Emulators

Emulating any of these platforms on your local machine is fairly simple these days, and in most cases doesn't even require setting up a full VM!

Back in the 80s/90s, before the market standardized on the Windows/MacOS/*nix ecosystem we know today, there were many more operating systems to choose from. Some of them were designed for hobbyists. Others were professional enterprise machines. Emulating these platforms is a little more complicated than the ones above, as they may require emulation of unique or archaic chipsets. Here's what we know:

Emulators for video game platforms are a big more complex than your average OS emulator, as they generally require emulation of the entire underlying unique chipsets these platforms use. However, most of them are fairly simple to use: Simply open the emulator, and tell it which ROM file (game) to open.

Some of these emulators require a second ROM to run: That of the console's firmware. Most of them do not, but we will let you know if any of them do.

The most reliable and stable game console emulators that we know of are as follows:

For NES emulation, you want FCEUX. It is the successor project to the infamous FCE and FCE Ultra emulators. It has been ported to all the major operating systems on its releases page or you can visit the project on Github at TASEmulators/fceux.

For Debian/Ubuntu users, it is already in the stock repos, and you can grab it with apt install fceux.

Another popular alternative is punesemu/puNES, which also doubles as a player for NSF music files.

Handheld emulation is no different than console emulation - we just have them sorted separately for readability's sake. Our top picks are as follows:

Visual Boy Advance has been the gold standard for Game Boy emulation for a very long time. It'll boot ROMs from the whole Game Boy Family. You can get it on pretty much every major platform, with the visualboyadvance-m/visualboyadvance-m fork being the most popular. Just download the appropriate version for your operating system, and you're good to go.

For Linux users, one of these versions may already be in your distro's package manager, and if not you can find it in Flatpak.