I know nothing about anything, obviously, however I was PMing with someone on the forum and he said, "One thing, if you are interested in the old videos games like from the 80's... ... and want to play them - romnation.net
It has the emulators and the ROMS. ROMS is their name for games... Most sites like mame.com just have the emulators,

MAME is the emulator you want for arcade games. Just pick the appropriate version...
There are also Atari 2600 and other platform emulators. Some work well some don't. Atari 5200 emulator sucks, just like the old system.
The thing is though, the games [roms] are exactly as they were back then, so any lag or graphic problems the game had with will still be there even if your computer is powerful. The ROMS are a perfect copy, not a re-program or anything.
My favorite games were Green Beret [1985] and Rygar [1986]
Rygar had some lag issues and the graphics were known to act weird.
OK so if you decide to check out romnation.net and have any questions, let me know. MAME is kind of a pain to get going but once you figure it out it is easy.

It sounds like it might be fun to play around with (truthfully I usually install things, play around with them for a day or two, then move on, since installing them and setting them up is the fun part if there are weird issues to solve). If there aren't any weird issues to solve I probably won't have much fun as the game, to me, is not the GAME. Same with CC.

Given the level of my ignorance it doesn't take much to form a weird issue for me, which is good.