http://live.pirillo.com/ – Chris asks if game emulation is bad. The answer: it’s a gray area. The actual act of downloading the ROM (read-only memory) from the Internet is relatively benign. Now, if you’re asking about actually playing old video games on your computer: that can be a very good thing – so long as you own the license for the game.

There are several emulators you can use to play classic video games (and newer ones) on your system.

For the NES, try jNES:

Jnes is a NES emulator for win32 platforms that uses DirectX for it’s hardware interface. It’s emulation capabilities include graphics, sound, input devices, and emulating quite a few memory mapping boards found in most USA games and a few popular japanese ones. Jnes boasts a fairly intuitive user interface that makes playing NES a little more enjoyable. One of the coolest features is the included database of Pro-Action-Replay and Game Genie cheats.

For the SNES you can try ZNES:

ZSNES is a Super Nintendo emulator programmed by zsKnight and _Demo_. On April 2, 2001 the ZSNES project was GPL’ed and its source released to the public. It currently runs on Windows, Linux, FreeBSD, and DOS. Remember that this is a public beta so don’t expect this to run on your machine.

If you’re looking to play some old arcade games, try MAME:

Even though MAME allows people to enjoy the long-lost arcade games and even some newer ones, the main purpose of the project is to document the hardware (and software) of the arcade games. There are already many dead arcade boards, whose function has been brought to life in MAME. Being able to play the games is just a nice side-effect. The huge success of MAME would not be possible without the talent of the programmers who joined to form the MAME team. At the moment, there are about 100 people on the team, but there is a large number of contributors outside the team too. Aaron Giles is the current coordinator of the project.

We’ve named only a few emulators out there. Which ones do you use?