How did you find out about emulation?

[Rox00]

I got into emulation when I first looked into emulation on my old laptop with the PS1 as it was better than my old desktop at that time, I remember my first emulator being Duckstation years ago before a lot of the improvements (I tried to download ePSXe but I couldn't make it work). Seeing the screen play and all that with one of my favorite PS1 games SRW Alpha just being played gave me the feeling of excitement and made me wanna go download more to experiment with more games (shoutout to Vimm's Lair btw!).

 

[LiberoVulpesLiberoVulpes's icon]

Back in the day, my dad had zsnes on his PC, we played a lot of zombies ate my neighbors and Joe & Mac, I learned to set it up myself by watching him.

Eventually expanding to other emulators, the first emulator I remember being able to set up completely on my own without anyone else was epsxe, to play MGS.

That's it.

 

[GenoCL]

I was like 10 or 11 at the time, I got a CD from a cousin that had Gameboy roms with the Rew emulator.

 

[diet_orange]

Sometime around 2006? My cousin had Project 64 and Smash loaded up on a Flash drive. Got hooked on it immediately and downloaded all the NES and Gameboy games I could find

 

[Lod 10]

EUI don't know if it was emulation but I knew classic NES games On the DVD player I saw the tiny game CD full of classic games

 

[SpcDaicon]

An older cousin introduced me to emulation in 2005-06.

Pokemon Fire Red, Golden Sun and Kirby Nightmare in Dreamland were my favorites.

I still remember the site we used, something like roxdownloads or something. Very shaddy and amaturish but it served it's propurse

 

[ShirabeAkatsuki]

I downloaded a Pokémon Yellow port to my phone, a Samsung without Android. Then I looked for ways to play the rest of the Pokémon games on my netbook, and I found Windspro.

 

[Shura271]

Somewhere around 1996/97, I saw a friend trading 3"1/4 floppy disks with "Secret of Mana" handwritten on the label. And I was like "Wait there's a PC version of Secret of Mana?!". He told me about emulators and the first thing I did was to run to the nearest Internet Cafe and download my first rom and emulator (Shining Force II on MD I think, I'm not sure).

 

[Badseed Badseed]

After I lost everything, God came to me and said there is a better way...
(true story)

 

[Lena CE]

I had heard about people playing on emulators on their PCs in a handful of forum posts or Youtube videos but I never really understood what it meant. The first time I fully understood was in 2009 or so. I was lucky enough to have a really nice Android phone and since it was the wonderful lawless wasteland era of Android there were tons of emulators on the app store to download for free. I think the ones I ended up using were Tiger-something, it started with a T I remember that much. Got the Genesis emulator and started tearing through the library. Was amazing to have a Genesis in the palm of my hand, got so good at touch controls that I was able to 1cc Contra Hard Corps which is wild to think about cause nowadays I can't even 1cc it on real hardware lol

From that point I modded my PSP and got a ton of emulators on that thing. Was a much nicer all-in-one device at the time c:

 

[Kamomedan]

I spent a lot of time on the PC when I was younger and randomly came across snes9x through an old Youtube video. Thought it was neat, but didn't really get into emulation heavily until the Steam Deck came out.

 

[Jangiku]

Back in 2009 i think when my PS2 died, was pretty bummed out and went to youtube. Typed something along the lines of "how to play my copy of crash twinsanity on my pc" and thus, my life changed forever.

 

[breremarer]

I first heard about them in the early 2000s, from my brother's tech-savvy hacker friend. I didn't really try emulating anything myself until a few years later. I had never owned an NES or SNES, but I loved all the Final Fantasies that I'd played on PS2, so the first thing I did was play through those.

 

[Max]

In a page for downloading java mobile games I found some Pokemon games with the emulator included. It took me a few days to realize how the whole thing worked

 

[tsunderemaid]

Pretty sure it was back in 2015? I remember seeing a kid in my geometry class playing Fire Emblem Binding Blade on his phone which absolutely blew my mind.