How long have you been emulating games?

[Rocket2049]

ever since i knew of emulators, i've been using emulators.
about 2000s when i had a windows 98 computer for the first time, i downloaded SO MUCH.
i'm extremely spoiled by fast forward, rewind, save states, and in some cases cheats to have other fun.

 

[rematche]

years.

 

[MegaHiro91]

I couldn't tell you the year, but it must've been around 4th grade (so around 10 years old), where a middleschool classmate who told me of "this epic way you could make your computer think it was a GameBoy" (the VisualBoyAdvance), and so, nagging him about it for a bit, I had him burn a CD for me with the program plus a handful of games. I was mostly interested in DragonBall Z: Buu's Fury, being a massive DBZ fan and seeing as that game didn't release in my country.

Our home computer at the time was slower than slow, so my input was lagging behind fiercely by about 3 seconds, but I was a pacient lad so I persevered! If anything it trained my reaction time as well as my ability to time my actions in tandem with what went on on-screen. Observing the speed of the enemy and the speed of their attacks I knew exactly when to defend or counter-attack for my move to land or not take damage.

...yes I felt smart :P

 

[DaveTheMan]

Around 1999-2000 as I wanted to Emulate Pokemon Games on my PC

 

[DeadVoivod]

I think my first would be MAME v0.21 in 1997.

 

[Judier]

I think I started like... half a year or so ago, thanks to the Nintendo DS emulator. So far I've been geeking about Metroid, I'm having fun with the Metroid Fusion Open Randomizer, it's pretty good!

 

[5thWolf]

Around 1998! I think my first emulator was NESticle!

 

[JIGENBAKUDAN]

I don't really remember the day when I first started emulating but the first emulators I ever used was John GB/GBC/GBA and OpenEMU.

 

[Mr. SyS]

2009 so I would say about 15 years. I can't believe enough time has passed since then that I can feel nostalgic for Pokemon hacks like Quartz or Shiny Gold.

 

[Vir_Tual_Player]

Must've been 10 to 13 years ago, when I was in middle school. I was craving to play Zelda Ocarina of Time again but couldn't thanks to my sister selling our N64, plus I didn't had any allowance at the time.

 

[necroticart]

I remember using NESticle when it came out. I even remember the days when SNES emulation barely worked.

 

[bjork]

I'm in with the 1997 people, a neighbor showed me nesticle and I thought it was the coolest thing. Prior to that, on the day of UFC 6 (some time in 1995), my cousin's boyfriend who was a bit older, showed me a console copier he had for SNES, booting SFII from floppy disks. That was just crazy to me.

Other than that, I don't know if it counts, but there were those system changers for non-Atari hardware that you can play 2600 games on, I feel like my uncle had one for his Intellivision. So if that counts, like... 1984?

 

[NoctemDead]

Around 2010, I read about LSD: Dream Emulator (In a cracked(.)com article maybe?) and got a PS1 emulator to play it. I don't remember which emulator but I do know it seemed a lot more difficult to set up than Duckstation was recently.

Around that time I also emulated some GBA Pokemon games. Then I didn't touch it again until 2024 when I wanted to play Baroque after I saw it on a YouTube video

 

[Parasite_Steve]

Early 2000s probably. I do remember playing nes and snes emulators on my old winXP tower which I got in 2002, so roughly around that time. My older brother had a couple of cds filled with roms that he got from lan parties.
Epsxe came around pretty much the same time and ran reasonably well but downloading isos was a drag for a long time due to connection speeds and traffic limits so I used it mostly to play my original psx games with save states. I did however manage to find the Japanese version of Tenchu 1 in the depths of the internet which I was keen on because of the level editor. At the time I was hopelessly overwhelmed by the language barrier. 20 years later I can just download it in a minute and play it on my phone.

 

[Antobal]

Around 1999 with MAME ... my first love.
Be able to play real arcade roms at home was a dream come true

 

[Deleted member 884]

Since middle school with Pokémon Gold in a language that doesn't exist, 1999 or 2000 I think.

 

[HarrDurr]

I think around 2015 when I was checking out all the NES/SNES Dragon Quest translations coming out and I couldn’t find any other way to play them. I remember friends of mine slapping Pokemon Red on the old school computers prior to that but I thought it wasn’t right playing Pokemon on PC. Oh how I was wrong

 

[starseeker300]

I thought it wasn’t right playing Pokemon on PC. Oh how I was wrong

yeah, gamefreak( and nintendo) brought it on themselves, make the new games objectively worse experiences and make the old games hard to obtain, what did they think was gonna happen when they chose not to expand their workforce while also taking on a stricter development schedule

 

[hembruh]

idk 20 years ago or something. I think I started with NES and GB emulation. I don't remember how I found out about it in the first place, but I do remember by 7th grade I had a typing class in the computer lab and I had really shitty dial up at home (rural area) but they had broadband at school so I would download roms there to put on a tiny usb flash drive that would fill up pretty quck but every day I'd be filling it with roms and emulators to take home until I had full sets of everything on the rom site I used up through the SNES/Genesis for consoles and the GBA for handhelds. I'd play SNES rpgs and GB games on the computer at school. I think I played Final Fantasy 4-6 in that class over that school year. my teacher one time asked me how the hell I was doing that and I thought I'd get in trouble but I showed him and then one time I needed to find out if I needed to do anything from a day I had missed for another class I had him for and walked in during lunch and he was sitting there playing a dragon quest game. cool guy. every computer class I took through high school I was mostly screwing around playing RPGs because they weren't as much of a pain in the ass as action games on keyboards.

 

[BunnyLain]

Chrono Trigger didn't come out in Europe. A lot of JRPG's didn't from that era. I only had one option >:C

 

[starseeker300]

Chrono Trigger didn't come out in Europe. A lot of JRPG's didn't from that era. I only had one option >:C

WAIT, WHAT!? you guys didnt get the GOAT Chrono Trigger

 

[lil_thang]

i believe i was in primary school iirc when an international student showed us all him playing pokemon red on one of the ancient old ass school computers of the era.
this blew my tiny brain and i think i went home that day and downloaded a buncha old emulators and roms, like SNES/megadrive etc.
some time in the early 2000s. possibly earlier, late 90s.

 

[BunnyLain]

WAIT, WHAT!? you guys didnt get the GOAT Chrono Trigger

We didn't get Mario RPG either, JRPG's just didn't release in Europe a lot of the time. Like, none of the dragon quest games came here and I don't think we got any final fantasy games after 1 either, except for mystic quest and 7. It wasn't until the PS1 re-releases did we get them... except for Chrono Trigger still... which we didn't get until the DS port.

We did get Terranigma though.

 

[cjl8336]

 

[Aisf]

I've been emulating for about three years. Emulating is pretty fun.