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.

 

[GaleComprehends]

Was watching Pokemon ROM hack videos full of swearing when I was 12. Wanted to try making my own, so I looked up how to do it. Never did make the potty mouthed ROMhack of my middle school dreams. I ended up looking for other games to play on VBA instead.

 

[strawberry29]

i always saw my sibling emulate games and learned that you can do almost every console and ever since that i emulate game all the time

 

[Gigano Reis]

I wanted to play mortal kombat 4 and majora's mask, so I looked some things up and found project 64. Ended up messing with the cheat codes in them, but it was a good time

 

[Just a romainian guy]

I was bloody mad that sony took God of war chains of olympus, and ghost of Sparta off the store right AFTER introducing the new subscription options, the most expensive one letting you play "classics" by streaming the games instead of actually letting you download them.

I didn't do anything for about a year until I mentioned to one of my friends how much i wanted to play those 2 games and some others like MGS and silent hill.

He told about a site called cdromance and the PPSSPP emulator for psp games.

Which then led me here and then retroachievements.

Those guys were right. Piracy is a service issue. I would have paid top dollar for those games.

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

Started emulating last year. Don't feel too bad.

 

[shaggi]

One day my NES stop working. I run my computer, hoping for a method to play my favourite games and Nestopia appears.

 

[Tosta_Pane]

A friend introduced me GBA emulation back in the mid 2000s. I didn't have a stable internet connection back then, so he gave me a USB drive with the emulator and a bunch of games.
Pretty nice of him.

 

[ThirteeTooBeets]

My family wasn't exactly poor, but our economic situation always made it so we had to prioritize more practical, survival required stuff. Things like food, clothes, the electricity, running water, heat in thw inter, we even got toys growing up, and good ones too, but electronic toys have always been very expensive over here, and rare to get back then.

When I was born my parents already owned a Famicom, and a home computer that my dad used to work, that computer was full of Nintendo roms and emulations (courtesy of a tech savy friend of the family, as a gift for us and especially baby me I think) and that's how I always played them growing up, it was the natural way to be and play. For the first few years of my life I didn't even know Nintendo made consoles

 

[JoystickV2]

Funny story, I discovered about emulation while in the house of some cousins, they were playing Sega Genesis games on the PC and I was flabbergasted, they had A LOT of games in that emulator too, and I played Sonic & Knuckles with them, asked how were they playing those games, and they told me I had to own the games to play them on emulators.

Several years later, I discovered the magic of emulation thanks to those SNES emulators for PS2 and was never the same afterwards, to say the least :V

 

[Sheepy765]

When I was like... 5 or 6, I saw one of my friends playing Super Mario World on his computer and thought that was neat. Fast forward 8-9 years I look up how to play GBA games on my phone and get introduced to Delta.