What was your first exposure to emulation?

[CactuarLOL]

I have a pretty cool memory of seeing my old computer class teacher showing the entire class how to emulate Sega Genesis games on the school computers. Unfortunately it was literally my last day before I had to move to another town so I never got to actually play them :(

Besides that, it was playing Pokemon rom hack nuzlockes together with my brother.

That is really cool, you can tell he was a big retro gamer.

 

[RandomHajile]

It was, I'm going to say November-ish of 1996 and I was on IRC Dal.net, a small Sailor Moon fan channel called #Crystal_Tokyo. It was me, another user and one of the ops. The guy who was op that night asked if we liked SNES games. I said yes. He said what my favorite was and I said Final Fantasy 2. He then gave me what I would find out was Virtual Super Magicom and a FF2 rom.

I was absolutely floored. I didn't know such a thing existed. Granted, the mist transparencies didn't work and the sound was off, but it still amazed me. After that, I started searching online for my own emulators and roms, which led me to Plasticman's rom site, Zophar's Domain, and Zsnes/Nesticle. Emulation became my obsession after that. Even started doing minor silly rom hacks too.

 

[pingugaming]

it was about the mid 2000s. i was at a friends house for the weekend and he showed me something on his computer. it was a small program that he called a "nintendo software" (it was a nes emulator, i don't remember the name unfortunately). he double clicked on it and after a couple of clicks a nes game booted right up! i was stunned! i could play a game not made for pc on a pc! (the game were gun-nac and super mario bros 3 btw) that absolutely blew my mind, so much so that i'm still stunned by the fact that we can actually do that

 

[E0N]

It was through one of my friends. He somehow got Pokemon Green and a GB emulator and gave it to me. That was the very first time I got to know that emulation is a thing.