Many PC emulators are written in Intel assembly language, which is not directly portable to Macintosh. In many cases, though, it's faster to just start from scratch than to port large chunks of assembly. An emulator is a program which simulates a piece of hardware on your computer. In general, this simulation is done completely in software, so you shouldn't need to change anything with your computer's setup. The best part is that most emulators are shareware or freeware, so you won't have to spend money to try them out.
Emulators require a lot of processing power for best performance.
Some emulators require ROMs to do anything useful. Cartridge-based video games are encoded on ROM chips, and most computers store basic information in an onboard ROM chip. However, emulation.net will not provide ROMs for some systems because they are still copyrighted by the original developers. Please see this article about distributing ROMs for further information. Back to emulation.net .