Torrenting is a peer to peer (P2P) file sharing protocol, formally named BitTorrent, this style of file sharing was very popular during the early internet but is a lot less common now and usually used for piracy or just general P2P sharing. How P2P file sharing works is that one computer acts as the "seed" or computer with the file you want on it, and all computers downloading from it are the "leechers", due to the nature of peer to peer connections working through computers connecting to one another, instead of a central server, the other leechers and seeders can see your IP address, because of this the use of a VPN should be considered required if you want to torrent.
There are many software you can use to download and handle files with the extention .torrent, the one I recommend is qBitTorrent this software is open source, meaning all of the code is public and it has a very good track record for being safe and reliable. For VPN's I recommend SurfShark, however VPN's like Mullvad and Private Internet Access are also good options.
Torrenting is an extremely popular way to pirate basically everything you would need to pirate, every single piece of media can be stored and packaged as a .torrent file and uploaded to torrenting websites, I can not stress enough how important using a VPN is on these sites, they are often unsecure and seeding/leeching files turns your computers IP public, do NOT torrent without a VPN, purely theoretically you will be fine, but thats assuming you dont run into any bad actors wanting to use your information for whatever purpose. Sites like "thepiratebay" host torrents for practically anything you'd need. I wont link the site since it has 18+ material on it and id rather keep that off of the site. There are also many subreddits dedicated to torrenting all forms of media and subreddits for "thepiratebay" itself.
Game emulation is one of the easiest forms of game piracy, the majority of game systems can now be emulated as long as the hardware that you are emulating on is strong enough to handle the emulation, generally the dependant parts for game emulation are your RAM and CPU, GPU is important but much less so since most games being emulated are older games, typically gamecube, DS or gameboy games, these games can be ran with very low gpu usage.
Emulation is an incredibly detailed and complex process that requires very intimate knowledge of processors and building processors. The information behind how they are made is far beyond the scope of this, it's a free media guide after all, so lets keep the specifics out. In simplest terms, an emulator is when one machine the "host" emulates (aka imitates) another machine, the "guest" through this, machines can pretend to be less powerful machines. This is helpful because many fan favourite and classic games are stuck on old hardware, take the Pokemon series for example, some of the best games in the franchise are heartgold and soulsilver, these games are stuck on the DS platform, which is a 32-bit system and was released in 2005, making the system 19 years old. This presents an issue, people want to play their favourite games, but they either no longer have the hardware, or they dont want to play on a old system, the solution? Emulation!
The following is a list of every system that has currently been emulated on the Windows OS, Zophar however this list is missing ONE emulator from what I can tell, and those are the newly worked on Nintendo Switch Emulators, but those are still new so its understandable that they are not on the site yet.
How to use most emulators can be solved by a youtube video, so I will not write about it here since there are far too many to cover, however I can write about ROM's "ROM" stands for "Read Only Memory" meaning, computer memory that can only be read by a system, not written to, this is what makes it different from RAM, which can be written to and read from. Now ROM's can take many many forms, however for our use, ROM's refer to data from old game cartridges, so games from the Wii, Gamecube, DS, Gameboy, N64 and many other cartridge based console games can be downloaded easily with ROM's. The following site has most ROM's you will need ROM Megathread.
I will not mention Switch emulation here, to learn about it, you can start here Emulation Wiki and for Switch ROM's you can start here NXBrew
(This section will be written soon)