How To Play Your Favorite Retro Video Games on Your Windows PC

Do you miss the days of playing your favorite games on “old school” consoles like SNES? Today we take a look at several different emulators for your PC that will bring back the retro gaming nostalgia.

Super Nintendo (SNES)

For playing SNES games we chose the ZSNES project. Download and unzip the ZSNES package and click on zsnesw.exe to start it up…no installation needed. The emulator will start and you can load a game right away and begin to play…or go through and configure it to your liking. There are a lot of settings you can customize including Video, sound, the controls, and more. Ah, the good old days listening to cheesy music and reading a long intro about the story. Luckily it allows you to skip straight to the game by pressing Enter.

Here we take a look at playing the Ninja Gaiden Trilogy. The game play is smooth and controls were responsive. Sometimes the frame rates would slow down but over all it wasn’t too bad. We’d be remiss if we didn’t show one of the coolest games for the SNES…Super Mario World. One issue we noticed when closing out of ZSNES from the Taskbar, it was still running in the background. We had to end the process through Task Manager.

If you want to correctly close out of the emulator, while playing a game hit the Esc key. This will bring up the ZSNES menu where you can quit. Of course you can also change configurations and save your progress as well.

Download ZSNES

Gameboy Advance

Remember the Gameboy Advance handheld gaming system? There is a very nice emulator project for that too called Visual Boy Advance. As with the others, no installation is required. Just unzip the VBA file and run the VistualBoyAdvance executable. Click on File then Open and browse to your game. Again, you don’t need to unzip the ROMS just select them and the game will start.

Here we have a version of Zelda running. Graphics are great and controls very responsive. If you need to change some settings while playing playing a game, just select them from the toolbar and your game will pause while you make adjustments. If you have a game that has a long intro, and it doesn’t let you skip it, you can hold down the Spacebar and speed right through it and get to the action.


Download Visual Boy Advance

Nintendo 64

By far the best Nintendo 64 emulator is Project64. It’s had some updates over the years and does a great job of emulating the N64 experience. This one you do need to install…just follow the install wizard as normal. After installation you’ll find it under Project64 in the Start Menu. Launch Project64 and select your language, To load a game click on File then Open Rom, Navigate to where your game is and double-click to start it up.

There are many neat customizations you can do with the controls. We were able to configure an XBOX 360 Controller for PC on many of the games and they were responsive. Because N64 had such an odd controller, it might be a good idea to take a look at one so you can adjust the buttons correctly. There are also other options like changing the graphics and audio settings. The settings you can use will be based on your computer’s hardware. Once you get your settings and controller setup, this emulator is very cool if you were a fan of N64 back in the day. The graphics are great and the frame rate was very smooth on most games. The games play basically like the originals with previews of the games, intros, and levels.

Download Project64