The word emulation refers to an ambition and effort to equal, excel or surpass another; to compete or rival with some degree of success, especially through imitation. It can also refer to the simulation of equipment or phenomena by artificial means, such as by software modeling.

Emulation or Emulator may also refer to:

in computing,

• Emulator, imitation of behavior of a computer or other electronic system with the help of another type of computer/system
• Console emulator, a program that allows a computer or modern console to emulate another video game console
• In-circuit emulator, a program used to emulate the processor in an embedded system, to aid in debugging
• Hardware emulation, the use of special purpose hardware to emulate the behavior of a yet-to-be-built system, with greater speed than pure software emulation
• Emulation for Logic Validation, used to emulate hardware in manufacturing automation

in other uses,

• Emulation (observational learning), a theory of educational psychology
• Socialist emulation, a form of competition that was practiced in the Soviet Union
• Gaussian process emulation, a special case of the Gaussian process in statistics