This article lists software

emulator In computing, an emulator is Computer hardware, hardware or software that enables one computer system (called the ''host'') to behave like another computer system (called the ''guest''). An emulator typically enables the host system to run so ...

Central processing units

ARM In human anatomy, the arm refers to the upper limb in common usage, although academically the term specifically means the upper arm between the glenohumeral joint (shoulder joint) and the elbow joint. The distal part of the upper limb between th ...

ARMulator ARM Instruction Set Simulator, also known as ARMulator, is one of the software development tools provided by the development systems business unit of ARM Limited to all users of ARM-based chips. It owes its heritage to the early development of th ...

Aemulor In computing, Aemulor is an emulator of the earlier addressing-mode ARM microprocessors. It runs on ARM processors under addressing-mode versions of . It was written by Adrian Lees and released in 2003. An enhanced version is available under the ...

QEMU QEMU is a free and open-source emulator (Quick EMUlator). It emulates the machine's processor through dynamic binary translation and provides a set of different hardware and device models for the machine, enabling it to run a variety of guest ...

MIPS

SPIM SPIM is a MIPS processor simulator, designed to run assembly language code for this architecture. The program simulates R2000 and R3000 processors, and was written by James R. Larus while a professor at the University of Wisconsin–Madison. ...

: The OVPsim 500 mips MIPS32 emulator, can be used to develop software using virtual platforms, emulators including MIPS processors running at up to 500 MIPS for MIPS32 processors running many OSes including Linux. OVP is used to build emulators of single MIPS processors or multiple - homogeneous MP or heterogenous MP.

x86 architecture x86 (also known as 80x86 or the 8086 family) is a family of complex instruction set computer (CISC) instruction set architectures initially developed by Intel based on the Intel 8086 microprocessor and its 8088 variant. The 8086 was introd ...

Bochs Bochs (pronounced "box") is a portable IA-32 and x86-64 IBM PC compatible emulator and debugger mostly written in C++ and distributed as free software under the GNU Lesser General Public License. It supports emulation of the processor(s) (includin ...

DOSBox DOSBox is a free and open-source emulator which runs software for MS-DOS compatible disk operating systems—primarily video games. It was first released in 2002, when DOS technology was becoming obsolete. Its adoption for running DOS games i ...

FX!32 FX!32 is a software emulator program that allows Win32 programs built for the Intel x86 instruction set to execute on DEC Alpha-based systems running Windows NT. Released in 1996, FX!32 was developed by Digital Equipment Corporation (DEC) to ...

PCem PCem (short for PC Emulator) is an IBM PC emulator for Windows and Linux that specializes in running old operating systems and software that are designed for IBM PC compatibles. Originally developed as an IBM PC XT emulator, it later added suppor ...

– an opensource emulator that emulates 7 architectures including ARM, x86, MIPS, and others *

box86 Box86 is an emulator for x86 userspace tools on ARM Linux systems, allowing such systems to execute video games and other programs that have been compiled for x86 Linux systems. Box86 is an alternative to QEMU for user-mode emulation. Box86 also ...

Rosetta 2 Rosetta is a dynamic binary translator developed by Apple Inc. for macOS, an application compatibility layer between different instruction set architectures. It enables a transition to newer hardware, by automatically translating software. The ...

: Apple's emulator for

macOS macOS (; previously OS X and originally Mac OS X) is a Unix operating system developed and marketed by Apple Inc. since 2001. It is the primary operating system for Apple's Mac computers. Within the market of desktop and lapt ...

allowing to run x86_64 applications on arm64 platform

Motorola 680x0 The Motorola 68000 series (also known as 680x0, m68000, m68k, or 68k) is a family of 32-bit complex instruction set computer (CISC) microprocessors. During the 1980s and early 1990s, they were popular in personal computers and workstations and ...

Mac 68K emulator The Mac 68k emulator is a software emulator built into all versions of the classic Mac OS for PowerPC. This emulator enabled running applications and system code that were originally written for the 680x0-based Macintosh models. With a few exceptio ...

: For

PowerPC PowerPC (with the backronym Performance Optimization With Enhanced RISC – Performance Computing, sometimes abbreviated as PPC) is a reduced instruction set computer (RISC) instruction set architecture (ISA) created by the 1991 Apple Inc., App ...

classic Mac OS Mac OS (originally System Software; retronym: Classic Mac OS) is the series of operating systems developed for the Macintosh family of personal computers by Apple Computer from 1984 to 2001, starting with System 1 and ending with Mac OS 9. The ...

PowerPC PowerPC (with the backronym Performance Optimization With Enhanced RISC – Performance Computing, sometimes abbreviated as PPC) is a reduced instruction set computer (RISC) instruction set architecture (ISA) created by the 1991 Apple Inc., App ...

PearPC PearPC is an architecture-independent PowerPC platform emulator capable of running many PowerPC operating systems, including pre-Intel versions of Mac OS X, Darwin and Linux. It is released under the terms of the GNU General Public License (GPL ...

Rosetta Rosetta or Rashid (; ar, رشيد ' ; french: Rosette ; cop, ϯⲣⲁϣⲓⲧ ''ti-Rashit'', Ancient Greek: Βολβιτίνη ''Bolbitinē'') is a port city of the Nile Delta, east of Alexandria, in Egypt's Beheira governorate. The Ro ...

: Apple's emulator for PowerPC processors, built into Mac OS X *

WarpUP WarpOS is a multitasking kernel for the PowerPC (PPC) architecture central processing unit (CPU) developed by Haage & Partner for the Amiga computer platform in the late 1990s and early 2000s. It runs on PowerUP accelerator boards developed ...

: Amiga system for PowerPC expansion cards built into MorphOS and available for

AmigaOS AmigaOS is a family of proprietary native operating systems of the Amiga and AmigaOne personal computers. It was developed first by Commodore International and introduced with the launch of the first Amiga, the Amiga 1000, in 1985. Early version ...

SheepShaver SheepShaver is an open-source PowerPC Apple Macintosh emulator originally designed for BeOS and Linux. The name is a play on ShapeShifter, a Macintosh II emulator for AmigaOS (made obsolete by Basilisk II). The ShapeShifter and SheepShaver project ...

: Emulates the PowerPC processor. Can run Mac OS 7 to Mac OS 9.

Computer system emulators

Full system simulators

Simics Simics is a full-system simulator or virtual platform used to run unchanged production binaries of the target hardware. Simics was originally developed by the Swedish Institute of Computer Science (SICS), and then spun off to Virtutech for commer ...

CPU Sim CPU Sim is a software development environment for the simulation of simple computers. It was developed by Dale Skrien to help students understand computer architectures. With this application the user is able to simulate new or existing simple CPUs ...

: A Java application that allows the user to design and create a simple architecture and instruction set and then run programs of instructions from the set through simulation *

GXemul Gavare's eXperimental Emulator (formerly known as mips64emul) is a computer architecture emulator being developed by Anders Gavare. It is available as free software under a revised BSD-style license. In 2005, Gavare changed the name of the softwar ...

: Framework for full-system computer architecture emulation

Mobile phones and PDAs

Palm OS Emulator Descended from Copilot, Palm OS Emulator is used for writing, testing, and debugging Palm OS applications. Palm OS Emulator emulates Motorola 68000-class devices and has intimate knowledge of Palm OS's inner working, allowing for the close monitor ...

* Adobe Device Central * BlueStacks *

Blisk (browser) Blisk is a freemium Chromium-based web browser that aims to improve productivity and code quality by providing a wide array of tools for Web development and testing for different type of devices: desktop, tablet and mobile. History The lates ...

Multi-system emulators

blueMSX blueMSX is a portable open-source MSX emulator that uses an emulation model to achieve the highest level of accuracy possible. It is available for the Microsoft Windows operating system and is ported to multiple other systems. It has been tra ...

: Emulates Z80 based computers and consoles *

MAME MAME (formerly an acronym of Multiple Arcade Machine Emulator) is a free and open-source emulator designed to recreate the hardware of arcade game systems in software on modern personal computers and other platforms. Its intention is to preserve ...

: Emulates multiple

arcade machine An arcade cabinet, also known as an arcade machine or a coin-op cabinet or coin-op machine, is the housing within which an arcade game's electronic hardware resides. Most cabinets designed since the mid-1980s conform to the Japanese Amusement Ma ...

s, video game consoles and computers * DAPHNE is an

arcade emulator The following is a list of notable video game console emulators. Arcade * Visual Pinball Atari ; Atari 2600 * Stella Nintendo Home consoles ; Nintendo Entertainment System * FCEUX * NESticle * Nestopia ; Super NES * Snes9x * ZSNES ; N ...

application that emulates a variety of

laserdisc video game An interactive film is a video game or other interactive media that has characteristics of a cinematic film. In the video game industry, the term refers to a movie game, a video game that presents its gameplay in a cinematic, scripted manner, ...

s with the intent of preserving these games and making the play experience as faithful to the originals as possible. The developer calls DAPHNE the "First Ever Multiple Arcade Laserdisc Emulator" ("FEMALE"). It derives its name from Princess Daphne, the heroine of ''

Dragon's Lair ''Dragon's Lair'' is a video game franchise created by Rick Dyer and Don Bluth. The series is famous for its Western animation-style graphics and complex decades-long history of being ported to many platforms and being remade into television a ...

''. HYPSEUS is a modern SDL2 update to the DAPHNE emulator, named after a

sibling A sibling is a relative that shares at least one parent with the subject. A male sibling is a brother and a female sibling is a sister. A person with no siblings is an only child. While some circumstances can cause siblings to be raised separat ...

to Daphne.

Network emulators

* ns-2 * Cisco Packet Tracer * Router Sim

Operating system emulators

Unix Unix (; trademarked as UNIX) is a family of multitasking, multiuser computer operating systems that derive from the original AT&T Unix, whose development started in 1969 at the Bell Labs research center by Ken Thompson, Dennis Ritchie, and ot ...

* Cygwin: For

Microsoft Windows Windows is a group of several proprietary graphical operating system families developed and marketed by Microsoft. Each family caters to a certain sector of the computing industry. For example, Windows NT for consumers, Windows Server for serv ...

, provides a

POSIX The Portable Operating System Interface (POSIX) is a family of standards specified by the IEEE Computer Society for maintaining compatibility between operating systems. POSIX defines both the system- and user-level application programming interf ...

environment and system libraries (contained in cygwin.dll). This does not allow one to run unaltered Linux/Unix binaries. However, it allows use of the gcc compiler collection to compile software written for these operating systems from source code. :In addition to the POSIX system, Cygwin includes a

package manager A package manager or package-management system is a collection of software tools that automates the process of installing, upgrading, configuring, and removing computer programs for a computer in a consistent manner. A package manager deals wi ...

that connects to a repository with 9000+ software packages. Users can optionally use Cygwin ports repository which includes >2300 (86x64) to >2700 (86x32) additional software packages not included in the RedHat-hosted repository, including many GUI applications. :The repository contains a wide range of software, including

Bash Bash or BASH may refer to: Arts and entertainment * ''Bash!'' (Rockapella album), 1992 * ''Bash!'' (Dave Bailey album), 1961 * '' Bash: Latter-Day Plays'', a dramatic triptych * ''BASH!'' (role-playing game), a 2005 superhero game * "Bash" ('' ...

(command shell and scripting environment comparable to the Windows Powershell), the

GNU compiler collection The GNU Compiler Collection (GCC) is an optimizing compiler produced by the GNU Project supporting various programming languages, hardware architectures and operating systems. The Free Software Foundation (FSF) distributes GCC as free software ...

with the complete tool chain. In addition, the 'usual and customary' programming languages installed with a

Linux distribution A Linux distribution (often abbreviated as distro) is an operating system made from a software collection that includes the Linux kernel and, often, a package management system. Linux users usually obtain their operating system by downloading one ...

, including C,

C++ C++ (pronounced "C plus plus") is a high-level general-purpose programming language created by Danish computer scientist Bjarne Stroustrup as an extension of the C programming language, or "C with Classes". The language has expanded significan ...

Python Python may refer to: Snakes * Pythonidae, a family of nonvenomous snakes found in Africa, Asia, and Australia ** ''Python'' (genus), a genus of Pythonidae found in Africa and Asia * Python (mythology), a mythical serpent Computing * Python (pro ...

PHP PHP is a general-purpose scripting language geared toward web development. It was originally created by Danish-Canadian programmer Rasmus Lerdorf in 1993 and released in 1995. The PHP reference implementation is now produced by The PHP Group. ...

Perl Perl is a family of two high-level, general-purpose, interpreted, dynamic programming languages. "Perl" refers to Perl 5, but from 2000 to 2019 it also referred to its redesigned "sister language", Perl 6, before the latter's name was offici ...

Tcl/Tk Tk is a free and open-source, cross-platform widget toolkit that provides a library of basic elements of GUI widgets for building a graphical user interface (GUI) in many programming languages. Tk provides a number of widgets commonly needed to ...

, and

Lua Lua or LUA may refer to: Science and technology * Lua (programming language) * Latvia University of Agriculture * Last universal ancestor, in evolution Ethnicity and language * Lua people, of Laos * Lawa people, of Thailand sometimes referred t ...

are available, along with multiple development libraries. :In addition to Bash, the GNU Utilities (e.g. find utilities, such as

locate Locate may refer to: * Locate (finance) * Locator software, in computing * Locate (Unix), Linux command to find files * Locate di Triulzi, an Italian commune of Lombardy * Locate Varesino Locate Varesino (Comasco: ) is a '' comune'' (municipal ...

find Find, FIND or Finding may refer to: Computing * find (Unix), a command on UNIX platforms * find (Windows), a command on DOS/Windows platforms Books * ''The Find'' (2010), by Kathy Page * ''The Find'' (2014), by William Hope Hodgson Film and t ...

grep grep is a command-line utility for searching plain-text data sets for lines that match a regular expression. Its name comes from the ed command ''g/re/p'' (''globally search for a regular expression and print matching lines''), which has the sa ...

) are installed by default. Hundreds of other software packages are included, many with non-POSIX Windows implementation, such as database management systems (

PostgreSQL PostgreSQL (, ), also known as Postgres, is a free and open-source relational database management system (RDBMS) emphasizing extensibility and SQL compliance. It was originally named POSTGRES, referring to its origins as a successor to the In ...

MySQL MySQL () is an open-source relational database management system (RDBMS). Its name is a combination of "My", the name of co-founder Michael Widenius's daughter My, and "SQL", the acronym for Structured Query Language. A relational database o ...

), web servers (e.g.

Apache HTTP Server The Apache HTTP Server ( ) is a free and open-source cross-platform web server software, released under the terms of Apache License 2.0. Apache is developed and maintained by an open community of developers under the auspices of the Apache So ...

), firewalls, text processing utilities, and console mode applications. In addition, there is a (reasonably stable) X.org/X11 implementation with GTK and Qt libraries. Based on these, graphic desktop managers, including GNOME, LXDE, LXQt, KDE, and others (e.g. x2go) with associated graphic user applications with variable stability and functionality.

Windows Windows is a group of several proprietary graphical operating system families developed and marketed by Microsoft. Each family caters to a certain sector of the computing industry. For example, Windows NT for consumers, Windows Server for serv ...

WINE Wine is an alcoholic drink typically made from fermented grapes. Yeast consumes the sugar in the grapes and converts it to ethanol and carbon dioxide, releasing heat in the process. Different varieties of grapes and strains of yeasts are m ...

: Available for most

compliant (

Unix Unix (; trademarked as UNIX) is a family of multitasking, multiuser computer operating systems that derive from the original AT&T Unix, whose development started in 1969 at the Bell Labs research center by Ken Thompson, Dennis Ritchie, and ot ...

-like) operating systems, such as

Linux Linux ( or ) is a family of open-source Unix-like operating systems based on the Linux kernel, an operating system kernel first released on September 17, 1991, by Linus Torvalds. Linux is typically packaged as a Linux distribution, which ...

BSD The Berkeley Software Distribution or Berkeley Standard Distribution (BSD) is a discontinued operating system based on Research Unix, developed and distributed by the Computer Systems Research Group (CSRG) at the University of California, Berk ...

, and

( Darling and Darwine projects). It provides a Win32 API and cleanroom implementation of the associated functionality. In contrast to Cygwin, WINE enables the installation and use of unaltered Windows software. Considerable effort has been put into support for video games, including third-party extensions (e.g.

PlayOnLinux PlayOnLinux is a graphical frontend for the Wine software compatibility layer which allows Linux users to install Windows-based video games, Microsoft Office (2000 to 2010), Microsoft Internet Explorer, as well as many other applications such as ...

) which provide custom Windows configurations known to work with a very large list of videogames. In addition, desktop productivity software, including MS Office, is supported. Because of the lack of dependence on the Windows registry, inclusion of statically linked libraries, and (at least in part) historic development from open source projects,

portable application A portable application (portable app), sometimes also called standalone, is a program designed to read and write its configuration settings into an accessible folder in the computer, usually in the folder where the portable application can be f ...

, such as the

PortableApps PortableApps.com is a website offering free applications for Windows that have been specially packaged for portability. These portable applications are intended to be used from removable media such as USB flash drives. User data is stored in a s ...

platform and the 300+ available software applications which can be downloaded with it, work with little or no issues.

Printer emulators

Ghostscript Ghostscript is a suite of software based on an interpreter for Adobe Systems' PostScript and Portable Document Format (PDF) page description languages. Its main purposes are the rasterization or rendering of such page description language files, ...

: Emulator for printers without

PostScript PostScript (PS) is a page description language in the electronic publishing and desktop publishing realm. It is a dynamically typed, concatenative programming language. It was created at Adobe Systems by John Warnock, Charles Geschke, Doug Br ...

Terminal emulators

Video game console emulators

References

{{Virtualization software

Emulators In computing, an emulator is hardware or software that enables one computer system (called the ''host'') to behave like another computer system (called the ''guest''). An emulator typically enables the host system to run software or use peri ...

Central processing units

ARM In human anatomy, the arm refers to the upper limb in common usage, although academically the term specifically means the upper arm between the glenohumeral joint (shoulder joint) and the elbow joint. The distal part of the upper limb between th ...

MIPS

x86 architecture x86 (also known as 80x86 or the 8086 family) is a family of complex instruction set computer (CISC) instruction set architectures initially developed by Intel based on the Intel 8086 microprocessor and its 8088 variant. The 8086 was introd ...

Motorola 680x0 The Motorola 68000 series (also known as 680x0, m68000, m68k, or 68k) is a family of 32-bit complex instruction set computer (CISC) microprocessors. During the 1980s and early 1990s, they were popular in personal computers and workstations and ...

PowerPC PowerPC (with the backronym Performance Optimization With Enhanced RISC – Performance Computing, sometimes abbreviated as PPC) is a reduced instruction set computer (RISC) instruction set architecture (ISA) created by the 1991 Apple Inc., App ...

Computer system emulators

Full system simulators

Mobile phones and PDAs

Multi-system emulators

Network emulators

Operating system emulators

Unix Unix (; trademarked as UNIX) is a family of multitasking, multiuser computer operating systems that derive from the original AT&T Unix, whose development started in 1969 at the Bell Labs research center by Ken Thompson, Dennis Ritchie, and ot ...

Windows Windows is a group of several proprietary graphical operating system families developed and marketed by Microsoft. Each family caters to a certain sector of the computing industry. For example, Windows NT for consumers, Windows Server for serv ...

Printer emulators

Terminal emulators

Video game console emulators

See also

References