Most of us have played TV video games in our childhood. Games such as Mario, Contra and many more were our favourite thing in childhood and gaming meant these games only.
In this article, I am gonna show you the easiest ways to play those games right on your PC or a smartphone for a heart-warming nostalgic experience.
For this, you are going to need these three things:
- A PC or a smartphone to play your games on.
- An emulator software, to know what is it, read this.
- A ROM (Game File)
In order to play the game, it is important to have an Emulator and a ROM (game file). An emulator is like software of the gaming machine aka the gaming console the game was originally developed for. Let’s start the process.
How to Play Classic Video Games on PC
In order to play such games on PC, you only need an emulator that works on PC. For classic video games, you need an emulator called Mesen. Apart from this, you need a ROM to run on this emulator.
Follow the steps mentioned below to play these games on PC.
- Step 1: Download Mesen from this link
- Step 2: Run the downloaded “.exe” file
- Step 3: Go to File Option and click on “Open ROM” to select the ROM of the game you want to play
And it is done, now you can easily play the game on your PC.
Also, you can connect a controller with your PC and play the game with controllers. You only have to go to “Option” drop-down and select “Input” to configure your controller.
How to Play Classic Video Games on Android
The process on playing classic video games on Android is pretty much the same as PC. You only need to have an emulator that works on Android along with a game ROM file. A good emulator for Android is John NESS. Follow the steps mentioned below to play games on your device.
- Step 1: Install John NESS from the PlayStore
- Step 2: Once you open the app, it will ask for “Storage Access” permission and search for the ROM file by itself, or you can also cancel the process and open the ROM file manually if you don’t want the software to search all your folders.
And you’re done! You can now play all your favourite games on you Android device.
Related: 9 Best Offline Games for Android (2020)
From Where to Download Classic Video Game Files?
It is not very difficult to find and download the ROM of your favourite game. Most of the games are available on the internet for free, you only have to search the game ROM. For instance, if you want to download Mario Bros, then you only need to search for “Mario Bros ROM” and hundreds and thousands of sites will pop up on your screen. You can choose any of the sites and download the game file. I found the site Romsfun.com to be the best for ROM files.
Note: Never download a game file if it shows as “.exe” as there is always a risk of downloading a malware or an unwanted software that you never wanted. The game ROM in our case would always be “.nes” or a “.zip” file. So, keep this in mind while downloading the game.
So guys, this was a short tutorial for all who want to play some games from their childhood on their PC or Android smartphones. The game files of these games is very light and is kilobytes (KBs) only, hence you can download more 1000s of these games and you r phone memory will still not get full.
Here is a 65 MB zip file with 655 classic video games. It can be used on a PC or an Android smartphone or any other device which has a supported emulator installed. You only have to extract the zip file and you will get zip files of all the games. Just open these files in emulator and you can play the game.
655 ROMs: Download link
Here are the links for Contra and Mario Game files if you want to download and play these two games specifically.
You only have to download these files and open them in the emulator software.
So, this was a small guide to help you have some fun in case you are fed up of work from home and want to have some fun with the least efforts possible.
