Roms and Emulators: The years of arcade games are finally over as 3D games have taken over them. Many of the consoles and games of those years are nowhere to be found, even in online stores. If you still want to play those good old games, you still have a choice-ROMs and emulators. You can play your favorite side-scrolling game right on your computer using an emulator. Using ROMs and emulators can be a bit confusing, especially if you are a novice. This article is about how to use ROMs and emulators to play those good old arcade games that are no longer available, expect in the forms of ROMS.

An emulator is the software that runs the games that you want to play. It is a program that recreates the console environment in your computer. This means, the original console is “emulated” and so games made for that console can be run on your computer using the emulator.
ROMs are games that were developed for consoles but saved as an image file on the computer. ROMs have different extensions like .smc or .nes etc. Images are pretty small in size ranging from a few kilobytes to about 1 or 2 MB. - Here are some common emulators:

- Atari 2600: Stella Stella can be downloaded from http://stella.sourceforge.net. It emulates the 2600 game console and supports almost all games that run on the 2600.
- NES: FCE ultra It is available on many platforms and supports network play via TCP/IP. It can be downloaded from http://fceultra.sourceforge.net
- Sega Dreamcast: Chankast Chankast is a free emulator for the Sega Dreamcast. Required, 2GHz processor or higher on your computer to play commercial games very well.
- Sony Playstation 2: PCSX2 The PCSX2 is the emulator for Sony Playstation. It is available in both Windows and Linux. You can download PCSX2 from www.pcsx2.net.
- Sony Playstation: pSX This is a playstation emulator for Microsoft Windows. pSX is a freeware and can be downloaded from http://psxemulator.gazaxian.com/. You need a Playstation BIOS dump to run games on the pSX emulator.
- Super Nintendo: ZSNES This emulator is available at www.znes.com and is available for many platforms like DOS, Windows and Macintosh. It offers many features and is a good option when it comes to choosing an emulator.

Once you have the emulator of your choice on your computer, the next step is to search for ROMs. There are many sites that are offering ROMs for direct download for free. You can also search for ROMs using peer-to-peer (P2P) tools. However, P2P may not be legal in all places and it is up to you to decide whether to use them or not.
The legality of using ROMs and emulators is disputed. However, there are circumstances in which you are perfectly legal in using them. You are allowed to play the downloaded ROMs if you delete the files within one day of downloading them. Also if you own the game, it is perfectly legal to download and play ROMs of the game on your computer. The third way is to obtain written permission from developers of the games.