This is not going to be as much as a guide as most might expect, it will be closer to "recommendations that a random stranger on the internet with some experience can give to people who might need help starting up".

The process can be easily boiled down to 3 steps:

1. Picking an emulator
2. Downloading the games
3. Playing

The first step is pretty self-explaining so here are my recommendations:

• For smaller games(say, early Pokemon games) I will strongly recommend Retroarch will be the perfect swiss army knife
• For almost everything else I would say a bit more "dedicated" emulators are going to be the way to go, examples include: YuZu, DeSmuMe, PCSX2, Dolphin etc.

Next step is picking a nice place to download the games, my main recommendations are: Vimm's lair(seriously, check it out!), romsgames.net(which I recently discovered and am enjoying so far) and maybe Gamulator.

For the final step you should simply extract the archive(or whatever you downloaded) and enjoy!

Thanks! I used The Internet Archive a lot since the site is ad-free and they also have collections and torrent links for every post

I miss the old NES Games!

Thanks for this Big Grin

thank you for the info!

finally, i can play xenogears again
thank you OP!

thanks.. it helps a lot