Snes9x is a portable, Super Nintendo Entertainment System (SNES) emulator. It allows you to play most games designed for the SNES and Super Famicom Nintendo game systems on your PC.



RetroArch is described as 'A portable, fast, and lightweight emulator frontend supporting classic and modern gaming systems with features like real-time rewinding and shader support' and is a very popular Game Emulator in the gaming software category. There are more than 100 alternatives to RetroArch for a variety of platforms, including Windows, Linux, Mac, Android and iPhone apps. The best RetroArch alternative is DuckStation, which is free. Other great apps like RetroArch are Lemuroid, PlayOnLinux - PlayOnMac, OpenEmu and Lakka.
Snes9x is a portable, Super Nintendo Entertainment System (SNES) emulator. It allows you to play most games designed for the SNES and Super Famicom Nintendo game systems on your PC.



MAME stands for Multiple Arcade Machine Emulator. When used in conjunction with images of the original arcade game's ROM and disk data, MAME attempts to reproduce that game as faithfully as possible on a more modern general-purpose computer.


mGBA is an open source emulator of the Game Boy Advance. The goals are speed and accuracy.

ZSNES is a Super Nintendo Entertainment System emulator. Aside from emulation accuracy, many interface features first introduced in ZSNES have been adopted by other emulators. ZSNES interface features include: Smoothing and dynamic image scaling; screenshot capture; state...



An experimental open-source Nintendo 3DS emulator/debugger written in C++. At this time, it only emulates a very small subset of 3DS hardware, and therefore is only useful for booting/debugging very simple homebrew demos. Citra is licensed under the GPLv2. Refer to the license.

Project64 is a Nintendo 64 emulator for the Windows platform. It employs a plugin system that allows 3rd party developers to implement their own software. It is an emulator, meaning that the user has the option to run ROM files that can be extracted from a Nintendo 64 game...

ChimeraOS (formerly GamerOS) is an operating system that provides an out of the box couch gaming experience. After installation, boot directly into Steam Big Picture and start playing your favorite games.




LaunchBox was originally built as an attractive frontend to DOSBox, but has since expanded to support both modern PC games and emulated console platforms. LaunchBox aims to be the one-stop shop for gaming on your computer, for both modern and...




ePSXe (enhanced PSX emulator) is an emulator of the PlayStation video game console for x86-based PC hardware. ePSXe makes use of a plugin system to emulate GPU, SPU, and CD drive functions, similar to the model first introduced in PSEmu Pro.




An open-source Epic Games Launcher alternative and normal game launcher for macOS written in Swift. We started this project to create a GUI frontend for Legendary and to play Windows games using game porting toolkit by Apple.

Ares, which apparently replaced higan, was formerly known as bsnes. The project was renamed after becoming a multi-system emulator.
Pegasus is a graphical frontend for browsing your game library (especially retro games) and launching them from one place. It's focusing on customizability, cross platform support (including embedded devices) and high performance.



Retroarch is not an emulator. Retroarch is a frontend for Libretro, which is a backend in which "cores" can be implemented and then run through a frontend(RA in this case.) These cores are emulators, and are what do most of the work of emulating systems. The vast majority of Libretro cores are simply preexisting emulators (like Snes9x!) ported into the Libretro API.