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.

 

[NeonKnights]

It was sometime in 2007 (Around the same time I first watched the Simon's Quest Pre-AVGN review.) after watching the King of Kong and wanting to play Donkey Kong again and then playing it on MAME on my old VAIO laptop.

 

[skramz]

funny enough, i've used an emulator on pc maybe 10 times... i think my first encounter with such a thing was on the wii? i remember messing around with some atari emulator trying to use the wiimote as a paddle. fun times!

 

[Xdqwerty Xdqwerty]

I think my older brother downloaded project64 and visualboyadvance for me back in 2016

 

[Grumpy_Old_Man]

Late nineties bootleg cd with zsnes for dos. One of the earlier builds with lots of bugs and the fabled snow effect in the menus accompanied with most of the snes catalog.

 

[Felipe]

Late nineties bootleg cd with zsnes for dos. One of the earlier builds with lots of bugs and the fabled snow effect in the menus accompanied with most of the snes catalog.

Kinda the same as me. Found about it through the computer with internet of a school mate of mine around 1997-1998. The 1st emulator i remember was Zsnes on win98 that like you said, it was bugged.

 

[Metroid_Hybrid]

How? Not 100% sure..
I only roughly remember when, that is, back in the early-00's..
It was actually quite fun back in those days scouring the interwebs for hard-to-find ROMs..

 

[urbancowboy]

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

2009, people at school were talking about playing Sega Games on the PC. I tried running RE2 on windows xp and couldn't get to work lol. In 2014 I got back into because of the NVIDIA shield tablet. I was stoked that I was able to play ps1 games again.

 

[pouet7]

in 2011 after watching a lets player use zsnes, I think my first emulated game was a pre patched ROM Hack. It was vip and wall mix 2 lol

 

[Grumpy_Old_Man]

Kinda the same as me. Found about it through the computer with internet of a school mate of mine around 1997-1998. The 1st emulator i remember was Zsnes on win98 that like you said, it was bugged.

Yeah I also got introduced to the fabled cd by a school friend. Only difference at that time is that I was still using Windows 95 on an Acer Aspire all in one.

 

[csanjuro]

97-98 with Snes9x on a cd that a friend of mine gifted me