How did you find out about emulation?

[RomanZZZ]

For example, I met her in 2016 with project 64, my favorite game at that time was ocarina of time

 

[RustySK]

Oh man it's been ages... I wanna say ZSNES with Super Metroid? Or maybe VisualBoy Advance? Definitely around the early 2000s. Maybe '02 or so. Emulators have come a LONG way since. Stuff like Duckstation still kind of blows me away with how user-friendly it is.

 

[Scotty]

One of my friends in middle school had MyBoy on his phone.

 

[Yousef Yousef]

More than 20 years ago cuz some stuff I had apparently came in with built-in emulation, but 15 was when I divided into it head-first.

 

[nobitakun]

Another post to make me feel old lol. 2016 your first emulation experience? gosh...

My first emulated game was Chrono Trigger in 1998 if I recall correctly. A friend told me to go to another friend's home, and then they showed me the magic through a Pentium machine.

 

[Clippy]

More than 20 hours ago

Same.

 

[CanicheSlayer]

When my brother and I got our first PC (1997? 1998?), one of our good friends told us we could play Super Nintendo games on it (on a floppy disk, he brought us Snes9x). That was probably the first time in my life I'd heard of emulators.

Edit : The first game I tested must have been Final Fantasy VI. The emulator wasn't quite perfect yet (a problem with planes, if I remember correctly).

 

[aquova]

In 2007 or so, I was watching an early "Let's Play" style video of someone playing through one of the old Genesis Sonic games. Before starting the game though, they actually left in some of their setup while they talked, and you could see the screen capture of them browsing through their files on their Mac and running the emulator. I was a Mac user at the time, and without having much experience with Windows, had always been told they were worse, less capable machines that couldn't do most things a PC could do. I remember being shocked not only that they weren't playing it on real hardware, but on a Mac like mine of all things. It honestly was quite eye opening, and I recall it really opened my eyes to learning more about both emulation and computing.

 

[RomanZZZ]

Wow, I really look like a baby compared to many here...

 

[Waffles's iconWaffles]

My best friend handed me a red floppy disk containing a copy of the primitive PlayGuy Gameboy emulator and Pokemon Yellow (IN SPANISH!). It blew my mind on SO MANY LEVELS that I immediately wanted to dig further to see whatever else was possible... And, because this happened in 1999, it was also cemented my love for the whole thing like nothing else would -- it was like getting an early taste of what the year 2000 had promised while also providing a huge bonus for kids really into the Pokemon anime, which was at the height of its popularity at the time.

 

[X y b e r - S k u ll]

It was 2008 and I found out about emulation through YouTube videos since I really wanted to play Chrono Trigger and Earthbound and I knew they weren't gonna be on the Wii shop anytime soon (Although CT did get put on there later that same year lol).

 

[JPchicre]

I would play old PS1 discs in my laptop, using an old emulator ,whose name i dont recall, that could read discs from the Drive. It was the late 2000 and my PS1 had stopped working years before.

 

[Nelson2001 Nelson2001]

In my case it was in 2008 for the Sonic Gems Collection (2005) for the 6 Game Gear games that were emulation and as well as the 2 Vectorman that came out on the Mega Drive/Genesis that were also officially Emulated.

Although I also got to know the emulation on PC thanks to the VirtuaNES (Famicom/NES Emulator) in 2013 and also a Famicom/NES emulator for Android called NESoid in 2014.

 

[bjork]

In 1995 my cousin's boyfriend built a PC for my family, 486 that he had overclocked. It had floppy drives for both 3.5" and 5.25" so I asked him jokingly if it would run Commodore 64 games. He said, "you'd need an emulator" and that was the first time I'd heard that word. I don't know what the emulation scene was like at the time, because I didn't actually use one until a couple years later, but just the notion that it was possible seemed really cool. He had a SNES console copier thing too, he showed it to me by running some version of Street Fighter II that required multiple floppies to back it up.

 

[qw90700]

Well I don't remember the year but it was between 2000-2001 (because I'm sure it was around the time Matrix 1 released) I randomly found a street vendor selling pirated movie discs. I asked if he had a PS1 game and he said "yeah" and give me a box. I checked its inside and found so many cool games but also NES emulator disc. I was like "WTF is this shit", I asked the guy "dude does it mean PS1 can play NES?" he said "yeah". Back then shady BS discs were so popular, you would buy a movie disc but it could have a porn video instead, even random person's wedding video (they mixed up discs yo lolol) but I wanted to risk it to discover if this emulator shit is real shit. I was saving my last money for trip to home via bus but this shit was too legendary to ignore so I said "fine, I will take the risk and buy it, but if it doesn't work I'll find you, and your mother, and your aunt, even your distant cousin's granma's grankids!!!" the guy said "Sir, I'm sure it will work just trust me my discs are legit pirated stuff" and I said "ok" then walked like 10 KM back to my home.

It was almost night time, and in my city darkness and moon is a silent wake up bell to monsters. The Luna watches but never takes a side, it shines upon monsters and their victims equally but its light is never enough to scare off the monsters...

I was walking around a surreal part of my city I never saw before. A factory just next to a primary school in the middle of nowhere, you walk and walk and in the middle of nothingness there is only one street and buildings of it like real life is Sim City and the player just started the game lol, prostitutes were calling my name and when I refused they were cursing at my "manliness" (but they didn't know I always eat pork buns!!! lol), some kid on a balcony just sceaming in meaningless way for no reason at all, I was almost becoming a hit and run murder case because of street racers and another number in the statictics, a random homeless guy followed me for a while and then started to run to me and asked if I have a smoke and I said "I never smoked in my life", he said "BS you are not a kid. I'm sure you started in highschool" and I said "nah, it's just unnecessary shit to waste money on", he noded and said "true. better don't start that shit" and after a silence he said "BTW dude do you have a change, I can hear you have some" but he was mixed them up with my keys so I was honest "dude if I had the money I would take the bus instead of walking. the only metal on me is my keys" and he said "BS" then I showed my empty pockets, moneyless wallet and keys, he was convinced and said "shit even I have way more money than you" and walked away lolol.

Then eventually after so many survival horror and beat 'em up sections and then beating the boss fight I finally came to my home and tested the disc. The shit was real!!! There was funny hacks in it like Toilet Mario and Punk Tennis, which was the first time I got to know the concept of games hacks too lolol.

 

[Soma_Shotgun]

Around 2009 or 2010 when I watched random Mario 64 Bloopers videos. I was around 10 and my English wasn't fully developed yet so I was very shocked when I managed to install and run Project 64 with Ocaina of Time. After that I emulated everything from NES, all the way up to N64. My setup wasn't ideal tho. Played everything with keyboard, I didn't know how winrar worked so I remember I opened ZSNES inside the rar so the emulator would never save and I pretty much beat games by having the emulator open and puting my laptop to sleep mode.

 

[Juiceala]

2004 after playing Sonic Heroes and Sonic Gems Collection (Sonic CD and Sonic The Fighters) a brit friend my sister knew online, we had a conversation about wanting to play knuckles chaotix and he mentioned having the rom and emulation, after some long research on primitive internet I learned about roms and emulation, soon that year I got a modded xbox and filled it with roms and emulators, that was a great decade to brag online before emulation started to become commonly known by the masses.

 

[Yousef Yousef]

Same.

LOOOOOL auto correct. Fixed haha.

 

[RomanZZZ]

Bro, I'm literally a SPERM compared to the answers here

 

[Muklas]

Poor kid from the Balkans trying to make his PSP useful. I was playing Pokemon Red on my Crisis Core edition PSP during recess.