How to use an emulator - The basics

For people actually reading this blog, but not knowing what an emulator is, this will tell you about the basics of emulation. OK, to explain what an emulator and rom is, keep reading.

Let's just say an emulator is a T.V with an inbuilt DVD player and the rom is a DVD.If you just have the T.V, then you can't play the DVD because you don't have any and if you only have the DVD, you can't watch it because you don't have anything to play it on.
So if you only have the emulator, but no rom, then you can't play any game, because you don't have one and if you only have the rom, then you can't play it because you don't have anything to play it with.

Ok, now that's done, now on how to play a rom, which is usually the same for each type of emulator.
To play a rom, open up the emulator and press ctrl+l to load a rom, but if that doesn't work, go into file, then open/load rom. You might have to select execute emulation/rom, but that can be in different places, but may be in the emulation menu option. Other types of emulators, like No$GBA, automatically go to a load screen, where you choose your rom and it loads it automatically. There are a few ways to open a rom, but if you're smart enough to find an emulator and rom, you're probably smart enough to figure out how to load up a rom.

Next is the little bit more advanced settings. Just so you know now,  these are not really the 'advanced settings'. More just the basics of the advanced settings.

With most emulators, you will be able to save states. What this means is that can save wherever you are in the game exactly like it was when you saved it. So lets say you saved while your sprite was walking and then your sprite stopped walking. If you then loaded your state, you would see your sprite exactly where he was before, walking. Another example is that you're facing a boss. You save state when you are about to beat him, and you are about to strike, when he kills you. If you just load the state, then you can dodge the bosses attack, then kill him. On VBA, the way to save states is to hold shift and press one of the F(no.) slots. To load it, you just press the F(no.) slot you saved it to. So let's say you wanted to save a state in pokemon, so yous aved in F1 (shift+F1). You lost the battle, so you want to load states. You press F2, but nothing happens. It doesn't work because you didn't save it to F2. You press F1 and it works. There are others, like No$GBA, when you have to press ctrl+S or F6?, to get a save screen. You then name it and press save. To load, you press ctrl+l or F7? and you get a load screen. You choose which save state to load and it loads. This is a much slower way, but it still works. There are also other ones like espxe where you change slots with F2, save with F1, and load with F3. This also works, but it's annoying when you ahve to keep pressing F2 to get to the save state that you want. That's all about save states.

Cheats. Cheats can be used in some emulators and are usually used with Action Replay codes and Gameshark codes. These can be found on the internet and most of the time on found on google. They can also be found on GBAtemp. They are usually able to be added on the cheats menu option.

Well that's pretty much all you need to know about emulation. If you want to find out more, then just play around with your emulator, but keep a copy, just in case.

If you need anymore advice, just comment and I'll see what I can do.