Emulators, cores, and the architecture behind preserving and playing classic games today.
A complete walkthrough keeping save files and save states in sync across a desktop, a handheld, and a laptop, so progress made on one device is exactly where you expect it on the next.
A complete walkthrough taking a messy folder of ROM files and turning it into a properly named, verified, artwork-complete collection that frontends like RetroArch and EmulationStation can actually use well.
Started in 2001 by developers Linuzappz and Shadow, PCSX2 reached a defining early milestone on December 19, 2002: the first successful boot of a PS2 game on any emulator.
Sony sued Connectix over its Virtual Game Station PS1 emulator, arguing that copying the PlayStation BIOS during development was copyright infringement. The Ninth Circuit disagreed — and the ruling still underpins console emulation's legal footing today.
A 256x224 image was never meant to be seen as a grid of hard, discrete pixels. Recreating how it actually looked on the display it was designed for is its own genuine technical problem.
The game runs and looks fine, but the audio pops, crackles, or stutters. This is almost always an audio buffer or sync problem, not a broken emulator core.
The controller works fine in other software, but your emulator doesn't see it — or sees it, but maps buttons incorrectly. Here's how to isolate where the problem actually is.
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.
RetroArch supports dozens of systems without reimplementing shaders, netplay, or rewind for each one — because the emulator logic and everything around it are deliberately different programs.