Anyone know the first ever game they ever downloaded as a ROM for an emulator?

[Isegrim]

Decades back in the Philippines, I saw this weird CD in the market when they once sold pirated software in CD-R's It was labelled King of Fighters, Art of Fighting, Fatal Fury, it had a weird listing of all the games I regularly see in the arcades and malls. I was a big fan of fighting games back then, Street Fighter and The King of Fighters mostly, and would often hang out in arcades and watch amazing head to head fights in the fighting games there. I also collected fighting games in my SNES and other consoles but couldn't buy as much as I wanted due to how expensive the carts are. And yet, the weird CD is claiming it had all the games I saw in the arcades.

So I bought the CD, found a program there called NeoRageX fiddled with it with some files (ROMS) containing the names of several arcade games and BANG, I was playing King of Fighters in all it's arcade glory on my computer. For years, I've always wished I could own a Neo-Geo which was the machine that ran all the SNK fighting games including KOF but it was very expensive at the time (and still is) and so were the huge carts containing the games. Each cart cost hundreds of U.S. dollars (even more so now as collector's items). And now, I was playing all of the games right in my computer coming from a cheap CD that cost just as much as a fast food meal.

From then on, I started to learn about emulation.

 

[WannabeSaint]

For me it was Super Mario RPG.

I was watching a video by Blaine Lockhart regarding how to jailbreak a PS VITA. When I was younger, I wanted to do jailbreaking with other electronics, but I never had much time or think that I was technologically competent to do so. Now fast forward almost just a few years ago, I learned how to do it and in the process learn how to get one of the Nintendo 64 emulators working on there.

Just curious if anyone remembers is all.

I remember it was Pokémon Leaf Green

I had it on my GBA and my little cousin spoiled it by basically soiling it with his spit ;-;

Oh well yeah that was my first game I emulated on my phone tho

 

[Dannzy]

I remember having a packed SNES emulator first, oddly have very strong memories of one of the Adam's Family games out of it, a game I'm pretty sure I didn't like. Donkey Kong Country was pretty big for me then too.

 

[thecrow2313]

Streets of Rage 2 because I love the music

 

[Clxmj]

Chu Chu Rocket on the GBA. I didn't even know anything like it at the time was possible until I seen one of the older kids in school playing Streets of Rage on the library PC (through GENS IIRC). I don't know why it was CCR either, I guess it was the first ROM I came across on my own but I ended up legit purchasing it that week from our local supermarket .

I've still got a bunch of floppy disks with a lot of the 3rd gen games on them that I got from school even though their all backed up on HDD.

 

[ThatOneLum ThatOneLum]

Final Fantasy (NES)

I had already been a fan of the later games since my childhood, mostly thanks to older friends, but I always had a lot of curiosity about the games I had missed. To this day I'm not even sure if I finished the game, but I do know that I was super confused by the whole number mis-match problem at the time.

These days I've tried most of them out, but back then I struggled to figure out why the games jumped from like, 3 to 7, lmao.

 

[MegaDrive1987]

Man I learned about emulation for the first time like 24 or 25 years ago. I know what I used was ZSNES however the game I'm kinda fuzzy on. It was either Mega Man X, Earthbound, or Super Punchout. God this is taking me back thinking about this, even remember some of the earlier sites I used to use for roms.

EdgeEmu was my ROM site of choice back in the day haha.

 

[MajesticSiN]

It was so long ago but If I remember correctly it was Chrono Trigger.

 

[YULEcannon]

For me it was Street Fighter Alpha 3, for the Kawaks emulator. I tried to get into Mame first, but could never find roms that worked for the version I downloaded.

 

[_Lorenzo_]

The first ROM I downloaded was Ninja Combat, an Alpha Denshi scrolling fighting game that I remember with nostalgia as I owned the cartridge for my Neo Geo. Among other things, it was the first one I purchased for this platform. The price had already dropped quite a bit, as it was already an old title. When I got the rom I was using the excellent (Win)Kawaks.

 

[thecrow2313]

EdgeEmu was my ROM site of choice back in the day haha.

Seems to me the website is down & out

https://check-host.net/check-ping?host=edgeemu.net&csrf_token=255f1c646d055e4d469ef9dac4e91f8e53575db6

 

[Daughter of Janus]

(Serious):
Lord of the Sword, for SEGA Master System. I still actually have the original ROM on a drive backed up somewhere. And probably, if I were to look through my burnt CD-Rs, I’d find a copy of it on disc.
Got it from some shady Russian website, with no fewer than 15 download links

Ah, the dilemma of digital relics, it's like digging through a digital attic.
Except instead of dust, you encounter the thrill and risk of potential malware.
Nostalgia is a cruel mistress, and she loves to vanish when you need her most.

 

[Sheepy765]

My first was Mario and Luigi: Superstar Saga on my old iphone back in like, 2017. Good times, good times. My first game that I ever played emulated though was Pokemon Emerald on a web emulator on my mom's laptop back in 2015..? 2016..?

 

[MegaDrive1987]

Seems to me the website is down & out

https://check-host.net/check-ping?host=edgeemu.net&csrf_token=255f1c646d055e4d469ef9dac4e91f8e53575db6

Oh yeah that went YEARS go mate.

 

[memphiskite]

Don't really remember what ROM I downloaded myself for the first time, but I do remember getting a copy of Pokemon Sapphire with the VBA emulator from a friend, as my first experience with ROM's & emulations.

Only reason this stands out the most in my memories is not because of the gameplay or it being my most favourite Pokemon game ever (it's Gold/HeartGold, if that matters). It's because I kept playing the game inside a zipped folder and getting peeved that the save states wouldn't work on it. Took me years to realise I was suppose to extract the files out of the folder and then it'll work perfectly fine.

Ahh, my first experiences with a computer when I was younger. Good days, I guess...

 

[5thWolf]

Oh wow!
I know it was for NES emulator NESticle. Most likely would have been The Legend of Zelda 1 or 2.

 

[Yoni Arousement]

In 2004, Metroid for the NES was one of the very first ROMs I downloaded. The very first game I played on an embedded emulator was Dragon Quest. The first emulator I used was Nester.

 

[Frickinfrik]

I think it was Shantae on GBC.

 

[Potapota]

I 'member Tomba on psx being the first that blew my mind when I realized that after all these years of playing the demo on ps demo disc #47 or whatever, I can literally just go online, grab this iso and play the whole damn thing right there and then on my pc.

 

[Soggy Donkey]

Mine was definitely KH Chain of Memories on GBA! Using VBA on a Windows XP machine haha

 

[Zanthia]

Dracula X, not the PSP one, featured on snes9x on MacOS 8.2, god-mode.

 

[Yousef]

Kirby?

 

[Leon]

I can't be sure about it, but i believe my first ROM was either phantasy star 4 or one of the 2 western released final fantasy games for the snes.
The first downloaded game rom/iso i finished was ironically, epica stella/vanguard bandits for the ps1.

 

[vash87]

Not exactly sure I know it was an SNES game using zsnes emulator on windows PC. I think it was probably Contra 3 though, used to love that game

 

[Sfjeov]

ff6 with openemu on macbook
since then I don't feel like playing it anymore tbh.