The First Ever Emulator You Remenber

[Isegrim]

Neorage X. I was already collecting SNES and NES games at the time I discovered it. Bought most ports of Capcom arcade games on the SNES as well and some of them had capabilities the arcade version didn't. A NES and SNES emulator might not have gotten a rise out of me if I heard something about it casually but Neo-Geo, that was a different world and one I wished to explore but couldn't due to the extremely high price tag of Neo Geo MVS and AES carts and yet, I could see their arcade games all over the malls back then and people were playing KOF and Neo Geo titles in public extensively. Their console ports especially for fighting games were a lot poorer compared to say...Capcom's so I wasn't satisfied legit wise.

So when I stumbled on a CD with Neorage X, it was like a whole world opening.

 

[MegaDrive1987]

For me, it was Meka (the best Sega Master System emulator back in the day).
It ran on DOS, had an amazing and skinnable UI and was just fun and easy to use overall.

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I remember tinkering with this in the early 2000s myself. I MIGHT still have it somewhere from one of my old backup discs.

 

[Leguminoso]

No$GBA was my first, then it was Visual Boy Advance.

 

[Sheepy765]

I think my first emulator was Delta (GBA emulator) on my iphone back when I first got one, played the heck out of the pokemon GBA games, also Mario and Luigi, really any kind of RPG i could run on it. Even added a custom kirby skin which was pretty cool.

 

[Shura271]

Neorage X. I was already collecting SNES and NES games at the time I discovered it. Bought most ports of Capcom arcade games on the SNES as well and some of them had capabilities the arcade version didn't. A NES and SNES emulator might not have gotten a rise out of me if I heard something about it casually but Neo-Geo, that was a different world and one I wished to explore but couldn't due to the extremely high price tag of Neo Geo MVS and AES carts and yet, I could see their arcade games all over the malls back then and people were playing KOF and Neo Geo titles in public extensively. Their console ports especially for fighting games were a lot poorer compared to say...Capcom's so I wasn't satisfied legit wise.

So when I stumbled on a CD with Neorage X, it was like a whole world opening.

Good old Neorage X. I remember waiting with anticipation for each new KoF rom to get decrypted. And those were quite a chunky download for the late 90s slow internet connections!

 

[fbnaulin]

Maybe ZNES, or Snes9x was the first one.

I remember using Callus a lot with my brother, to play every single Capcom beat'em up. We were usual arcade players, so having access to Free Play and the DIP Switches was crazy.

 

[Deleted member 887798]

The first emulator I remember using is no$gmb: https://problemkaputt.de/gmb.htm

When the original Pokémon games came out, my sister and I didn't have enough money to buy a Gameboy, let alone two, so we opted for emulation. Everybody was playing Pokémon in the school yard, you literally couldn't not play it. I mean isn't it like, the most popular franchise ever, or something?

no$gmb had the option to use the Super Gameboy borders, which blew my mind in 1999. And it would help my sister and I tell Pokémon Red and Blue apart. I had Red and she had Blue, because it has Vulpix, I guess.

Then it got me curious about emulation, I had to look it up online and immediately loved Snes 9x. You couldn't just emulate N64 then, or I would have picked that.

 

[Pjira]

snes9x, Fusion, fceux, epsxe, VBA, Project64

All on Windows, I never emulated until the early 2010s

 

[Kamomedan]

epsxe, snes9x, Project 64, VBA.

I didn't start heavily emulating till way later

 

[Deleted member 887798]

I think it was either Genecyst and then Snes96/97 (Snes9x's ancestor) on DOS, I probably tried them on the same day. It's crazy that these emulators used to run on a good old Pentium 166.

What I find really crazy, is that the SNES has a 3.58 MHz processor, and it often runs slower. Somehow they just make games work on it.

 

[Leviafen]

i remember using an snes emulator (likely zsnes) to play earthbound and mega man x which were games i always remember reading ppl rave on abt. i liked mmx way more and became a hardcore fan in my teenage years.

 

[Poppet]

A weird one. I think it was SNES9x, but whatever it was it was behind a w98 interface that made everything look easier to interact with. There was a list of games on the left, it showed screenshots of them on the right and once you picked a game, you just had to hit play.

 

[dilsworth]

Winkawaks

Back when I was 15 and suddenly took interest in Samurai Shodown V (and Special), me and my sister started doing extensive Yahoo and Google search on how to play it and turns out . It was all trial and error to get it running the first time we downloaded it. Then one forum we used to be active in were super helpful on proving solutions to get the emulator and game running. Even dipswitches too!

 

[Gigano Reis]

My first emulator was project 64. I think I downloaded it around 2005. I was a little kid and wanted to play around with cheats on majora's mask and make machinimas.

 

[Ikagura]

 

[Strategist's icon Strategist Strategist]

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The nostalgia hits hard with this one.

 

[Ikagura]

The nostalgia hits hard with this one.

There's something about old emulators that I absolutely love

I do like more advanced modern emulators for sure but still, they lack something they used to have...