I’m a big fan of emulating old systems. There’s no substitute for playing on original hardware and having original packaging, of course, but emulation is a relatively straightforward and cost-effective means of enjoying older games without having to brave eBay, thrift stores or exorbitant “collector’s” prices.

The legality of emulation is something that has been discussed to death online, so I will sidestep that particular issue for the moment and instead bring your attention to a wonderful tool I’ve started using recently.

One of the biggest pains with emulation of older systems, particularly if you have a lot of ROM files, is managing and organising all these files, and indeed even knowing what you have available to play. This is a particular issue with old computers, whose disk images tend to contain multiple titles much like the pirated disks “computer clubs” would exchange freely in the ’80s and ’90s, but given the sheer number of games that have been released for various console platforms over the years, it can be an issue finding what you’re looking for even on systems that use media that only contains a single title.

Enter LaunchBox, then, a thoroughly pleasant and well put together front-end for all your emulation… well, no, all your PC-based gaming needs, with a particular emphasis on the emulation of old platforms and operating systems.

Launchbox is, at its heart, a database designed to be filled with records of games with related media files — including ROMs and disk images — attached. It organises software by platform and allows the automatic launching of a particular emulator when selecting a game.

Perhaps its best feature, though, is its online connectivity, which allows it to connect to various online services, including its own online database, Wikipedia and Emumovies, and download all manner of supporting media for each game, where available. This supporting media ranges from simple box art and PDFs of the original manuals to music, movies and fanart of the games. By importing all your ROM files into LaunchBox, you can quickly and easily build up a full gaming database and automatically populate it with relevant information about pretty much any game you’d care to name; any game that doesn’t get automatically populated with information can either be corrected yourself or manually searched in case it was stored online under different details.

This makes LaunchBox an excellent resource both for organising your collection and learning about titles you might not be familiar with — particularly those from other territories. The brief blurb LaunchBox provides for supported titles gives a good synopsis of what the game is all about and what to expect from it, and from there it’s a simple matter to double-click the game in your collection and be playing it in a suitable emulator almost immediately. LaunchBox even recommends and provides download links to emulators for the most popular platforms and can automatically set them up for you; it also comes bundled with the wonderful DOSBox, which enables you to play old DOS-based games on modern Windows computers.

While I’d still prefer to have a wall full of original packaging and games playable on their original systems, that’s not an especially cost-effective thing for me to do right now. So LaunchBox is very much scratching my “collector’s” itch until I’m in a position to put together an actual physical collection. And in the meantime, it’s turned my PC into pretty much the ultimate games console ever.