Emulators, cores, and the architecture behind preserving and playing classic games today.
Why software emulation of games and computers became its own discipline, who started the project most responsible for legitimizing it, and how a single court case settled whether any of this was legal in the first place.
A complete walkthrough enabling RetroAchievements — earning genuine achievements for classic games that never had them, verified against actual game memory state to prevent cheating.
A complete walkthrough adding decorative bezels around the emulated screen — arcade cabinet art, console-themed frames, or your own custom artwork — and building one from scratch.
A complete walkthrough setting up configuration that applies only to a specific game, or only to a specific core, without changing your global defaults for everything else.
A complete walkthrough turning a Raspberry Pi into a dedicated retro gaming console — from flashing the image to configuring controllers and adding your first games.
Characters look too wide, too thin, or the image doesn't fill the screen correctly. This almost always traces to a pixel-aspect-ratio setting, not the emulator core rendering incorrectly.
A save state that worked before an update now fails to load, or loads into a corrupted state. This is expected behavior given how save states actually work — here's what to do about it.
The core loads but the game never appears — just a black screen, or an immediate crash back to the menu. Here's how to isolate whether it's the ROM, the core, or your video configuration.
On October 9, 2019, Tony Cannon released GGPO under the MIT license, removing the licensing friction that had limited its adoption and helping cement rollback as the fighting game industry's netcode standard.
On September 19, 2018, Nintendo's own subscription service began shipping with 20 emulated NES games included — a striking contrast to the company's history of aggressively pursuing unauthorized ROM sites.