Emulation? I remember seeing that word searching for a lesbian porn site.
Well what the fuck is it?
Emulation is playing console-system games you own on your PC. It's not like playing the PC version of Street Fighter II, you are instead using the actual data from the game cartidge, ROM board, or CD. In effect, you can build an exact replica of the orginal Street Fighter II arcade machine given you have all the necessary parts.
You must delete the files after 24 hours of downloading them if you don't own the original game.
Here's a sample of what emulation is like:
Download an unzipping utility if you don't already have one.
Get yourself an emulator. For this example we'll use Nesticle version 0.43 which is available here
Next, get yourself a game image for the NES. You can go to this site and look for them yourself (don't ask me for ROMs like a doofus, ok?).
Remember only to download games that you actually own, because these ROM are considered back-up copies.
Run Nesticle and press ALT + L to load the ROM image you just downloaded (you remembered to unzip it, right?)
Oh smack, I got Nintendo games on my computer, maybe I'll create an NES gaming server (like, yeah!) !
: -)