1. Arcade Emulator home pages
2. General Arcade Emulation Pages
3. Arcade Emulator Frontends and Utilities
4. Other Non-Arcade Emulation Pages

1. Arcade Emulator home pages

The Official MAME Page - need I say what this is?!

Raine - The Rainbow Islands emulator - an excellent emulator of mainly 68000 based arcade machines and unlike most other non-MAME Arcade emulators RAINE is still being developed.

Sparcade! - the homepage of one of the first Arcade Emulators. Dave Spicer still updates it on an irregular basis. Has the advantage of great speed due to the fact that it's written in assembly language, though the massive disadvantage that it hasn't been updated for years :-(

2. General Arcade Emulation Pages

MAME World - the MAME support site for all things MAME, includes instructions on compiling your own MAME.

MAME Testers - think you've spotted a bug with the latest MAME? If so this is the site to find if it's already known about and if it isn't get it reported - don't bug the MAME devs.

Aaron Giles’ Home Page - homepage of the head honcho mamedev, get to read his opinions about films he seen recently and occasionally some snippets about new drivers he working on and how he's about to break MAME again to make it better.

Haze’s Mame WIP - homepage of the Dave Haywood one of the busiest mamedevs who posts lots of news/piccies on new drivers he's working on. Also the place to find new releases of HazeMD - the great Sega Megadrive emulator which is based on the MAME source so it includes the same great cheat engine and debugger.

Arbee's WIP Emporium - another often updated WIP site of one of the top mamedevs.

The Vintage Gaming Network - a golden oldie and one of the few emulation sites with news that is regularly updated.

Haggar's Page - Get your Final Burn Alpha & Nebula/Kawaks Cheat files from here..

3. Arcade Emulator Frontends and Utilities

Emu Loader - an excellent MAME (and HAZEMD) frontend with loads of features. Probably the best of the current frontend crop.

CLRMAME - an essential utility for all serious MAME users. It will verify, fix, merge, unmerge and/or rebuild your MAME ROMs and samplesets - I would be lost without it.

4. Other Non-Arcade Emulation Pages

Gamebase 64 - this is essentially a frontend for all C64 emulators (best used with CCS64). Along with the GameBase64 Collection it's virtually impossible not to find any released C64 game. The database contains over 15000 games including a link to the best version of the game, a screenshot or two, a link to a sidfile (if one exists), various extras (TAPs, coverscans etc) and general information about the game including publisher, year published, game type, programmer, musician etc. etc.

VICE Site - VICE is the best C64 emulator available, and being open source it's available for several different platforms...there's even a compile of VICE for the xbox (you'll have to hunt for that though).

CCS64 Site - BETA V2.0 of CCS64 is one of the two best DOS/Windows 95/98 C64 emulators available. Used in conjunction with Gamebase 64 it's incredibly easy to use.

M.E.S.S. homepage - MAME's rougher younger sibling which has still got a lot of growing up to do, but if you can't find an emulator for your favourite home computer/console than there's a good chance that MESS may already emulate it (though in many cases the emulation may only be preliminary).

Atari Forum - An active Atari ST forum which is quite interesting if you were blessed with an Atari ST rather than one of those Amiga thingies.

Easynews - the best place to download ROMs on the web. Unfortunately it costs $10 a month for 20 gigs of data, but if you haven't got a decent usenet news feed provided free by you ISP this is the best way to get access to the newsgroups via a nice easy to use web interface. The problem is that you will find that there is a lot more of stuff to download too - so before you know it your one-month membership to get all the ROMs has turned into 6 years because it's so easy to get carried away...