To game or not to game

Ah, well isn't this amazing. I am sitting here at work on a Saturday morning with not more to do then look at a computer screen and ponder why I am not gaming. Well, largely because I don't want to get caught. However, today I think I am going to talk about game emulators for the PC.

In particular NES emulators and the games for it. Most of you know that I recently started setting up a Home Theater PC (HTPC) and of course, I had to include the game emulators so that I can really have an all in one kind of box. It is pretty sweet to be able to play Mario, Zelda, and more again for the NES since I haven't had a system in years. The best thing is that with most of the emulators on the market, you can load the emulator to a flash drive and run it from that location without any lasting footprint on the PC that you are using. This is great for those work computers that no one monitors much or school computers where you can't install software. I can have my games and player in my pocket and pull up and start playing where I have access. At a friends house, well I can play there.

Now, there is a catch to game emulators that I should make clear. If you don't currently own the game that you have the ROM (the file that lets you play the game) then it is technically illegal to have the ROM. With that said, just google NES ROM's or game emulator's sometime and you will have a plethora of results. Nice heh?

The worst thing about emulators though is that everything is by keyboard. I just can't play Mario, or most games, with the keyboard. For this, I went and picked up a cheap USB game controller that looks similar to the PS2 controller and then I had to meticulously set up the buttons on the controller to work for my game emulator. Now though, it is set up pretty sweet and it is great to be able to play alot of the games from my childhood again.

Of course, when the Wii releases from Nintendo I may use thier service to play all of these old games. This is granted they don't charge you arms and legs to obtain all of the old games I used to love and play so much. I am sure that whatever emulator they will have built into the Wii will probably function better then whatever is built for a PC. Still, it is pretty cool to have them available again.