How did you find out about emulation?

[dr grim]

With Bleem! for the ps1, as i wanted to play ps1 games on my pc.. then i discovered the rest for the genesis.. super nes..

 

[Lt. Commander Data]

I was pretty young when I first found out about emulation. I found out about it through one of my parent's friends at the time.

We were spending time at their house one day, and they wanted to give me something to do to occupy me while they went and did adult stuff. They sat me down at their computer showed me the different emulators, taught me how to open the roms to play, and let me have at it. It was an experience I'd never forget.

A few years after that I got my first home computer, and that's when my interest in emulation really took off, because it got me interested in foreign games I hadn't had prior access to. Which led me to finding fan translations, and romhacks.

I also believe these games deserve to be preserved and played by any means necessary, with growing scarcity for some titles and things just degrading with the passage of time. Emulation plays a huge role in keeping some of these consoles alive.

I also know in some countries, emulation is basically a necessity, because game consoles and the games themselves cost an exorbitant amount of money, and they aren't always privy to what's most modern either.

 

[bliss_freak]

I don't remember exactly when I learned about it but in the mid to late 2000s I was bringing Genesis Sonic ROMS and Gens to school on a flash drive to play whenever I had the chance.

That's why I have no nostalgia for Ultimate Flash Sonic. It's only exciting when you don't have access to a real Sonic game.

 

[Spyrone]

I'm pretty sure I figured out about the concept of emulation and simulation from an early 90s Reader's Digest book I picked up in a thrift store when I was in middle school. It had some pretty interesting stuff related to computers and electronics in it, from the old sweaty robot thing called Manny the military built (for testing web gear and other clothing, apparently) to an article about the then-potential future of cybernetic augmentation (which suggested using compound eyes like that of an insect to compensate for the lack of resolution on digital cameras at the time, and mentioned non-cybernetic implants and prosthetics that were already common at the time), as well as an article discussing emulation and simulation, and it's use in software and hardware engineering at the time.

A little later I got a bunch of Game Developer Magazines from my uncle, and one of them had an article discussing the retrocomputing scene as it stood in early '08 (IIRC, it might have been earlier than that). It mentioned a lot of the homegrown hardware that was coming out for old 8-bit computers at the time, as well as mentioning emulation in passing. Soon, I think I downloaded ePSXe and some games over the course of a few days (I still had dial-up, and I'm pretty sure that this was one of the last things I used it for before I got modern WiFi) primarily Spyro and the Medal of Honor games. I think the first game I booted was MoH: Underground, and I immediately cheated to get to the weird secret level I'd heard about.