Have a hankering for some Pac-Man, Mario or even the hallowed Street Fighter II? With Mediaportal’s My Emulators plugin, all your favorite classic video games are just a remote click away.

ROMS and Emulators

Emulators are programs that allow your computer to run games designed for other systems - arcade boards, Sega Genesis, NES, and so on. ROMs are the games themselves. Almost every system ever invented has a working emulator and almost every game is available as a ROM on the internet.

Now, possessing a ROM is of questionable legal standing. Although it may seem like no one could make money off Duck Hunt or Pac-Man, companies are increasingly releasing their ancient classics for modern systems. So tread carefully.

Some of the most popular emulators include:

Mediaportal

Open source DVR program Mediaportal supports a plugin called My Emulators which nicely integrates your ROMs and emulators. This is convenient, but not necessarily the best solution for a couple of reasons:

  • Mediaportal setup sucks. Everytime you want to rename a game, add a screenshot, or adjust your emulators you have to quit MP, load up the setup program, do your business, and then reboot MP to see if it worked.
  • Poor MAME support. Mediaportal’s plugin doesn’t hook into the MAME universe well. No Goodtools support, no way to access cloned games, displays my Neogeo bios as a games.
  • Limited Organization My emulators has only a few ways of displaying your ROMs.

Other Front-Ends

Using the Multishortcut plugin, you can call several other stand-alone front ends. These are more feature-heavy and customizeable than My Emulators. I haven’t tried them all, but here are some of the most well known options:

Controllers

Now, you’ve got your games, you’ve got a nice way to display them… how do you control them?

USB Gamepad

This is cheap and easy. $20 gets you a USB compatible, PS2-like controller. Fine for most home systems, but not enough for certain situations that demand extra attention.

Nintendo 64

I find that N64 games really need their original controller to even be playable. Luckily, you can plug that funky thing right into your PC using a USB adapter. Now, readily eBay has a ton of cheap-o versions but the ultimate in N64 adapters is the Adaptoid. Of course it costs nearly $40 and is out of stock, but…

Arcade Sticks

Frankly, it sucks to play arcade games on a joypad. Arcade games are designed around certain controls. Pac-Man needs a 4-way stick. Street Fighter needs six buttons. Centipede needs a track ball. Robotron needs two joysticks!

There’s a couple options here: buy or build. If you want to buy, check out the X-Arcade or SlikStik.

If you want to build a controller, look here for more info than you can imagine.

That concludes our brief introduction to video games on your HTPC. I certainly plan on delving into the art of building your own controls as well as finding the perfect front end. If you’re really interested, you can even build your own arcade cabinet!

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