Console Emulators - Great fun for rainy winter days!

If you're older than 30 chances are you have either owned an old Nintendo console back in the day or knew someone who did. Well, if you have been following the depth and quality decline of games in recent decades you may agree when I say that the heart has gone largely missing in many if not most game titles. Especially the "top sellers". Graphics are insanely good but so many times the gameplay feels dull, and the magic is completely missing.

Cal it nostalgia, but there were games that used to be great fun, were challenging and felt rewarding to play and eventually beat, games that once required a specific infrastructure to be played (meaning you needed that hardware console, a tv screen, controllers and the respective game module to enjoy some great video game).

Well, now that my woman and I are out on the road, we have rediscovered the magic of the old Nintendo days. Because -as many veterans may not know - there have long been emulators out there that let you play any old Nintendo or Playstation title on literally any computer system of today. For free.

All you really need to re-experience that old video gaming flair is the emulator in question, a "rom" as they are called - digital representations of the old gaming modules compiled into a single file, and any old gamepad you or your neighbor may have laying around, any will do provided it has a USB cable and still works. Even cheap used ones of ebay wil do.

Now as you can imagine, playing old Nintendo titles this way is somewhat of a legal grey area. So I will not be able to link you the files in question here. But I will give some recommendations so you can go and find them on your own.

If you want to play some SNES from back in the day, I can totally recommend you go do a search for "sourceforge ZSNES" which is my favorite SNES emulator for desktops and laptops. I see they also have mobile emulators by now which is just crazy ;)

Then all you need to do is do another search for "game title rom" and download the file off the internet. There are still many sites that offer these roms to the world while some other large ones had to shut down over legal complaints.

If you don't know where to start you can do a search for "best games for SNES" and get some inspiration from the many articles out there ranking all the Super Nintendo titles ever made.

Best of all - this will also work for Nintendo 64, as most modern systems (even with onboard graphics) can run games like Mario Kart 64 or Zelda: Ocarina of Time without any issues. You want to look for "Project 64" which is the name of a great N64 emulator!

The same goes for most other consoles you can name, there are numerous emulators for all sorts of consoles out there, from Playstation 1,2,3 to Sega Dreamcast or even for Nintendo's Gameboy. Just do some digging and you will find it.

Now, you may think: Well, I do have my old console still, why do I need an emulator? Well because it will not only give you access to all the titles you may have never gotten your hands on when you were young, emulators also come with all sorts of awesome features.

You can utilize graphic filters and higher resolutions to make the game more beautiful than it ever was on the old console. You have way better control over saving your game, allowing you to save your progress at any point - not just where the programmers once decided you could. The hardest games become rather fun this way as you can actually beat them now instead of going insane over outlandishly hard segments or levels.

You can also find hacks by fans who have changed the roms to make a game more balanced, harder or even add translations for legendary games that never made it out of Japan onto the international markets. I have seen hacks for games that added multiplayer functionality were there never was any with the original, and programs like ZSNES just works so amazingly well that it's quite inspiring... To see fan-made software just to keep their legends alive and available for an entire new generation of gamers - Wow.

If you have never tried "Secret of Mana", if you have never played "Donkey Kong Country" or "Zelda: Ocarina of Time" - this is your chance <3

Have fun ;)

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Thanks for stopping by <3