Emulators and virtual machines

This page lists various categories of emulators and virtual machine software out there.

Emulators emulate, or pretend to be, something else. Usually hardware, but sometimes also used to refer to software being emulated.

Virtual machines implement in software a fake hardware environment. Unlike emulaters, virtual machines never existed to begin with. They are typically created to idealize CPUs to more portably implement languages on top of them.

Hardware

Commodore

• VICE - C64 C128 VIC-20

Misc

• qemu - emulates different types of CPUs.

x86

• Bochs
• VMware - Supports running Windows, Linux, FreeBSD, Novell OS.

Game Consoles

Arcade

• MAME

Game Boy and Game Boy advance

• Gnuboy
• Visual Boy Advance

Nes/Famicon

• FCE Ultra
• TuxNES

Nintendo 64

• Fake64
• Mupen64

Sony Playstation and Playstation 2

• ePSXe
• PCSX2

Misc

• ScummVM - Classic LucasArts engine for point-and-click adventures.

OS

• colinux - allows running Linux on Microsoft Windows.
• CrossOver
• DOSEMU
• DOSBox
• User-Mode Linux - Run another Linux kernel in userspace.
• Win4Lin - emulates Windows 98/ME on Linux.
• Wine - Emulation layer for running Windows applications.
• WineX
• VirtualPC - emulates x86 on MacOS.

Programming languages environments

• JVM - Java Virtual machine, but there are also other languages that run in it.
• Parrot - VM specially designed to run interpreted languages.
• Mono - .NET CLR.

See also

• Virtualization