OpenAI gym provides an Atari 2600 game environment with a Python interface. The games are simulated by the arcade learning environment, which uses the Stella Atari emulator. For more details, read the following papers:
- MG Bellemare, Y Naddaf, J Veness, and M Bowling, The arcade learning environment: An evaluation platform for general agents, journal of Artificial Intelligence Research (2012)
- Stella: A Multi-Platform Atari 2600 VCS emulator, http://stella.sourceforge.net/