emu/romparadise for roms
coolroms.net also

play fire emblem shadow dragon or literally any fire emblem game you can animate, its not hard to find emulators on thier official sites

GBA- Vba
DS- DesMuMe
Gamecube/wii- Dolphin
Nintendo 64- Project 64

emuparadise is good in general, torrent sites like tpb/ kat have worked for me with roms

pcsx2 (ps2) is a good emulator, dolphin (gamecube)

I recommend persona 3 fes / 4 and animal crossing

ePSXe for playing playstation games and I got most of my games from CoolRoms

for ps1 or ps2? i'd highly recommend pcsx2 for ps2. if it's anything like the ps2 itself, you should be able to play ps1 games on it just fine, but i don't remember the emulator i used when i played FFT again. but yeah, coolroms and emuparadise never let me down.

ePSXe only works for PS1

I also recommend PCSX2 for PS2 games, but be aware you have to BIOS dump your ps2 to get PCSX2 to work
there are tutorials on how to do that

Check TASVideos's recommendations. Basically, if you want to play a retro console game the answer is BizHawk.

if you want it to be as realistic as possible, meaning that you want lag emulation, then go with BizHawk (EmuHawk) but thats for games only up to gba i think
other than that, epsxe for psx games is always the answer

keep in mind btw, the default gba core in bizhawk isn't actually accurate, because VBA-M runs at 60fps and the gba ran at a really weird 59.7fps, so VBA-M is slightly faster than the proper console as a result

the mGBA standalone emulator fixes this, presumably the mGBA core that's in bizhawk does too?

do you guys usually play with your keyboard, a controller (xbox, ps3, etc), or the kind of controller that the game is for (eg. gamecube cont. for gamecube games)?

You don't necessarily need the controller it's meant for but it helps.

For ePSXe I use my Xbox 360 controller and all you have to do is set it to that in the client.

Has everything you need to know about pretty much every emulator released or talked about.

You can use whatever controller you want usually, modern controllers will most likely have enough buttons that you can rebind whatever you need to play the game you want. I've used my Xbox 360 controller for everything from Pokemon to Ratchet and Clank.

If for some reason the emulator you want to use can't/won't let you rebind your controller Xpadder is a solid program for that kind of thing. Used it recently to play Fable: TLC with a controller.

Why not just thepiratebay?

I've never had to BIOS dump anything; just dl'ed them and it worked fine

You can do that, but it's mildly illegal.

Then again, so is most of this I suppose.

on this topic anyone know where to find a good melee rom?

• Emulator: I use RetroArch. It has a convenient controller friendly interface, and you can download and update emulator cores from within the software. It's not the user friendliest thing out there, but emulators never are anyway. Just go with a Mednafen core for whatever system you want to use and you're good on accuracy. For 7th gen. systems you should use Dolphin and PCSX2 instead, but you'll need a decently powerful PC to use them. You can also try some DOS games with DOSBOX, there are quite a few DOS games that are still worth playing today.
  
• ROMs: I won't link to anything as that's against the rules. Just know that using Google will most likely give you what you're looking for. It's pretty hard to shrek yourself by downloading ROMs, because they're not supposed to come in executable files. Don't double click anything, and if the archive you got has .exe, .com, .bat or - God forbid - .vbs files, delete it and try elsewhere. Keep your antivirus running and stay safe.
  
• Games: from my limited experience with console gaming (the TF2 addiction struggle is real you guys), I'd readily recommend Super Mario 64 (N64), Metal Gear Solid (PSX), EarthBound, Super Metroid and Mega Man X (SNES). Pretty much any Nintendo game is a safe bet, really.

i have a copy i can dropbox or send to you personally somehow, add me.
(and a link, but i wont put that here)