

Most of the emulators available today are free and open source and developers don’t get much monetary benefits to work on them.

They have to rely on limited resources and many times public documentation is not available at all.
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While emulator developers constantly work to improve compatibility and performance, neither they nor the emulation software can be blamed if certain games don’t work on emulators. Even the most modern and powerful PCs can struggle to emulate games, especially games with high resolution 3D graphics. Note that emulators need considerable CPU and GPU power to emulate games, much higher than original game console hardware. Not all emulators will be listed in this article, only the most popular ones based on the console popularity and emulator development activity. This article just lists emulation software available for Linux and doesn’t encourage piracy of any sort. Downloading console firmware files and game ROMs from unauthorized sources without owning the actual console and game copy may be illegal and considered piracy. You need to own both game console and game copy to emulate games on PC. ROM files can be ripped or dumped from your game console or from cartridges and discs using third party software. To play games on emulators, you must have game files, typically called ROMs. Some emulators emulate these components as well making it easier to play games. Emulators require original file system dump from game consoles. Games running on these emulators see emulated components as if they were parts of a real game console and they cannot see the underlying platform (PC) on which the game is running on.ĭeveloping an accurate game emulator for PC is an extremely difficult task, involves reverse engineering and many times developers have to sacrifice accuracy to improve compatibility. Emulation allows you to play console exclusive games that are otherwise unplayable on PCs. Emulation software can emulate CPUs, GPUs, audio hardware and many other such physical components available in real game consoles. Emulation is a software compatibility layer that emulates hardware components of game consoles, instruction sets and related APIs.

This article will list popular game console emulation software available for Linux.
