and the invigorating 3D games such as F-Zero, Mario Cart, and StarFox.

Toward the end of its run, SNES surprised many people with advanced games from the software company Rare. Generating a revolutionary methodology in the video game development paradigm - Rare introduced pre-rendered graphics beginning with Donkey Kong Country - resulting in games with silky smooth graphics and a warm feeling of real quality -- and were also (most importantly) a lot of fun to play.

The NES appealed more to kids than adults - SNES tried to break away from the mold with various sports titles from EA (NHL, Madden, PGA) but Genesis held onto that market.

The SNES was a great sequel. It would later be trumped by the Nintendo 64, the Game Cube, and of course, the Wii.

CS 11-8

October 29, 2008by Chris

You can emulate the N64 nicely on your PC, Mac, or in Linux. Many years have been spent on creating N64 emulators - namely Project 64 for win32 and Sixty Force for Mac.

The Nintendo 64 was a powerhouse of a machine and the Pentium 100's at the time did not have much of a chance at emulating the 64bit Risc PowerPC chip, not to mention the silicon graphics reality coprocessor..

Nowadays, your mp3 player can emulate it.

Sixty Force will put a modern dual core system through its paces but will still maintain a smooth 30fps with near perfect audio.

CS 10-2008

October 27, 2008by Chris

The Nintendo DS is the second most successful handheld gaming system of all time with over 77 million units sold (June 2008). Nintendo's Gameboy is still the reining champ with 116 units sold worldwide.

With the DS selling close to three quarters of a million units per month and the new version coming out, this system is no where near the end of its product life cycle.

So that makes it a problem for the emulator world - there are still many millions of dollars to be made for Nintendo and so emulation of the DS is an iffy art at best.

There have already been some causalities - the coder of the popular DeSmuME emulator had to terminate development out of legal concerns with Nintendo. And that is to be expected.

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Currently, the best Nintendo DS emulator out there is iDeaS by Lino (second place goes to DeSmuME).

Both of these emulators faithfully emulate some DS games - each emulator's home page contains a list of compatible games - highly recommended reading to help save you time and effort.

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Apart from emulating the DS on your PC, Mac, or Linux, you can run emulators on the DS - an Apple II emulator is available and you can even run Linux on your DS. How cool is that?

CS 10-8

November 1, 2008by Chris

Kega and Genesis Plus are your best bets for Sega Genesis emulation.

Kega Fusion is hands down, the best win32 Genesis emulator available today. It also handles Master System, Gamegear and many other Sega products.

Genesis Plus by Richard Bannister offers near-perfect Genesis emulator for OSX.

CS 11-8

October 30, 2008by Chris

Stella is the best emulator for the Atari 2600. It is available for Windows, the Mac, and Linux.

Also noteworthy is the z26 Emulator for Windows and Linux.

Roms can legally be obtained from Atariage.com.

The widely admired Atari 2600 was released in October 1977, ran strong for 12 years, and is still produced today. Of Atari's initial entries into the growing video game industry, this console was revolutionary: a solid state system that easily connected to a television, accepted two joysticks, four paddles (Warlords anyone?) and featured multi-optioned gaming from a stack of cartridges that would reach to the moon.

The device was an intriguing novelty. To many people, the Atari 2600 was the introduction of next-generation video games or even video games in general - people were mesmerized when exploring the castles and dungeons in Adventure, when bouncing bullets through the blocks in Combat, or when guiding Pitfall Harry through the jungles and over the crocodiles.

Certainly, modern systems are exponentially more powerful (ie XBOX 360 is 5000 times faster), however, one of the fastest games ever was written for the Atari 2600 - Kaboom by Activision. This game got your blood pumping and it was unreal watching a skilled player whip through the higher levels making nanosecond decisions.

This was the machine that jump started the video game industry and remains near and dear to many of us.

CS 10-8

January 28, 2009by Chris

What a difference 20 years of technology can make. At the end of the 1970's, alongside the Apple II, the Atari 8bit computers were cutting edge.

Emulating the Atari 400 or 800 with home technology was an impossibility at the time but right now it is a piece of cake. Our multi-core processors can effortlessly replicate the legacy 8bit microprocessor' functionality -- even a 386 should be able to do it. Hopefully 20 years from now the same thing can be said for the Playstation 3 and the 360.

That various models of the Atari 8bit systems - 400, 800, XL versions, and the 5200 - are now emulated to an extremely high degree of accuracy in Windows, OS X, and in Linux, with several excellent public domain emulators.

There are still some concerns about legally procuring Atari 8bit ROMs so the emulator authors do not include the required Atari Operating Systems with their creations, however, you can get exactly what you need from this site.

Atari game ROMs are a little bit tricky to find on the net but huge stashes are available, if you're willing to wait a little bit (and if the downloads still are available - last tested: January 2009).

You can use this link to rapidlibrary.com acquire a 71.6MB installation package of the Atari800 emulator with over 2000 games! (filename: Atari 800 plus setup.exe)

The games appear as disk images and can easily be read from the emulator. The package contains two pdf's that map out the games for each image.

You can trust this file as I installed it last night and was more than delighted with the archive & emulator (my system is still alive and virus free). There are many other archives at www.rapidlibrary.com too - Atari 2600, SNES, Playstation, Commodore 64, etc.

The Emulators

Atari800Win Plus by Richard Lawrence is your best bet for win32 emulation. The emulator includes an installer and will get you up and running Atari 8bit programs in seconds.

Atari800MacX by Mark Grebe is easily your best Atari 8bit OS X solution with fullscreen and extended emulation functionality over the original PC counterpart - the Atari 800 win32 emulator by David Firth.

Atari800 will get you running in Linux.

Atari 8bit computers and the 5200 console were machines of beauty with their advanced audio and graphic chipsets. Sure they seem silly compared to our mindbending graphics and sound of today, but these devices, and their emulators, show us where we came from. The genesis of home computer technology is a beautiful thing.

CS 1.9

March 1, 2009by Chris

In the movie Star Trek II: The Wrath of Khan, you may have noticed that Captain Kirk has his very own Commodore PET at his modern digs.

Interesting that they never discovered flat panels in the original series' timeline - or moved away from CRT screens.

I wonder if Kirk used his futuristic 8bit Commodore PET to hack in and reprogram Starfleet's simulator and triumph over the 'no-win' Kobayashi Maru scenario? That rapscallion.

What a great movie.

April 10, 2009by Chris

JaC64 was written by Joakim Eriksson and functions in any browser provided that you have Java installed (a default setting). The emulator was written to share the creative development efforts of Commodore 64 games, applications, and SID tracks over the net.

JaC64 is installed at Max-Emulators.com and is found at this page with 39 games. Note that the keypad is used to emulate joystick 1 or joystick 2 - click the joystick links if you have trouble with the control. It takes a few seconds for the games to load and initialize.

The emulator also functions on the PS3, provided that Linux is installed.

For more information and how to configure Jac64 into your own website, visit the author's website at www.jac64.com.

Cheers to another mighty fine online emulator

MaxEm 9.4

November 4, 2008by Chris

It is no surprise that the majority of Apple II emulators are available for OSX, however there are some great Windows versions which range from the shareware 'OASIS', supporting the Apple II, II , and IIe models to the XGS32 emulator which faithfully emulates the Apple IIGS (the "only Apple IIGS emulator that supports Windows 9x/NT/2000" editors note: XP too). Note that the Apple GS is totally backwards compatible with all legacy Apple II systems.

For the Mac, the Open Source emulator Catakig and the freeware OSXII are popular. For a step up to the Apple IIGS, the shareware emulator bernie ][ the rescue is the leading choice. Finally, there is the original KEGS for OSX.

For Linux users, the KEGS emulator (Kent's Emulated GS) is the best.

Please note that the Apple II operating systems remain under copyright. Questionable copies are available in the wilds of the Internet, however, so be wary of copyright ethics and hungry lawyers.. If you have a copy of the software on a ROM chip (ie on the motherboard of that great Apple II machine collecting dust in your attic) then you may lawfully acquire a copy.

CS 11-8

November 9, 2008by Chris

For the original Macintosh experience on your PC, look to the MiniVmac Macintosh emulator.

Also worth noting is the Executor application from Ground Zero - a Mac emulator that utilizes no proprietary Mac software.

October 30, 2008by Chris

Pubic domain Amiga emulators are available for a variety of operating systems: MAX UAE Amiga 500/1000/2000 for OSX and UAE for Windows and Linux.

Amiga Kickstart, OS, and program images are protected by copyright law and may be purchased at www.amigaforever.com

Amiga binaries are scattered throughout the far reaches of the internet including emule, torrents, limewire, ares, IRC, and USENET - www.newzbin.com.

CS 10-8

January 19, 2009by Chris

THE SONY PLAYSTATION emulation scene is active throughout a wide array of computers, operating systems, consoles, and handhelds.

Leading the pack is the ePSXe emulator which provides the best experience with near perfect emulation over a wide array of PSX games. The latest release of ePSXe was in 2008 for Windows. A Linux version of ePSXe is also available.

Unfortunately, for the Mac, Playstation 1 emulation has stalled with the demo offering of 'PSX' which does not support plugins nor ISO compatibility (physical disk only). If you want PSX on your Mac then your best bet it to use bootcamp & XP.

The iPhone/touch Playstation scene is strong with the release of PSX4All from ZodTTD. It provides accurate emulation and good frame rates for the jailbroken devices. Note that PSX4All is not yet available for the iPod touch second generation as a public jailbreak has not been released from the Dev Team. 'redsn0w' will hopefully appear any day now, if the Dev Team can solve the boot problem). See the redsn0w video here.

PSX emulators require the copyright protected Playstation BIOS which can be dumped from your console or found on the Internet.

CS 1.9

October 28, 2008by Chris

The best Playstation 2 emulator available for Windows and Linux is PCSX2 (by the creators of the PS1 emulator, PSX). PS2 emulators are not available for OSX.

Sony is still making a killing with sales of the Playstation 2. It is very much alive even though the PS3 went on sale over two years ago.

The PS2 is the world's most successful console with 140 million units sold to date - even trumping the 116 million Gameboys Nintendo sold. Sony sells well over a hundred thousand PS2's a month.

Even though the PS2 is still going gangbusters, there is very active emulation scene happening for it. To legally emulate the PS2, you require the BIOS from your console (that's right you need to own a PS2). Please do not ask the creators of PS2 emulators or this website for a copy of the PS2 bios.

The brains of the PS2 - the Emotion Engine is an incredibly powerful chip - emulation of it requires the latest and greatest home technology: dual core CPU at the very least for a respectable 30 FPS.

CS 10-8