/vr/ - Retro Games

reading this post reduced my iq

Sorry guys this is gonna be a very brainlet question because I'm pretty stupid when it comes to basic computer shit, but how do I play cd-console, roms? Emulating stuff like Genesis/SNES/handhelds/all pre-CD consoles is easy because with the roms you just extract them from the zip file and that's that. But I've noticed with stuff like sega cd or ps1 you can't really extract it as easily because there's multiple files in the zip file. So when you extract it you just have a bunch of files for one game. Can emulators play roms that are still in a zip file? Do I even need to extract the zip files to begin with? I've always done that when emulating old game boy games.