The First Ever Emulator You Remenber

[Rocket2049]

ZSNES
it's really bad NOW, but back in windows 98 i loved it!
but it had major graphics issues, like F-zero/mario kart, or anything with mode9 graphics, looks really bad, blurry even.
Final fantasy 5 had issues where i couldn't see "underwater" so i was blind navigating, happens a few times in that game, and once in FF6. some games had glitchy sound too.
but for a long time i had SO many SNES games going on that.

 

[Trainer Red]

nesticle and zsnes was what i was introduced to in the late 90s so yeah those two !

 

[MegaHiro91]

VisualBoyAdvance. I remember a middleschool classmate who told me of "this epic way you could make your computer think it was a GameBoy", 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.

 

[Mad Max]

Callus95, it was 10,000 years ago

 

[Adahriot_]

My first emulator I played was Genesis that came on a magazine disc. I played Sonic 3 and a weird hack rom of Chip n Dales replaced with Mario

 

[cjl8336 cjl8336]

Kawaks in the early days of CPS2 cracking

 

[Pokenami's icon Pokenami Pokenami]

Virtual GameBoy (VGB) and Snes9x on my old potato laptop

 

[5thWolf]

NESticle!!

 

[CG4R12I4N]

Bleem!

I did remember playing Pokemon RBY first on no$GB, but Bleem! (especially the PSX one) was first time I actually ever bothered to engrave the name in my kid phase because it's such a revolutionary emulator to play a revolutionary game console at the time.

 

[tempest2k]

zsnes for sure.... it's what made super mario world my favorite game for a very long time. i was amazed that i could play games from that weird grey thing my cousins had on my shitty 2008 laptop, and rom hacks on top of that

 

[rodimusprimal]

Bleem, Nesticle, and ZSNES.

 

[Patapolis]

the first emulator i remember was frodo (commodore 64 emulator)

 

[DadBowser]

ZSNES for sure was my first foray into emulation. Then Bleem! (confused Bleemcast for Bleem although I remember that was pretty cool too) happened I'm 43 years old now and when I think about it, the whole scene feels like a blur. I feel like I've used and troubleshot more emulators and front ends than I've completed games in my backlog

 

[Don Patch]

ZSNES

Really liked that menu, NGL

 

[fishboneKiller]

my mom used to teach at a high school, and i would often stay with her after school and go mess around until she was done with her work. one time i wandered into one of the computer labs, and these two high schoolers were playing mario 64 on a computer. it totally blew my mind at the time. i asked them how they did that, and they gave me a flashdrive with a REALLY old version of project 64 and a handful of roms. if i recall, it had mario 64, wipeout, starcraft, and maybe banjo kazooie? it's been well over a decade so i don't remember all of them, but there were definitely more than that. i think the drive was named something like 'ASDSDASDSSDSAD", it was definitely a keysmash of those three letters. they let me borrow their flashdrive, as long as i promised to give it back.

i never did. i still have it, actually! the plastic shell broke off long ago, so it's stripped down just to the basic pcb and plug. i still use it for stuff like wii modding, though its mostly a last resort. i guess if those two guys are reading this... i've still got your flash drive, if you want it back!

 

[Sumea]

That found out I could play some GBC and GBA games for free on my PC so I could try some stuff for free. Having to actually adjust frameskip to 1-3 depending on system and game. The first time I tried N64 emulation having to get plugins separate from emulator. That time I helped friend to do a Zelda OOT Puzzle with a controller because he emulated on keyboard. I had to do Mirror Shield puzzles for him. Having to find out weird combo of plugins to play PS1 games on PC. Needing to adjust FPS limit manually to 15 to play MGS from my PAL disks correctly.

All of that stuff, now I should be able to do that all on retroarch. I know it has reasons for hate and other prefer entirely different thing. That is why there are different things which is as should be.
Zsnes ui is still legendary.

 

[Zandabel]

Zsnes was the first. I think it was 1999 or 2000. My brothers friend brought over a CD that had it and hundreds of games. I spent hours switching between games just to see what we had. He had fan translations of some even way back then. I believe Front Mission was the first translated ROM I ever played. Hours poured into Harvest Moon, Mario RPG, and the Enix library. Game Boy and GBA came little while later. Years later, I put Zsnes with a handful of ROMS on the school computer. The IT guy caught it and I got banned from them for the last 6 weeks of 8th grade. Good times.

 

[Krazy Kat]

back when i have my first pentium 2 333 mhz in my elementary school
genecyst dos / win98 is sega 32x emulator
Bleem / connectix virtual game station win98 is psone emulator

maybe it was around june or july 1999 back when i played might and magic VII and darkstone game
and then my friend came he had the og hardware of psx and tell me this "wtf your ps1 graphics much better than mine" me having riva tnt2 at that time

 

[RetroCasual]

The first emulator I saw running was a very old version of NeoRAGEx which still didn't run the full catalog of the NeoGeo and had a lot of crashes, but ZSNES and ePSXe were the first ones I used in my PC.
I got both of them at once, searching on emulation websites, and although everybody was amazed and saying wonders about ZSNES (and it was an almost ended project), it never convinced me because of the graphics pixelation. I found the graphics very different compared to when I played SNES in my CRT TV and I still didn't know why it was happening. But ePSXe was in a constant progression and really showed 3D games in my PC screen slightly better than my real PlayStation, so ePSXe was my true real first emulator.

 

[vaçago]

I was a kid and bought this random PS1 game with Mario and other classic characters on the cover. When I got home and started playing it I realized it was a collection with hundreds of NES games and this "game" was called imbNES. I didn't even know what an emulator was at the time but I immediately liked the idea of playing older systems on a modern platform.

 

[Gamma]

NO$GBA.

 

[Deleted member 1816]

PPSSPP which I used to play Monster hunter freedom unite.

 

[GardeniaSky's icon GardeniaSky GardeniaSky]

Project 64! Way back I got it to run some LoZ games because I had to sell my GC[I had that bonus disc with MM and OOT]

 

[JJ43O9]

Epsxe was my first step into emulation! Boy was it a trip!

 

[starseeker300]

visualboyadvance, the old version. it was old reliable for a while for me, though i only started emulating in high school