An arcade emulator is an application that pretends to be the electronics that make up a real physical arcade machine like you saw in midways and arcades of the past. The goal is to allow software written for these machines to run in the emulator, and in XCade's case.. right in the palm of your hand!

XCade has a growing list of games it supports. Check the current release notes for a list of supported game hardware. A variety of games may be loaded into each game hardware, and new homegrown software designed for these old machines will run as well.

You can look in the screenshots page to see examples of many of the games one could run in XCade.

XCade is designed to run exclusively on Palm OS version 5.0 and later on the ARM processor based units. That means the Palm Tungsten T and the Sony NX series, as of November 2002, though we're sure there will be many more ARM units out soon. XCade needs these super powered units in order to work its magic at the correct arcade framerates.

We cannot help you obtain game software as most of it is owned by the company that originally built it. The arcade game software we ourselves run in XCade we get from the physical machines themselves, as we've been collecting for a long time. Where you get game software is your business, but we trust you do it legally! You can purchase software emulators from the game vendors to support them and perhaps copy the rom files from them once you own the rights to use them?

The best way to obtain ROMS is the following: Buy the arcade cabinet from ebay, or even just buy the pc-board of the game itself that came from an arcade cabinet. Hundreds of these can be found on any given day on ebay. Once you've obtained the pcboard for the game you want, get yourself an EPROM-reader/burner and pull the game off the pcboard and pop it into XCade. It takes only a few minutes and is the correct legal way to do this.