Free video game console emulators

MAME (formerly an acronym of Multiple Arcade Machine Emulator) is a free and open-source emulator designed to emulate the hardware of arcade games, later expanded to include video game consoles, old computers and other systems in software on modern personal computers and other platforms. Its intention is to preserve gaming history by preventing vintage video games from being lost or forgotten. It does this by emulating the inner workings of the emulated machines; the ability to actually play the video games is considered "a nice side effect". Joystiq has listed MAME as an application that ever

Nintendo GameCube and Wii emulation software

PCSX2 is a free and open-source emulator of the PlayStation 2 for x86 computers. It supports most PlayStation 2 video games with a high level of compatibility and functionality, and also supports a number of improvements over gameplay on a traditional PlayStation 2, such as the ability to use higher resolutions than native, anti-aliasing and texture filtering. It has been released for Windows, Linux, and macOS.

VisualBoyAdvance (commonly abbreviated as VBA) is a free emulator of the Game Boy, Game Boy Color, and Game Boy Advance handheld game consoles as well as of Super Game Boy and Super Game Boy 2.

PPSSPP (an acronym for "PlayStation Portable Simulator Suitable for Playing Portably") is a free and open-source PSP emulator for Windows, macOS, Linux, iOS, Android, Nintendo Wii U, Nintendo Switch, BlackBerry 10, MeeGo, Pandora, Xbox Series X/S and Symbian with a focus on speed and portability. It was released to the public on November 1, 2012, licensed under the GNU GPLv2 or later. The PPSSPP project was created by Henrik Rydgård, one of the co-founders of the Dolphin emulator.

RPCS3 is a free and open-source emulator and debugger for the Sony PlayStation 3 that runs on Windows, Linux, FreeBSD and macOS operating systems, allowing PlayStation 3 games and software to be played and debugged on a personal computer. It is in active development, targeting x86-64 and ARM64 CPUs featuring OpenGL and Vulkan as backend renderers.

Nintendo 3DS emulator

Nintendo Switch emulation software

ZSNES is an emulator for the Super Nintendo Entertainment System released as free software. There are official ports for Linux, MS-DOS, Windows, and unofficial ports for Xbox, and macOS.

Project64 is a free and open-source Nintendo 64 emulator written in the programming languages C and C++ for Microsoft Windows. This software uses a plug-in system allowing third-party groups to use their own plug-ins to implement specific components. Project64 can play Nintendo 64 games on a computer reading ROM images, either dumped from the read-only memory of a Nintendo 64 ROM cartridge or created directly on the computer as homebrew.

Mednafen (My Emulator Doesn't Need A Frickin' Excellent Name), formerly known as Nintencer, is an OpenGL and SDL multi-system free software wrapper that bundles various original and third-party emulation cores into a single package, and is driven by command-line input. It is distributed under the terms of the GPL-2.0-or-later license. Certain emulation cores of Mednafen have been ported to RetroArch/Libretro.

Nestopia UE - and its predecessor Nestopia - are open-source NES/Famicom emulators designed to emulate the NES hardware as accurately as possible.

FCEUX is an open-source Nintendo Entertainment System and Family Computer Disk System emulator. It is a merger of various forks of FCE Ultra.

Cemu is a free and open-source Wii U emulator, first released on October 13, 2015 for Microsoft Windows as a closed-source emulator developed by Exzap and Petergov. With the release of Cemu 2.1 on August 27, 2024 it gained stable support for Linux and macOS. Though still under development, it is able to run the majority of games smoothly, assuming compatible hardware. The popularity of the emulator spiked with the release of The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild in 2017 as Cemu successfully booted and ran the title within hours of its release.

emulation software that aims to recreate the hardware of many classic home computer systems

multi-system emulator

PCSX is a free and open-source, video game console emulator that allows software designed to be used with the Sony PlayStation to run on personal computers. Over the years, development changed hands several times with PCSX-Reloaded (PCSXR) now being the main version. As of 2021, the emulator seems to be no longer under active development. A newer, actively maintained fork of PCSX-Reloaded is PCSX-Redux.

emulator for the Atari 2600 game console

Ryujinx is a discontinued free and open-source emulator of the Nintendo Switch. It was first released on February 5, 2018 and supported more than 3,000 games by 2024.

OpenEmu is an open-source multi-system video game emulator designed for macOS. It provides a plugin interface to emulate numerous consoles' hardware, such as the Nintendo Entertainment System, Genesis, Game Boy, and many more. The architecture allows for other developers to add new cores to the base system without the need to account for specific macOS APIs.