Official retail emulators

[ExedExes]

I believe even the PC Taito Legends (1&2) used MAME.

- ROM images were present in the game folders.
- Nicola Salmoria (MAME creator) was in the credits under the development team.

[Tanooki]

Konami Collector Series Castlevania & Contra for the windows PC environment uses a custom NES emulator. People got curious about it since Konami set it up just to run the NES games Castlevania 1-3, Contra, and Super C. By digging around with it, a lot of roms were able to be loaded and work correctly or correct enough to be worthwhile, but seeing that other than CV3 they were not really advanced titles, the emulator was pretty basic customized for them so all other games were widely hit and miss.

[noiseredux]

Wow I actually have that Konami disc.

[Tanooki]

It's not that easy to find in a local aspect but they're easily had up on ebay.

[CRTGAMER]

So I have this Atari release:

<img>PC Atari 80 Games</img>

I was having issues getting it to install or even run properly in Win7. However, once I started digging around the folders on the disc, I realized that all the arcade games were their own standalone exe's and could be ran by bypassing the main program menu altogether.

But even more interesting - there's a program simply called "2600.exe" and a folder of all the 2600 games as bin files. I found it interesting to see that on this disc Atari actually provided an official emulator and a folder of ROMs. I have no idea if this 2600.exe is built around a more common emulator like Stella that we all know of, but it's neat to me mainly because it was distributed by Atari.

Anyway, I'm curious what other compilations or releases out there are similar where you could actually use the official disc as an emulator to play even games not included with the release?

That is really interesting. Are there only 80 games or ALL the 2600 Roms in the disc directory?

The Sega Genesis Collection for PS2 and PSP is a retail release with emulation by Steve Snake (who made Kega Fusion).[/img]

but is there a way to use that emulator to play games not included?

THIS. The Hidden PC EMUs are a neat discovery though not much gain to cracking due to so many emulators available on the PC. Still, a neat find.

However, the Emulators on the game console discs are worth investigating for cracking in additional Roms to play thru the game console. If individual Roms are listed in the disc, the easiest way is substitute new games renamed to the same names of the existing set and burn a new disc.

@ samsonlonghair - Look for the unlock exclusive Vector Arcade game Tac Scan. Nice game and the only other official release is on the Atari 2600.

[ExedExes]

That is really interesting. Are there only 80 games or ALL the 2600 Roms in the disc directory?

There's a total of 80 games in this collection. Roughly 20 are arcade games and all of those have stand-alone .EXE files so the menu launcher isn't needed for those. (this menu launcher file is what causes the problems on Windows versions outside of XP). The 2600 roms are all in their own folder, but need the 2600.exe to run (but cannot be run on its own, sadly without the menu launcher).

Didn't Steve Snake work on the KGen emulator too? I saw his name on Test Drive 6 (Dreamcast), he was part of the development team known as Pitbull Syndicate.

[noiseredux]

You can run the 2600 exe by dragging a rom onto it in win explorer though. I even played Halo 2600 on it to test.