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 sof ...

Central processing units

ARM

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 the ...

* Aemulor *

QEMU The Quick Emulator (QEMU) is a free and open-source emulator that uses dynamic binary translation to emulate a computer's processor; that is, it translates the emulated binary codes to an equivalent binary format which is executed by the mach ...

MIPS

* SPIM: 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, the processor is capable of 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 8086 microprocessor and its 8-bit-external-bus variant, the 8088. T ...

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) (includ ...

DOSBox DOSBox is a free and open-source MS-DOS emulator. It supports running programs primarily video games that are otherwise inaccessible since hardware for running a compatible disk operating system (DOS) is obsolete and generally unavailab ...

* FX!32 * PCem *

– an opensource emulator that emulates 7 architectures including ARM, x86, MIPS, and others * box86 * Rosetta 2: Apple's emulator for

macOS macOS, previously OS X and originally Mac OS X, is a Unix, Unix-based operating system developed and marketed by Apple Inc., Apple since 2001. It is the current operating system for Apple's Mac (computer), Mac computers. With ...

allowing to run x86_64 applications on arm64 platform

Motorola 680x0

* Mac 68K emulator: 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 Mac (computer), Macintosh family of personal computers by Apple Computer, Inc. from 1984 to 2001, starting with System 1 and end ...

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 a PowerPC platform emulator capable of running many PowerPC operating systems, including pre-Intel versions of Mac OS X, Darwin, and Linux on x86 hardware. It is released under the GNU General Public License (GPL). It can be used on Wi ...

Rosetta Rosetta ( ) or Rashid (, ; ) is a port city of the Nile Delta, east of Alexandria, in Egypt's Beheira governorate. The Rosetta Stone was discovered there in 1799. Founded around the 9th century on the site of the ancient town of Bolbitine, R ...

: 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 b ...

: 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 versions ...

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 proj ...

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

RISC-V RISC-V (pronounced "risk-five") is an open standard instruction set architecture (ISA) based on established reduced instruction set computer (RISC) principles. The project commenced in 2010 at the University of California, Berkeley. It transfer ...

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 comm ...

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 C ...

: 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 softwa ...

: Framework for full-system computer architecture emulation

Mobile phones and PDAs

Adobe Device Central Adobe Device Central is a software program created and released by Adobe Systems as a part of the Adobe Creative Suite 3 (CS3) in March 2007. Its primary purpose is to integrate parts of the Creative Suite together to offer both professional and i ...

* BlueStacks
NoxPlayer
* Palm OS Emulator * touchHLE *

Windows Subsystem for Android Windows is a Product lining, product line of Proprietary software, proprietary graphical user interface, graphical operating systems developed and marketed by Microsoft. It is grouped into families and subfamilies that cater to particular sec ...

Multi-system emulators

* blueMSX: 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 emulate the hardware of arcade games, video game consoles, old computers and other systems in software on modern personal computers and ...

: Emulates multiple arcade machines, 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 Microsoft ; Xbox * xemu ; Xbox 360 * Xenia Nintendo Home consoles ; Nintendo Entertainment System * FCEUX * NESticle ...

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, o ...

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. The series is notable for its film-quality animation by ex-Disney animator Don Bluth, and complex decades-long history of being ported to many platforms. It has also been adapte ...

''. 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 other person. 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 ...

to Daphne.

Network emulators

* ns-2 * Cisco Packet Tracer * Router Sim

Operating system emulators

Unix Unix (, ; trademarked as UNIX) is a family of multitasking, multi-user 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, a ...

Cygwin Cygwin ( ) is a free and open-source Unix-like environment and command-line interface (CLI) for Microsoft Windows. The project also provides a software repository containing open-source packages. Cygwin allows source code for Unix-like operati ...

: For

Microsoft Windows Windows is a Product lining, product line of Proprietary software, proprietary graphical user interface, graphical operating systems developed and marketed by Microsoft. It is grouped into families and subfamilies that cater to particular sec ...

, 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 application programming interfaces (APIs), along with comm ...

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

GNU compiler collection The GNU Compiler Collection (GCC) is a collection of compilers from the GNU Project that support various programming languages, Computer architecture, hardware architectures, and operating systems. The Free Software Foundation (FSF) distributes ...

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 that includes the Linux kernel for its kernel functionality. Although the name does not imply product distribution per se, a distro—if distributed on its own—is oft ...

, including C, C++, Python,

PHP PHP is a general-purpose scripting language geared towards 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 high-level, general-purpose, interpreted, dynamic programming language. Though Perl is not officially an acronym, there are various backronyms in use, including "Practical Extraction and Reporting Language". Perl was developed ...

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

grep grep is a command-line utility for searching plaintext datasets for lines that match a regular expression. Its name comes from the ed command g/re/p (global regular expression search and print), which has the same effect. grep was originally de ...

) 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 software, free and open-source relational database management system (RDBMS) emphasizing extensibility and SQL compliance. PostgreSQL features transaction processing, transactions ...

MySQL MySQL () is an Open-source software, 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 rel ...

), web servers (e.g.

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

), 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 Product lining, product line of Proprietary software, proprietary graphical user interface, graphical operating systems developed and marketed by Microsoft. It is grouped into families and subfamilies that cater to particular sec ...

WINE Wine is an alcoholic drink made from Fermentation in winemaking, fermented fruit. Yeast in winemaking, Yeast consumes the sugar in the fruit and converts it to ethanol and carbon dioxide, releasing heat in the process. Wine is most often made f ...

: Available for most

compliant (

Unix Unix (, ; trademarked as UNIX) is a family of multitasking, multi-user 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, a ...

-like) operating systems, such as

Linux Linux ( ) is a family of open source Unix-like operating systems based on the Linux kernel, an kernel (operating system), operating system kernel first released on September 17, 1991, by Linus Torvalds. Linux is typically package manager, pac ...

BSD The Berkeley Software Distribution (BSD), also known as Berkeley Unix or BSD Unix, is a discontinued Unix operating system developed and distributed by the Computer Systems Research Group (CSRG) at the University of California, Berkeley, beginni ...

, 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) 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 software, is a computer program designed to operate without changing other files or requiring other software to be installed. In this way, it can be easily added to, run, ...

, such as the

PortableApps PortableApps.com is a website that distributes free applications for Windows that have been packaged for portability. These portable applications are intended to be used from removable storage devices such as USB flash drives. The site was fo ...

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 of documents in these language,, the display or prin ...

: Emulator for printers without

PostScript PostScript (PS) is a page description language and dynamically typed, stack-based programming language. It is most commonly used in the electronic publishing and desktop publishing realm, but as a Turing complete programming language, it c ...

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 perip ...

Central processing units

ARM

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 8086 microprocessor and its 8-bit-external-bus variant, the 8088. T ...

Motorola 680x0

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 ...

RISC-V RISC-V (pronounced "risk-five") is an open standard instruction set architecture (ISA) based on established reduced instruction set computer (RISC) principles. The project commenced in 2010 at the University of California, Berkeley. It transfer ...

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, multi-user 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, a ...

Windows Windows is a Product lining, product line of Proprietary software, proprietary graphical user interface, graphical operating systems developed and marketed by Microsoft. It is grouped into families and subfamilies that cater to particular sec ...

Printer emulators

Terminal emulators

Video game console emulators

See also

References