How long have you been emulating games?

[YoshifreakZX]

I've been emulating games since like 2009-2010 I wanna say, when I was a kid. First game I remember emulating was Sonic 1 by downloading it on some site called gameguerilla I think? (been a VERY long time so my memory is rough)

 

[LightningmanEXE]

since I was in single digits age wise. I saw someone playing Super Nintendo on a laptop during a family trip, and when I got home I immediately tried to figure out how that worked. been a fan ever since.

 

[Leon]

Around 2006 for me, not sure it was 2006 exactly but it's between 2006 and 2008.

 

[hazys]

I think my first emulator was ZSNES in the mid-late 2000s. Used it to play Chrono Trigger.

 

[Ninnuam]

2005, I got my first PC and my uncle gave me a CD with zsnes and the whole romset

 

[Graw]

The late 90's with zsnes and nesticle. Then after epsxe came out I tortured my computer trying to play psx games at like 15fps. It's how I played Xenogears, Chrono Cross, FF7 and FF9 for the first time. Chrono Cross was painful to play and I ended up not finishing it. It just crawled. I remember too almost every single playstation game needed it's own configuration to get working properly. There were a ton of individual game hacks and patches built in to the emulator needed to emulate specific games. I remember having to go out and search out the best settings for almost every game I played just to get it to run. Those days were like the wild west.

Emulation's so easy now it's boring. You used to spend almost as much time messing around with the emulator as you did playing the game. It's a lot better now for sure. I found it weird trying to get switch games running. It reminded me of those days except there was nothing I could do. A game either worked or it didn't. There's not really any settings or anything I could change to make it work if it didn't work.

 

[beyondthesky]

I think around 2012? I was a huge pokemon fan and I had a DS lite. I wanted to play Pokemon white/black, I had a R4 and the game on it but it wouldn't boot up. Someone told me the DS lite was too weak to run pokemon black/white (don't know to this day if that's true) but I had a laptop and I heard talks about emulators before, so I investigated a bit and was able to play on DesMume

 

[Dragonsoren]

2006, when my computer was still a core 2 duo pentium that only runned PS1 games for the generation below.

 

[ThatOneLum ThatOneLum]

Around 2004/5. I don't remember the emulator but it was the Final Fantasy games on NES after I discovered that the series was mostly missing outside of Japan.

Went back and finished 1, then tried out some of the others I had missed as well.

Pretty sure I immediately dived in head first and started playing PS1 resi games on my laptop since I had been too scared of them as a kid to play them when they were new.

 

[reila]

Not sure if I replied here but oh well. I started somewhat late, around 2011/12 ish. Like many others it was VisualBoyAdvance. My older brother had a USB with a bunch of Pokemon ROMs and that was how I was able to play Emerald for the first time. And even then, I remember physical copies of emerald being like 100$+. I still want one, although I’m not sure how good reproduction cartridges made by fans are. Oh and I didn’t mean to derail the thread here.

 

[groundbeef]

Since 2000 on my Dreamcast. Got a PC in 2001 and have been using emulation ever since.

 

[VysetheBlueRogue]

Hey Guys and Gals! First post here. Anyway, my first emulation experience was Final Fantasy 6 with ZSnes on my family's Compaq PC back in '98. My brother and I discovered so many classic SNES games that way. Good times!

 

[FTLOTG]

I started in 2005 but I moved on to just using original hardware for everything. I prefer it to emulation.

 

[LucasLeite]

The first time I played an emulated game was all the way back in 2002, when a friend of my mother got me a floppy disk (I suppose most of you are too young to even know what is a floppy disk, but think of it as Fred Flintstone's SD card) with Pokémon Gold and a GBC emulator in it. I actually got that gift one or two years prior, but 2002 was my first opportunity to try it, thanks to the computar lab in my school.

But I only got a computer of my own in 2005. As soon as I got internet, it didn't take long for me to figure out all the emulators my PC could run (basically every console up to PSX, N64 and GBA). Discovering Sonic 3 & Knuckles, Ocarina of Time and Minish Cap was the best thing ever in those days.

 

[Graves Ruinwalker]

Ahh yes ! It was 2003 and a friend of mine was a real tech-fanatic . He had already a N64 , Ps1 , Ps2 and a Snes too but he preffered the PC overall . We were teenagers and he showed me alot of cool stuff he found on the web.

And out of nowhere he told me about emulation . I didnt believed him till he showed me the N64 emulator (it was project64) and i was blown away .
He made me a disc for our family computer and from this day on im fully into emulation.

That were awesome times . Getting gaming magazines , looking for new games , hanging around with the other kids from our street and talking about videogames day in , day out.

And when the PSP arrived , this was the next level and we learned to jailbreak it and pirated alot of psp-games while emulating on it like mad men .

Awesome times indeed.

 

[CaineRand]

Probably around 2010s. Can't remember exactly when but it was me and my older brother trying out Visual Boy Advance.

I do remember that the first proper game that I played was that Naruto game on GBA.

 

[LiberoVulpesLiberoVulpes's icon]

I have been playing SNES games on PC since i have memory, so around 2003~2004. Cause my parents are gamers as well.

ZSNES.

 

[SoraSquood]

Around late 2017, I believe. Not with a computer, but with a PS3 I had gotten that I put some custom firmware on as it was one of the later fat models that ditched full backwards compatibility with physical PS2 discs. Later on I moved on to DraStic on my phone, realized I could play GBA on my PS3, hacked a Wii, got a computer so PPSSPP became a go-to, lost the Wii, got a BETTER computer so I can actually emulate PS2 decently, got a new Wii and hacked that one.

Still got the PS3 too. It needs a cleanin' something fierce but it still works.

Oh right, I learned about emulation in general from my uncle. He's got a ton of modded consoles and a lot of discs. Fond memory was tryin' out one of his modded og Xbox's.

 

[mistaflojangles]

I feel like an OG lol
I started getting NES roms from the library computer back in like 2003-2004. I would use floppy disks and had a windows 95 computer. Started emulating SNES games and playing Mortal Kombat with friends using USB controller's it was a blast. I remember finally getting Tekken 3 to work on a PSX emulator and it took days of tweaking options, and if It played a cutscene it would crash

I got my start back in 2012 on the PS1 emulator ePSXe. The first game I emulated was my favorite video game of all time, Castlevania: Symphony of t

 

[TamagotchiTamaHero24's icon TamagotchiTamaHero24 TamagotchiTamaHero24]

We don’t talk about the “Dad’s andriod phone with Pokémon Emerald” incident.

I still mourn that corrupted save data to this day.

 

[PKT]

Since at least 2011 when I got (mostly) unregulated access to a computer. Would use browser based emulators to play NES games and it spiraled from there

 

[tongloko]

About 20 years.

 

[lensboi]

growing up poor, I only have a PC at home. I started emulating games since 2010, my pc at that time only capable of emulating SNES and GBA games.

 

[SonOfEnosh]

I had a really low end PC, and I was desperate for some change in games. My brother and I usually had older consoles, but since they were bootleg and cheap they would stop working after a while.
Then searching through the sites to play GBA games, back in 2011 we found emulators and Pandora's box opened. Quickly switched to n64 and NDS, haven't stopped since.
I played all the classics, and some obscure games. Now with a better PC I focus mostly on PS2 and PSP, but I never forget GBA and other ones.

 

[cousinDipp]

huh, guess its been over 8 years since i first learned how