An isolated small wind turbine emulator is described in this paper. The system consists of a PC controlled variable speed dc motor coupled to a synchronous generator. Dump load is connected to the generator through a microcontroller controlled DC-DC converter. The varying aerodynamic torque of the wind turbine due to furling action and its resulting dynamics are incorporated in the emulator with the use of a PC based wind turbine model. A simple gain scheduled digital PI controller is designed which makes sure that the actual rotational speed of the DC motor is tracking the theoretical rotational speed of the wind turbine rotor. To extract the maximum power from the system, a dynamic controller is discussed which uses the wind speed and rotor speed information to control the duty cycle of the buck-boost converter in order to operate the wind turbine at the optimum tip speed ratio.