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See: [[Depending on the emulator, BIOSes can be either necessary or an added novelty. Generally, emulators of more modern/complex consoles will require BIOS files in order to operate.{{Main|Emulator Files]]}}

No. <u>Many that you come across on YouTube videos and the like are scamsor malware.</u>

Most emulators of the 16-bit era (fourth generation) and earlier consoles (e.g., Sega Genesis, NES, Atari 2600, etc.) can be run on any PC, even one with a CPU clock speed of below 1 GhzGHz. higan is the only exception, because it's highly accurate and requires a 3 Ghz GHz CPU for optimal performance. Other emulators such as Snes9x, Kega Fusion, Mesen, etc. can be run on any PC that can run Windows.

However, emulators of the fifth generation and later consoles are a different story. While fourth generation and earlier consoles could only display pixel art and, in some cases, very primitive 3D graphics, the move to fifth generation consoles saw a massive jump in consoles' graphical capabilities, with full 3D polygon graphics with texture mapping, lighting and shadows, anti-aliasing, texture filtering, etc. The consoles required much more complex CPUs and GPUs with multiple cores to be able to display these types of graphics. Because of this, emulators of the fifth generation and later consoles require a mid- to high-end gaming PC for optimal performance, with a 3 ~ 3.5 Ghz GHz or faster CPU clock speed and at least a mid-range AMD / Nvidia graphics card.

Some developers have taken it upon themselves to make these drivers. The first one that ever went public was called [[MotioninJoy|MalwareinJoyMalwareohJoy]], but it was plagued with issues, [https://web.archive.org/web/20170715032648/http://betterds3.ciebiera.net/why/ as the author of BetterDS3 wrote in 2013].

'''I downloaded a PS1 game from emuparadise. It's in .ecm format and won't open in an emulator. Why?'''

ECM is a compressed format. You need to decompress using PakkISO or ECM Tools (both provided on the emuparadise download page). It'll output as a .bin usually, which is what the [[Cue sheet (.cue)|.cue]] uses to load the game. Note that recent SVN builds of [[PCSX-RReloaded]] DO allow loading of ECM files, however, it's recommended to unpack them anyway. Linux users can use the ECM Tools which should be included in your repository, which is explained on [https://ubuntuforums.org/showthread.php?t=1472552 Ubuntu Forums]. You then need to use the 'ECM-uncompress' command in terminal.