Before we answer this, understand that everything here is absolutely free. You do not have to pay to download a single game.
In order to download a file larger than your initial quota, you need only to download that file when your quota is at maximum.
This means that when you come to the site and you have a fresh alotment of quota, you can download that game straight away.
You MUST not download ANY files before you download files larger than your quota. If you do, you will have to wait 12 hours for your quota to replenish.

Your quota is reset every 12 hours after your initial download.

All the games provided here are ROMs. (LaserDisk based media images are also known as ISOs)
They can only be played through specialised applications designed to play certain kinds of games.
These programs are called Emulators. Most Emulators are designed for a specific system/console. (Eg. Project64 for Nintendo 64 game and VisualBoyAdvance for Game Boy Advance)
You must download an emulator for the system of the game you want to play. You can search google for an appropriate emulator.
After you have downloaded, and installed the emulator, you may open the game with it.
If the game you downloaded ends with .7z, see "What are .7z files?" to learn what to do first.

Please note: Some systems cannot yet be emulated. For a (incomplete) list of these systems, please see a List of unemulated systems.

List of systems that simply are not emulated yet.

• Nintendo Wii
• Playstation 3
• Xbox 360

Unstable Emulated Systems:

• Xbox
• Gamecube
• Nintendo DS
• Sony PSP
• Playstation 2
• Sega Dreamcast

This list is highly incomplete. There are a lot of systems out there, many of them so rare that an emulator will never be created for them due to lack of any popularity.
This list merely provides more known systems that the general public may have an interest in playing.

7z files are a type of archive using the LZMA compression algorithm.
The compression ratios we can achieve with them, and the generally higher speed than those of the RAR format.
They can be extracted with their freeware, 7-Zip File Manager available at http://7-zip.org/

Advertisements are a vital source of income for this website.
We provide our games for free, and it's quite expensive to do this.
We currently transfer over 500 GiB of games every DAY.
Without users respecting our ads, we can't afford this.
Respect our wishes, keep ads visible. We don't ask that you click them, merely that you do not disable them.

A person's download rate on this site is highly dependent on their location.
Our download server is in china. Your speed is highly effected by your distance from the server.
You and others you know likely come from different areas of the country, or even the world. If they have an ISP with a better link to china, they're going to get better download speeds than you are, even if they have what you may consider to be a slower connection.
See Factors that effect speed for a more complete list of factors that affect you download speed.
You may also want a list of known slow locations.

There are numerous factors in downloading from our server.

• Distance from the downloading server.
• An ISP's Available Interlinks
• The quality of an ISP's available interlinks
• A down interlink that is convenient for an ISPs connection to china will slow down speed significantly.
• Type of internet service; Satellite will have a large hang time. DialUP will be blatantly slow, regardless.

Please remember, this depends on the download server you choose.

China
• Provinces near Michigan in the United States
• Several countries in Europe. Notably Portugal and Sweeden

This website exists for the sole purpose of the distribution of roms to the public.
We have several reasons for this:

• We believe in freedom of software. See the GNU website.
• To distribute roms to the creators of emulators to provide a wider range of software with which they can test the compatibility of their emulators.
• For the general public to enjoy. Regardless of Financial Status.

Notes:
We are not affiliated with GNU, we merely uphold their philosophy.