newbie question for using emulator build

To run the emulator, you have to use the OpenCL emulator libraries that come with the toolkit. You also have to set some environment variables to tell it which board to emulate. The OpenCL libraries will then work like regular OpenCL but run the code on the CPU, which is rather slow. The aocx has to be built for the emulator. The emulator can not emulate FPGA images. The emulator also cannot tell you anything about how fast your code will be on the FPGA. It is only useful to verify the correctness of your code without going through the complex build process.