Gamers have long used emulators to make their home pc into their personal video arcade, but until recently pocket pc emulators have been lacking. Fortunately for the gamer in all of us, that is beginning to change. The growing popularity of PDA's, particularly among young people, means that software vendors are paying more attention to the vast market for pocket pc emulators.

The pocket pc emulators on the market today can allow the PDA owner to emulate the Atari system, MAME, Nintendo and Game Boy among others. Game playing is an important and growing use for PDA's, and a good emulator can make the PDA fun as well as useful.

Having your PDA act as a handheld game device greatly increases it's versatility and usefulness. Now not only are PDA's replacements for cell phones, digital cameras, electronic organizers and personal stereos, but they can be wonderful game devices as well.

Let's have a look at some of the emulated software that can be found for pocket pc's. Mind you, these are just examples representing this vast world:

1.Pocketneshttp://pocketnes.retrogames.com. This emulator is pure joy. It's free (donation will be appreciated) and it's downloadable instantly to your PDApreferably iPAQ. All the platform games like classic Mario Brothers3 work well. You can also save a game level and come back later.
2.Pocket Enginehttp://pocketengine.emuviews.com/this emulator is great. Nothing looks this good, plays this well, and has as many panels. For instance, you can run great Mahjong game, with beautiful tiles and vivid colors.
3.Mame World http://www.mameworld.net/mamece3/Runs more than 2,000 arcade machine ROMs including the NeoGeo games.

There are so many other emulators, and the above are just representing examples that I found to be a good starting point. These emulators will help you bring oldies like packman, space-invaders, Mario bros and other good old games "back from the dead" and resurrected right on your PDA. I think nothing beats the old games in terms of pure fun and in many cases the beauty is in the simplicity and not in high tech complicated games.
Since these games require much less computing power than the modern games, they are perfect to run on your PDA.

When shopping for a PDA, especially if it will be used as a gaming emulator, it is important to choose one that has a lot of memory, or at least a large capacity for memory expansion. It is also important to choose a PDA with a good solid processor running at a fast speed. As with desktop pcs, gaming takes up more resources than other applications, and having a fast processor and lots of memory will ensure that your gaming experience is a great one.