How did you find out about emulation?

[Heinzu]

It wasn't that long ago, I think it was 10 years ago. I wanted to play some good NDS games there. But they were nowhere to be found anymore. I found a website where these games were listed as data. A friend then explained to me that you need an NDS emulator to play them. I had no idea what that was back then. He then showed me the DraStic NDS emulator, which ran perfectly. And that's how it was back then.

 

[JimNakajima]

My earliest exposure to emulation was seeing people make videos with ZSNES in the mid to late 2000s. That UI is still so cool to this very day.

I wouldn't get into trying it for myself until... I wanna say the early 2010s, when I tried Mario & Luigi Superstar Saga on Visual Boy Advance. Those were the days, though was more for testing purposes. Mother 3 was the first time I'd actually finish a game through emulation, after I found out about it through Chuggaaconroy's let's play.

 

[Yurokashi]

A kid in my class was emulating either Secret Agent Clank or Daxter on his Samsung tablet back in 2012 and I was blown away. Forgot all about it until it hit me in 2020. Decided to try out FFVII on ePSXe and it worked like a dream. Then I fell down the glorious emulation rabbit hole.

 

[Sumea]

Once upon a time there was an emulator and I knew of it the end.

 

[TechBlisSTer]

I can't remember exactly when I first found out about them, but I remember my classmates were playing Tecmo Bowl on the school's library computers with nesticle.
I found it interesting how I could fit a good number of my favorite games on a single floppy disk. Then in HighSchool I was chipping Xboxes and PlayStations. I really enjoyed playing GBA games on my Xbox when they were still the current generation handheld.

 

[Cheeks]

Damn, making me feel my age here. It must have been around 1998/1999 when my cousins introduced me to ZSNES and MAME. Those were the big ones I recall, and I recall a lot of hours exploring those libraries.

 

[RandomHajile]

Got online in the fall of 1996. Started dabbling in IRC with mIRC. Internet relay chat was fun, and I was an op on many channels, but one channel in particular, #Crystal_Tokyo, a sailor moon channel, was particularly fun.

Well, one night it was me and this other guy named Tom, and some other operator I never talked to. He asked us both what are favorite SNES games was. He said Mario World, I said Final Fantasy 2. After that, he sent me, via DCC, an FF2 rom and a .exe

After promising several of times it wasn't a virus, he told me it was called Super Virtual Magicom, and that I had to run it via a command line and point it to the rom he just gave me. I did so, and I was absolutely floored as the game booted and I was playing Final Fantasy 2 (4) on my PC.

Yeah sure, the mist in the first dungeon didn't work and it ran slow, but it was amazing. After that, around November/December 1996, I started searching for more roms. Eventually, in early 97 I found sites like Plastic Man, Cherry roms, and Zophar. Got Nesticle for NES, Zsnes for snes, Genecyst, Callus, MAME, etc etc. I was immediately hooked and became obsessed.

Would pass out CDs I made with complete rom sets and emus to my friends and classmates. I introduced a lot of folks to emulation that way. One guy failed our networking class because he was too busy playing the translated FF3 rom on Nesticle instead of studying. Good times.

 

[SeventhSon]

My friend showed me the black magic of emulation... then I started using NESticle, Genecyst, and MAME

 

[Luxfin]

I grew up with the likes of SSoHPKC playing Brutal and Kazio Mario on ZSNES back in like 2009 - 2010. I think my first time playing on an emulator was playing Pokemon FireRed on Android using My Boy back in like 2010-2011.

 

[HEADBOY]

I remember being eight years old over a friend's house and saw he was playing Sonic 3 on his family's computer and wondering how he did that. At the time I had Sonic Mega Collection so it didn't hurt as bad that my Genesis died a year before I think. At the time I didn't know it was emulated, I just vaguely remember him saying it was illegal and didn't ask more about it. It wasn't until I was in highschool when my cousin set up a SNES emulator on my crappy PC from 2003 that I started playing on an emulator, too bad I had no idea how it was set up cause I remember screwing something up and just gave up.