The best way to fall in love with legal emulation is to play something great on day one. Homebrew and freely available games give you exactly that — polished, legitimate titles you can enjoy without a single question mark over where they came from. Here's a starter list, grouped by where you'll find them.

Modern homebrew worth your evening

Homebrew is new games made for old hardware by independent developers who release them directly. These are a few celebrated examples that show how alive the scene is:

  • Micro Mages (NES): a gorgeous, tightly-designed platformer built to run on real NES hardware. It's routinely held up as proof that new NES games can rival the classics. Sold and released by its developer, Morphcat Games.
  • Cheril Perils and other Mojon Twins games (ZX Spectrum / multi-platform): a prolific homebrew studio that has released a big catalogue of freely playable arcade platformers.
  • Sydney Hunter titles (SNES/Genesis era): adventure-platformers created by CollectorVision as brand-new cartridges for classic systems.
  • Game Boy homebrew jams: the annual community game jams produce dozens of free, downloadable Game Boy games every year — a bottomless well of small, charming titles.
Homebrew developers want you to play their work. Downloading a freely released homebrew game and opening it in GameFlixer is exactly how it's meant to be enjoyed.

Public-domain and freely licensed classics

Some games have been placed in the public domain or released for free by their creators, so anyone can share and play them:

  • Freeware DOS classics: a number of early PC games were later released as freeware by their authors or publishers, and can be run through emulation legitimately.
  • Demoscene productions: the demoscene has decades of freely distributed, technically dazzling productions for old computers — art you can run yourself.
  • Open-source game remakes and originals: community-made open-source games are free to download and play by their license.

Where to get them — and where not to

The rule of thumb is to get games from the people who made them or from reputable archives that host freely licensed work. Developer pages, homebrew community sites, game-jam listings, and well-known preservation archives are all good starting points. If a site is offering copyrighted commercial games for free, that's your sign it's the wrong place — and it's a place GameFlixer will never send you, because GameFlixer doesn't fetch anything at all.

Getting them into GameFlixer

  • Download the game files from the creator or archive to your device or connected storage.
  • In GameFlixer, open your retro library and choose Add your ROMs.
  • Point it at the files. GameFlixer picks the right emulator core and you're playing.

Start small, then explore

Pick one homebrew platformer and one public-domain classic to begin. Once you've felt how good legal emulation can be — no guilt, no sketchy sites — you'll want to explore the wider scene. And when you're ready to back up games from your own shelf, our guide to bringing your own ROMs covers doing it the right way.