In the interest of sharing, I'd like to provide my current list of working emulator sites for various platforms. All of these enable gameplay directly within your browser, so there's no sticky business of downloading software and finding the necessary game files to get it all going. These are all great sites and we should all show our support. I'm dubbing this the "November 2009" edition of the list and would love to keep adding to it, so suggest away and when I do the next edition, I'll expand it. Here goes:

* 2600online.com - Play various Atari 2600 Video Computer Systems games
* c64s.com - Play various Commodore 64 games
* Freearcade.com (Scott Adams section) - Play various Scott Adams/Adventure International text adventures
* JEMU - Emulate and play on the Acorn BBC Model B, Amstrad CPC464, Dick Smith VZ-300, Sinclair ZX Spectrum 48K, Sinclair ZX80 and Siclair ZX81
* nintendo8.com - Play Nintendo Entertainment System (NES)/Famicom games
* Play Infocom Adventures Online
* The Gallery of Zork - Infocom museum and plenty of games to play
* Sandy White's Ant Attack
* Sarien.net - Play Sierra adventure games
* SC-3000 Survivors - Play Sega SC-3000/SG-1000 games
* Virtual Apple ][ - Play Apple II and IIGS games
* vNES - Play Nintendo Entertainment System (NES)/Famicom games

Finally, don't forget the Games section right here on Armchair Arcade. Enjoy!

CC3 Package MenuAs many of you know, Chad Schell's Cuttle Cart 3 for the Intellivision was recently released and was a boon to enthusiasts who wanted a ROM flash cart/development environment for Mattel's system. The one "downside" to the Cuttle Cart 3 was that you needed to set up your own menus, manuals and ROMs for use with the miniSD card. Obviously, one solution is to get the official ROM releases from Intellivision Productions, but it still requires a lot of setup work and is not all-inclusive (support them and their products anyway!). An even better solution - an addition to everything else you might want to do with the Cuttle Cart 3 or Intellivision emulation in general if you will - is get David Harley's new release, which includes ROMs that have never been seen before and a variety of patched software (for instance, the amazing Ehanced Computer System (ECS)-based World Series Major League Baseball is fully functional now!).

From David's e-mail:

Hardball on the Apple IIgsBill Martens, who runs the superb "Virtual Apple 2 - Online disk archive" has informed me that the site now supports Firefox. Previously the Website only supported Internet Explorer. For those not familiar with the Website, it allows you to play Apple II and IIgs games directly in your browser. No fuss, no muss, and it's fairly configurable to boot. As a bonus, the site also gives you access to the ROM images for use in another emulator or for transfer to your real Apple system. While my preferred way is to of course play these games on the real hardware, nothing beats the immediacy of a well functioning browser-based emulator that already has the ROMs, as it's invaluable for quick reference and screenshot captures. Check it out at http://www.virtualapple.org/.