Some call it a new era of gaming, others call it organized piracy. Whether you love 'em or hate 'em, the concept of the emulator is now firmly entrenched in modern videogame culture.
Steve Edwards

In the past, using computers such as the Amiga and Atari ST, back-bedroom programmers would demonstrate their technical prowess with the creation of demos; showcases for their immense talent ensconced on a floppy disk. They wowed the public and completely exploded the Public Domain scene.

As PCs and dedicated 3D technology became more commonplace, the sight of a textured spinning cube accompanied by techno music quickly became hackneyed and tiresome. Obviously, these technical geniuses needed a new challenge to get their teeth into. Enter the emulator, surely one of the greatest innovations of the 20th century.

Imagine having the facility to play all those classic games on your desktop PC, without the hassle of climbing into the attic to unearth a computer which probably gave up the will to live years ago. Emulators let you do just that. They are the perfect compromise between art and technology; programmers get satisfaction in a job well done; we get to play Elite and Knight Lore in our lunch hours.

The popularity of emulators may have escalated in recent years, helped in no small part by the rapid advances in PC technology, but the first incarnations (like A64, a Commodore 64 emulator for the Amiga) appeared as far back as 1991. True, they were hideously slow and ran next to little commercial software, but they were the seeds that would later grow into the emulator scene which exists today.