The First Ever Emulator You Remenber

[MyNameIsJeff]

Early 2000s. I remember playing Nintendo 64 and NES games on some old beige chonker as a child. I really liked Hot Wheels: Turbo Racing and River City Ransom. Tried Final Fantasy but had zero clue what I was doing.

The earliest emulator I remember setting up myself is No$GBA on a school laptop in high school. It's how I first played Castlevania: Aria of Sorrow.

 

[itsameamerica]

Also the original Zsnes had a hi-res mode 7 hack that was fantastic and I don't know why no modern SNES emulators do that. It also fit on a floppy disk with a single compressed ROM.

BSNES has a high res Mode 7 option

 

[GoodWall_533]

First one i 've ever seen was Visual Boy Advance. Saw my cousin playing Pokémon Fire Red one day on my aunt's old PC with his friend. I remember being mesmerized by it lol. The first ever emulator that i've used was KEGA Fusion. Played the Sonic trilogy there for hundreds of hours.

 

[slimedotdocx]

First emulator I remember using was zsnes, and then later visualboyadvance. I have fond memories of watching Protonjon and making my own terrible lunar magic SMW romhacks as a kid.

 

[Adrastia]

The first ones I used were ZSNES and Gens. I knew of other emulators but rarely used them at the time because I had the systems and a lot of games. As that changed I started using emulators more.

 

[Shameless]

Remember when i was a lil kid my dad coming back from work overseas with MAME on his laptop loaded up with all sorts of games, but the first emulator i got myself was DeSmuME even tho i had a dsi.

 

[DanCalibur]

I got my SNES in 1997 and for years I hunted down a copy of Zelda: A Link to the Past or Chrono Trigger with no success. One day around 1999/2000 my cousin invited me to check his new computer and it had Nesticle, Genecyst and ZSNES loaded with not just the games i wanted but stuff I had no idea even existed ? . Took me two years of saving to get my first AMD Duron 1Ghz single core, 128Mb of ram and onboard graphics?. Loaded it with ZSNES, Project64 and EPSXE and it was glorious?.

 

[ZForceFFC]

I don't really remember what emulator it was, but Final Fantasy 5 was the first emulated game I remember playing.

 

[setokaiba]

zsnes

 

[MrFabulous]

First emulator I had even heard of was Bleem! but the first one I used was NESticle. As mentioned earlier in the thread, I ended up deleting it because the windows icon was a ballsack and I didn't want to explain that to the fam. After that was ZSNES which was constantly praised and seemed to be the favorite for emulation enthusiasts, but I had terrible luck with it not detecting on-board sound - I played through FFV-VI and Chrono Trigger without music (or transparency layers) before switching over to Snes9x, they were like completely different games.

I think it was just a windows shell for ZSNES but that basically carried me through high school, even the post-processing effects were nice. Catching up with SNES games was incredible but I think the last time I was really blown away by emulators was when MAME got really big.

 

[Terro108]

Found Emulation via Vizzed at first but I didn't really understand what it was at first. After that I'd say my first Emulator was Desume

Introduced to me to a ton of games like Pheonix Wright, Fire Emblem, SRW, Summon Night, etc.
Also Golden Sun

Looking back its probably the source of my love for old school JRPGs

 

[Mecharocca]

Definitely ZSNES and NeoRageX. I remember being dumbfounded I could even do this.

• Putting the snow theme on for ZSNES on during the holidays felt nice.
• For NeoRageX, the patience required to understand all the nooks and crannies to get it to work and finally running Blazing Star.

 

[mrmagicm]

I remember VGB (1995) on ms-dos 7.0

 

[IndigoCrow]

Mine was Visual boy Advance. The first game that I tested was Mega Man Zero 4 and My mind exploded when I saw that you could play retro games on a computer It was like opening the pandora box.

This was mine as well, and also used it to play Megaman Zero and the Battle Network games a lot when I was a kid. Growing up we couldn't afford much so having options like this on an old computer was amazing, I remember it being handed to me alongside some other files on a CD of all things, lol.

 

[Mr. SyS]

ZSNES. Loved the interface.

 

[Castrovania]

NESticle to emulate Zelda and Pro Wrestling back in 1998.

 

[RandomHajile]

Wow, I loved Nesticle and Genecyst, but it wasn't my first. I didn't know emulation existed until I'm going to say November-ish of 1996, when I was in #Crystal_tokyo on dal.net IRC and one of the ops told me about it and gave me the DOS SNES emulator Super Virtual Magicom. Yeah, ran through a command prompt of all things. He told me to pick any SNES game I wanted, just one, and he'd give me a rom to play on it. I chose FF2.

It opened a whole new world for me. After that I began searching the net for more roms. This led me to Plasticman's old site (anyone remember that?) Cherry Roms, Lina and Nuku-nuku, Zophar, and many others. I got into the hacking community too and started messing with roms casually. Got into MAME around 98. I remember holding onto the CPS2 roms eagerly awaiting support in MAME for them so I could play D&D: Tower of Doom.

I went to a computer school from 99-2000, and when there I brought several CDs with all my emulators and roms on them. This one guy ended up failing the class because he was playing the translated FF3 on Nesticle the entire class period. My fault, I guess!!

Emulation is a big part of my life. I have tons of DVDs of just backed up games and old versions of emulators. There's as much nostalgia there as there is in the games themselves.

 

[sunofpearl89]

My first (technically) emulator was Sega Smash Pack 2 on PC in the late 90s-early 00s.

As far as unofficial emulators go, there was a Java-based NES emulator that could be played in a browser called "Norbert's Online NES Emulator." It blew me away at the time. I'm not sure if it's still around, probably not.

 

[Zerpina]

Around 97/98 and Either GenEm or KGen, i can't recall now tho, been so long ago XD
At that point in time, i was just getting a "New" old hand me down PC. think it had a Pentium 4 in it, 64 meg of ram or something like that. And a Full size 5 1/2 Floppy drive. And a Womping 2GB Spiny boy HDD. i miss that old clunker ;_;

I could be Misremembering the specs mind yoy

 

[lonelysardine]

NesterJ on the PSP back in 2011 for some NES games. Me and my buddies all had PSPs so we spent a lot of time playing games together. We ended up jailbreaking them and modding them as much as possible. Also tried Daedalus for N64 games but don't remember having a lot of luck.

 

[vitad00d]

*First* was an SNES emulator on a now-ancient Mac––playing fan-translated Bahamut Lagoon and a European Terranigma rom in the early 2000s was pretty memorable.

*Most mindblowing* was the release of the PS1-to-eboot.pbp converter for PSP in the mid 2000s.

Having full-speed multi-disc PS1 emulation on a handheld––way before the normalization of high-tech handhelds almost 20 years later––was what really got me into emulation. That tool was released on Christmas Day, and it really did feel like the ultimate gift to PSP owners, while creating a category that would later develop into handheld hacking scenes, and current-day dedicated emulation handheld devices.

 

[Zerpina]

I Do love the PSP/Vita, mine have been modded for ages <sadly the psp gave up the goat a few weeks back> but they are Alas, To underpowered for much beyond PS1 anymore.

I Still love the things tho, still take my Vita with me on trips and such, for something to kill time.

 

[zmbfan]

Snes9x on Windows XP

 

[Spike's iconSpike]

Connectix (maybe)

 

[raveci]

you can find it here

K

Thread 'The First Ever Emulator You Remenber'

Dec 13, 2024

As far as I'm concerned, in the nineties, on my dear old 386 PC, I remember playing NESticle (nes emulator) and  Genecyst (md emulator) obviously running on ms-dos: both with an attractive interface (the second with blood dripping on the screen) and which worked discreetly skipping a few frames, but the sound was sometimes crackly and lacked graphic filters.

Regarding handhelds, I remember a NO$GB (DMG-001 emulator), if I'm not mistaken, always for ms-dos.
And your?

• Karnik
• Replies: 212
• Forum: Emulation

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