Emulation Software For Windows and Mac
You can select which game systems you want to emulate with EmulationStation. It features a gallery-style graphical front end to browse through and select what you want to play. The selection includes home computers and consoles ranging from the Atari 2600 to the Nintendo 64. EmulationStation even supports PC game ports. Once you've decided which systems to emulate, EmulationStation will display a list of available games for each system. You can also obtain additional information from an external 'Scraper' tool.
You must install an emulator first before using EmulationStation. If you want to use emulators such as the PlayStation 2, PlayStation Portable, Xbox 360, and Nintendo DS, you should install these first before using EmulationStation. Alternatively, you can download the EmulationStation pre-compiled binary and install it on your computer. However, this will take some time since EmulationStation requires a number of packages to run.
Installing RetroPie is easy. It will ask you to select a theme from a list. If you want to install one, just double-click on the RetroPie icon in the EmulationStation application's main menu. If you already installed RetroPie, you can see the names of the available themes on the RetroPie wiki. Once you've installed EmulationStation, you'll have to restart your system. Fortunately, this will take care of the problem.
If you want to play old PS2 games, you'll want to use PCSX2 or another emulator. While the MAME emulator is not particularly user-friendly, it can be used to play some of the most popular games from the system. It is very resource-intensive and requires enough CPU power and GPU to play games. You can also download third-party front ends to make your game playing experience more enjoyable. The documentation for MAME is extensive.