I am a late gamer , started about ten yrs ago. A couple of days ago someone talk to me about Emulators kinda hook. as newbie does anyone have any suggestion. I have been using Launch box got the hang of some of the Emulators but still got a lot to learn

Do you want to play PC, console, or arcade games?
There are hundreds of emulators, and many of them are actively maintained.

For GOG games:
Many old games depends on DOSBox, which is an emulator.
ScummVM is a bundle of rewrote game engines.
Amiga and SNK games here also depends on emulators.

What do you want to emulate? There are a lot of emulators like PCSX2, Dolphin, CEMU, PPSSPP, Desmume, VBA-M, etc.

Just to clarify, the games you purchase here, the installers will install any required emulator that's needed. You don't have to install one yourself.

Just wanted to make sure you understood that. :)

But yes, explaining a bit more as to what you're trying to do would be helpful.

Gamecube and WII - https://dolphin-emu.org/
PS1 - http://www.epsxe.com/
PS2 - https://pcsx2.net/getting-started.html
Nintendo 64 - https://www.pj64-emu.com/
Android - https://www.bluestacks.com/

Just to add to the advice here, be careful with what you download here. Emulation is a big area, and a grey area in terms of copyright. You are ok to emulate thiings you own, however if you don't own them then its illegal. Also, there are no emulators for Xbox/360, Playstation 3 - don't be fooled by con sites trying to push these. There is only PCSX one for PS3 and as far as I can tell nothing runs on it.

In terms of what you might want to play, quite a lot of these you will find a native PC version of the game, its not always better than the console version, but often is as you don't need the emulation, and you have all the options for PC that you wouldn't on console - for instance larger screens.

Anyways, depends what you want to emulate.

Technically they do have emulators for all those systems but none of them could be considered mature. CXBX is an original Xbox emulator that doesn't really run anything playable (which sucks because I've got a lot of Xbox games that I'd like to play again). XQEMU is a 360 emulator that's a bit farther along but still not close to user-friendly. And RPCS3 is PS3 emulator that's actually making very rapid progress and can comfortably run some big games if you have a good enough PC, but it's also still at the stage in which updates might break emulation for as many games as they fix.

But yes, it's good advice that if you're going to get into emulation, you should bring a good anti-virus program with you :)

Yes, thats why I mention there isn't an emulator for those systems. I haven't tried the Xbox ones, but I know they are not far along. The RPCS3 one I tried recently just out of interest, God of War colletion - opened main screen, managed to select game, then it crashed. Demonsouls, loaded to main screen, then crashed. Unfortunately its anywhere near the standard needed to push out to anyone as a working emulator. Even if I could load them, not sure I would trust it with several hours of my gaming time to be lost, considering ps3's are quite cheap anyway.

Its the exclusives I really want them for, Red Dead Redemption (and Revolver for Xbox), Demonsouls, GoW, LoUs. You just cant get these on pc.

Hmmm, i'd say getting into emulators, try out the various 8-bit 6502 computers, The Atari, Apple, Commodore, and other related systems. While it may technically be under copyright (due to the Micky-Mouse Copyright extension act) no one cares and no one enforces it. And it's interesting looking at some of the BASIC programming and seeing what they could do with so little.

I'm still looking for a few games from the past... probably will never find them...

https://sourceforge.net/projects/atari800/

https://archive.org/details/atari_8bit_library_games

https://www.atariarchives.org/

Protip:
NEVER ZSNES. The thing last had an update 11 years ago and is so poorly coded that it can cause unauthorized code to leak out of the emulator and into the actual system itself.

My suggestion is Retroarch, which takes away the rigamarole of individual emulators and puts it all in one neat package.

As for which cores, I suggest Gambatte for Game Boy and GBC specifically, one of the VBA variants for GBA itself, NEStopia UE for NES/Famicom, SNES9X for SNES unless you really think you can handle BSNES, Dolphin for Gamecube and Wii...and for the rest it's a bit of a mystery because I don't have any games for those. Save for Citra, which is literally the only 3DS emulator on the market.

The Atari 800 is a very underrated gaming PC, IMO. Seems like the C64 gets all the hype from that generation because it had more games and it does admittedly have the best sound chip of all time, but the Atari is no slouch on its sound and it generally has the best versions of a lot of old multiplatform games like Rescue on Fractalus (better 3D capabilities) and most of Synapse's titles. I use Altirra to emulate it (for C64 I use WinVice and AppleWin for the Apple II).

If you want to do vintage consoles and arcade games, MAME is definitely worth a look:
http://mamedev.org/

Keep in mind that in many countries you need to own a legitimate copy of the game (and sometimes the associated console/arcade hardware) in order to legally play it on an emulator.

Mhmm, i grew up under the Atari800XL. It had sprite graphics, pokey sound, and was a really decent system. But since the 6502 didn't have any IO pins memory is mapped out as communications with the other hardware devices, which allowed a LOT of features at the cost of not having a full 64k memory access for users. The book mapping the Atari goes through the memory locations. Like offset 53770 is effectively a random number generator.

Unfortunately one major flaw with the 8bit computers (all of them), is that they didn't want to put a dedicated video chip in, so like 80% of the time the CPU is drawing on the screen, so the 1.79Mhz is like 1/10th that for actual processing, add that BASIC is interpreted makes it even slower... I'll have to see if it's possible to disable drawing while doing heavy work and then enabling it afterwards, good for complex computations.

A few things to note about emulation:

* As a rule, you are best off assuming that ROMs are illegal. Don't pretend that what you're doing is legal. (Of course, there are many things that should be legal, but are not; I'll leave the decision for you to make.) I have found a couple ROMs that can be legally obtained without specialized hardware or console hacking (though not for free), but those are the exception, not the norm. (Note that some ports of games are actually emulated versions; if you acquire such a version legally, it is legal. This includes all GOG games that use DOSbox.)

* Emulators vary in how accurate they are. In some cases, you might need to choose between strict accuracy and a more user-friendly experience. (One example here is floppy drives; some emulators let you speed up disk accesses; while not as accurate, I think most casual players are going to want to speed these up, provided doing so doesn't break the game.) There's also the fact that higher accuracy requires a more powerful CPU; bsnes (the SNES emulator core found in higan)

* Save states are one emulator feature to be careful with. For one thing, often the save state also saves the SRAM; this means that if you use the game's save feature and then load a save state, the save you just made will be lost. For another, the *entire* state of the game, including things like the random number generator (RNG) state, are saved; this means that reloading after getting an undesired random result will often result in you getting the exact same result the second time.

* Some emulators allow you to record your gameplay; these recordings are actually not video, but rather input sequences. Viewing these videos may destroy your SRAM saves for the game, so make a spare save state first. If you've heard the term TAS (Tool-Assisted Speedrun), it might be worth knowing that a TAS is really an input sequence that is created with the use of emulator tools like save states, but then played back in real time.