EMULATOR ACTION
Sadly, many of my fondest childhood memories come from the countless hours I spent sitting in front of my favourite computer games and clocking them for the umpteenth time. I only had (and still have) a Commodore Amiga myself... I became a Master of Speedball 2, attained a PhD in Bubble Bobble, and achieved first class honours in Golden Axe, Silkworm, Lotus Esprit Turbo Challenge (II and III) and many, many others. However, I would also take every opportunity to get on friends' Nintendos or Sega systems for just ³one more go² at Mario, Megaman or whatever the flavour of the month happened to be.

Fortunately, we now live in a golden age, where the Internet, combined with the programming ability of people I don't know and illegal pirated software mean that I can now re-live all of my fond childhood memories from the comfort of my own home computer. Yes, that's right, I'm talking about the giddy world of emulation.

For those unfamiliar with that term in this context, emulation is the process of getting your computer to think it's a Nintendo Entertainment System or a Sega Megadrive or anything else so that you can play all the oldies on it. There are two parts to emulation: the emulator and the game itself. Let's look at each of these parts in isolation.

Emulators are computer programs which are, by and large, freely available on the Internet. You can, if you like, imagine that an emulator is a virtual Nintendo (or whatever) itself and you just have to stick a virtual game cartridge in it. They're usually pretty straight-forward, but might require some computer chops for advanced use, especially when it asks you things like whether you want to enable 32-bit triple z-buffering or alpha multipassing.

The games are just single computer files, often called rom files (Read-Only Memory files). You simply load these into an appropriate emulator program much as you would stick your Atari 2600 Asteroids cartridge into your Atari 2600, but they can be hard to come by since they are (strictly speaking) copyrighted material and downloading them without owning them first is naughty.

Like I said, you can emulate anything - NES, SNES, Segas, C64's, Amigas and even coin-op arcadies - so long as you've got the required bits and a grunty enough computer (though any computer bought in the last 5 years should be fine for most things). So that's pretty much it. Now you can complete Megaman 3 time and time again. For extra fun points, you can do like I've done and fork out for a control pad for that real, authentic gaming experience.

To get you started on your emulation journey, try going to Zophar's Domain (http://www.zophar.net/) - it's got all the latest news from the emulation world (thing's are always getting updated) and all the emulator downloads and links you'll ever need. If you want to find your favourite game, try searching from Google (www.google.com) for "download" or "roms". Good luck with that.