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A console and a computer are different problems

A console was built to do one thing: put a cartridge or a disc in, and play. There is usually nothing to configure, because there was nothing to configure originally. Emulating one is normally as simple as opening a file.

A computer had a keyboard, an operating system, and a user who was expected to type. Emulating one means recreating that whole environment — which model, how much memory, which disk in which drive, and often the operating system itself as a separate file. That is why the Amiga and the Apple II have a reputation for being difficult while the Mega Drive does not. It is not that the emulators are worse. It is that there is more of a machine to recreate.

This matters practically: a computer usually needs a keyboard, and a keyboard is the thing you do not have on a handheld. Every system page here says plainly whether you will need one.

What a BIOS actually is

Most machines had a chip soldered to the motherboard holding the code that runs before anything else — the code that draws the startup screen, finds the disk drive, and hands control to your software. On a real machine that chip is simply there. An emulator has no chip, so you have to hand it the chip's contents as a file.

That file is what people mean by a BIOS, a firmware, or on the Amiga a Kickstart. It is not the game, and it is not the emulator. It is the missing third piece, and it is the single most common reason something refuses to boot with no useful error message.

How many you need varies more than people expect, and usually less than they fear. Most systems that need one need exactly one. The Amiga is the case everyone hits: one Kickstart file covers nearly all Amiga 500 software, a second covers the Amiga 1200, and you only need the second if you are emulating the later machine. Every system page here states the number.

Which ones you can get legally

This varies genuinely, and it is worth knowing rather than guessing:

• Not needed at all. Many systems are emulated well enough that no firmware file is required — the emulator reimplements what the chip did.
• Free from the rights holder. A few firmwares have been released for redistribution, and some open hardware never had a proprietary one to begin with.
• Buyable. Amiga Kickstart ROMs are sold legitimately by Cloanto as part of Amiga Forever. PICO-8 is a $15 program you buy from its author. These are the cleanest cases: pay, and you are done.
• Dump your own. The lawful route is extracting the file from hardware you own.
• No legal source. For some systems there is simply no legitimate route, and pages here say so rather than implying otherwise.

This site names files and explains what they do. It does not host them, link to them, or publish checksums for them.

TOSEC, No-Intro, Redump — and why the biggest set is usually the wrong one

These are cataloguing projects. They do not distribute anything; they publish authoritative lists describing exactly what a correct dump of each piece of software looks like, so a collection can be checked against a known standard. Each covers a different territory:

• No-Intro catalogues cartridge dumps — one clean, verified file per release.
• Redump does the same for optical discs, where getting a byte-perfect copy is considerably harder.
• TOSEC covers home computers very broadly: disks, tapes, and every variant including cracked releases, alternate versions and broken dumps. Superb as an archive. Frustrating as a games folder, because you get nine versions of everything.
• MAME software lists tie verified dumps to specific machines, which is often the only surviving record for obscure hardware.
• WHDLoad is different in kind: a community project that repackages Amiga floppy games as hard-disk installs that boot straight into the game with no disk swapping.

The practical lesson: the completist set and the playable set are not the same thing, and for most people the smaller curated one is the right choice.

Where software legally exists

Most commercial software from these machines is still under copyright, including a great deal that nobody is selling and nobody appears to own any more. Abandoned is not the same as free, and this site tries not to blur the two.

What is genuinely free is larger than people assume: decades of public-domain and shareware libraries distributed freely at the time, homebrew scenes still producing new work for machines from the seventies, and titles whose rights holders have explicitly released them. The Internet Archive hosts a great deal of this legitimately. Individual system pages point at what is actually free for that machine.

How this site judges things

Two scores per machine, kept separate on purpose. Fun today asks whether someone with no nostalgia would enjoy it now. Historical importance asks whether it mattered. A machine can score 1 and 5 — the RCA Studio II does — and calling that "bad" would miss the point entirely. The label at the top of each page comes from combining the two, so significance is always visible next to enjoyment.

Setup effort is computed from facts rather than opinion: whether firmware is needed and how obtainable it is, whether media needs converting, how many manual steps are involved, and how demanding it is to run. That means the ratings are consistent across every page, which a hand-written label never would be.

Where a number could not be verified, the page says so. An admitted gap is more useful than a confident guess, and there are more gaps here than a tidier site would show.