MAME in 5 minutes

Mame emulates arcade machines.

grab mameui32 from here http://www.mameui.info/

and install it. Current version is 141.

Each Mame build is linked to a set of games/ROMs, but mame itself doesn't come with any ROMs.

In the tree view on the left, you'll see all the All Games, and Available. Available will be empty.

You have to supply them yourself and copy them into the roms folder.

For example, download space invaders ROM from http://www.romnation.net/srv/roms/mame103/s.html and store it in your mameui32/ROMs folder

Start mame, and hit F5 (or select refresh from view menu) and then your game appears in the available folder.

There're over 8000 games - and they vary a lot in size. Some sites sell DVDs will the entire collection. The complete set is about 12 DVDs. But a minority of games (about 250) are much bigger, and require significant hardware to run (think quad CPU with SLI graphics) and so are hard to run and so you can also get 7DVDs that contain all but those.

As a rough guide, the above game runs fine on a core2 laptop.