WHEN IT COMES TO NOSTALGIA, you can’t beat a bit of retro gaming. Why dig out your old computers and consoles when—armed with the right tools, tips, and know how—you can recreate your old favorites using your own PC? Emulation—the art of recreating one type of computer in another—is nothing new, as anyone who has attempted to play old 8-bit games on 16-bit hardware will attest. But as PCs grow ever more powerful, their ability to emulate older machines has only got easier over time.
These days, you can emulate just about any gaming machine from yesteryear on your PC, including arcade games. The more powerful your PC, the more options you have, but you don’t need anywhere near the latest hardware to relive games released in the 80s and 90s. In this feature, we’ll reveal everything you need to know about creating your own retro-gaming environment, from standalone emulators to slick frontends that make running a variety of games across a multitude of platforms as easy as it can be. We’ll even help you spec your own dedicated retro-gaming PC and show you how to run retro games on any PC to hand, armed only with a USB thumb drive. Enough chatter—the
LET’S BREAK DOWN WHAT you need to enjoy retro gaming. First, you need some form of emulator for whatever platform(s) you wish to recreate. Virtually every home computer ever built has at least one emulator available for it, from popular classics like the Commodore 64 and Amiga to more obscure machines like the Welsh Dragon 32 and Japanese MSX family of computers. The same is true for games consoles, whether you’re a fan of Sony, Sega, Xbox, or Nintendo. Long story short, whatever gaming platforms you’ve owned in your life, you’ll almost certainly find an emulator for it.
If you spent most of your youth hanging out in arcades, you’ll also be pleased to learn that it’s possible to recreate classic arcade games on your PC too. The best platform for this job is MAME (), on which hundreds of classic games from the 70s
