Emulation is the art of creating software that mimics one system on another. An example would be emulating a TV gaming console or a mobile phone on your PC. Why use emulators? Plenty of reasons. Wouldn't it be much easier to code a mobile application in a PC rather than in the mobile phone itself? What if your good old TV game has gone nuts, you can't find a new one and you dearly want to play that prince rescues princess game? Emulators are the answer.

Emulators have played a significant role in the evolution of modern day software. A lot of pioneering software (VisiCalc the first spreadsheet for example) was coded on mainframes that emulated a microcomputer. There are numerous emulators available all over the net nowadays. Most popular among them are the gaming console emulators.

Emulators is also a challenging and fun field to work if you are programmer. Most emulators are open source and you could join in with some of the guys or create a new emulator all by yourself.

Below is a list of emulators that you might want to have a look at.

Gaming consoles
Nintendo16 - JNES
SuperNintendo - Z SNES
SEGA Genesis - GENS

Computer emulators
Commodore 64 - VICE
ZS Spectrum - SpecEmu
Macintosh - Softmac
Intel x86 - Bochs
Altair - Altair32

Mobile phone / PDA
Nokia - Nokia Toolkit
PalmPilot - PalmOS Emulator

Resources
Google Directory
Emula3