Play old games on your PC Video

Play old games on your PC Video Transcript

[ pac man noises ]

>>Ah, barrel in the foot! Hey remember the old classic games from Nintendo, Sega, even Atari? Well you can play them again in more than just your mind. I'm Tom Merritt editor from CNET.com. On this edition of Insider's Secrets, I'll show you how to play classic old video games right on your PC. ^M00:00:19 [ Music ] ^M00:00:31 Let's use a Sega Genesis as an example. Now the old video game systems had very tiny processors and memory. What that means is you can play those old time games on your big time processor and memory holding PC using something called an emulator. Now an emulator like this one called Jenz, pretends to be the old machine's hardware but it's running a software. Once the emulator is running you open a file called a ROM to play a game. ROM stands for Read Only Memory. In the olden days, the software for the game was stored in Read Only Memory inside the cartridge. These days you can extract that software and store it as a file. Folks call that file a ROM, in honor of its hardwired predecessor. How do you play these games though? Well it starts by downloading the emulator software. Here are a few emulators you can get off the internet. Stella emulates that Atari platform, letting you relive the simpler times of Combat and Qbert. MAME, the Multiple Arcade Machine Emulator, emulates the old stand up arcade games. SNES9X from SNES9X dot com helps you relive the Super Nintendo years and a DOS box emulates DOS, so those old games like Sim City can run at normal speed. There are plenty others out there if you just search around for game emulators. Once you've picked your favorite, it's time to play. Download the emulator of choice and follow the instructions to install it. Now some of them are more complicated than others. Depending on the model, you'll load the ROM one way or another and control the game either through a joystick or keyboard controls. Then you're off and playing! Now one final somber note about ROMs, there's a whole legal morass about what's legal and what's not. In some countries it's legal to have a software ROM if you have the cartridge, in some countries that may not be true. So if you want to play it totally safe, only download ROMs that have been licensed for your use. That's it for this Insider's Secret. I'm Tom Merritt, enjoy your emulated gaming. ^M00:02:26 [ Music ]