What was your first foray into Emulation like?

[FR4M3]

I'll start:

The first emulator I used was Callus 95, I'm in a 3rd world country where internet wasn't much of thing up until a decade ago and the tech was not at all affordable, so we never got most of the stuff officially released here. Plus being in a middle class family with narcissistic parents didn't help either.

I bought a CD of some game that I don't remember (it was of course a illegal copy) which fortunately or unfortunately didn't work. So I went back to the seller and asked him to give me a different disc of the same game but he didn't have another copy so he said he'll give me another game but he won't change it again if it doesn't works. (because people will just copy the game to their pc and return the disc and demand their money back)

So he gave me a option to choose between "PepsiMan (PS1)" for PC or "Cadillacs & Dinosaurs" for PC. Which of course is an arcade game which meant they were supplied with emulators. Although this wasn't stated on the box.

I was intrigued by the Cadillacs & Dinosaurs copy because I had seen CoinOp Kiosk in the pay to play game parlours that I used to frequent at that time and really wanted to try that game. So I picked that instead of Pepsi Man.

When I got home and tried running the game I of course had problems because I couldn't manage to load roms into the emulator. Because I was only 8-9 years old, didn't understand English much (it's my third language) and we didn't have internet. Just this old Pentinum 3 with crap ton of malware on it. So I spent like two hours figuring out what every thing meant, what "roms" was, why were they in zips, how to load them, why they needed to be "loaded" etc.

Also the fact that it had no instructions didn't help plus the build of Callus didn't have proper WinXP like GUI, it did have GUI but it was like those win 95/98 & Dos like GUI with black screen and green GUI or green text. Kinda like the early builds of ZSNES but without the colors and the animations.

While i was doing all that my brother got pissed because I didn't know shit and told me "I should've bought the Pepsi Man game" because it atleast would've worked. (it of course would not have worked because PS1 emulation would've been more performance intensive than CPS1/2 on the Pentinum 3 plus early builds of epsxe were quite complicated and I definitely would have had hard time figuring out that emu too) And he kept on berating me for that for the time being.

Sometime after that he got fed up of waiting and left to play outside while I was still trying to piece everything together. And after a while suddenly I managed to hit "Load Rom" and selected "dino.zip" (that's the name for the Cadillacs & dinosaurs rom zip iirc) and lo and behold the game booted and I was over the moon. Even though I couldn't play it because the key bindings needed to be set. So it took me a couple more minutes to do just that and I finally managed to successfully setup three players via the knockoff PS2 controller for Player 1 and Player 2 & 3 being on the keyboard.

When my brother got back and saw me playing Cadillacs & Dinosaurs with two players (I was setting up the key bindings) his jaw dropped. Dude was like "how the hell did you figure it out?". I didn't say anything and gave him a side eye. Then I proceeded to close the game boot another rom called "punish.zip" and started playing Capcom's The Punshier beat 'em up. Then my brother was like "there's more than one game???!" which after that I proceeded to show him the list of the Rom files and tell him all these files you see are individual games and told him I got you more than a dozen games for the price of one (it was a CD-R so around 720 MBs of ROMs and that emulator). He immediately started throwing a tantrum and yelling" you just got lucky!", " what if you couldn't get them to work like ever? What would you have done then?" I simply told him "that's the thing I did get them to work".

After that I just chuckled and handed him the controller and we started playing two players on Cadillacs & Dinosaurs and one of my friend who lived next to us showed up to our house after a while to play so I also got him on the keyboard with me and we played Knights of the Round/Dragon (another Capcom beat 'em up) and had a blast. After two hours of playing I asked my brother "should I go exchange this disc for Pepsi man?" he didn't respond just kept smiling.

The second emulator was Win Kawaks. Which I unfortunately don't remember where I got it from.

The 3rd was No$GBA and I played GBA Doom on it on my AMD Sempron via a Knock Off PS2 controller. That was also my first introduction to Doom in 2010.

Later sometime in 2011 my brother got a Disc of God Of War 2 for "PC" and it had some old version of PCSx2. Which didn't ran on our i5-680 (2C/4T) because the emulator was not there yet and GOW II is one of the most demanding titles. But at least that DVD introduced me to PCSx2, 40¢ well spent.

Those were the days.

 

[Tonberry]

In 2003 when I was like 7 years old my dad’s friend gave me a CD with snes9x an a million snes roms and told me ”just drop the games onto the emulator” and the rest is history.
In that way I always say I kinda grew up with the snes too because I spent such an insane amount of time playing all those games on there.

 

[J.B’s rabbit den]

I was only 10 when I found my way into emulation.one of my older sisters boyfriends showed me an app on my old Samsung tablet that could let you emulate GBA roms. And to me I’m not joking when say it was like entering a whole new world of fun sense me and my brother were into retro Nintendo and other games. And soon after i realized it just the beginning of discovering what other consoles you could emulate.

 

[Otosou]

Some dude played EarthBound on SNES emulator in local library, and it looked fun so I decided to play it as well in home, and the rest is history!

 

[fake-kun]

My dad installed DeSmuME on my PC because I couldn't stop begging him to buy me a Nintendo DS and all Ace Attorney games.

 

[DanVzare]

My dad got a couple of CDs. One with a whole bunch of SNES games and one with a whole bunch of Mega Drive/Genesis games.

The SNES disc was full of Japanese-only games (some were in English, but a lot weren't), and the emulator lagged a little bit on my computer at the time. It also lacked a lot of well-known Nintendo titles, sure it had Super Mario World, but it didn't have Final Fantasy 4, 5, or 6, nor did it have Link to the Past either. Meanwhile the Mega Drive disc ran perfectly, all of the games were in English, and there were way more games to boot, plus it had many of the heavy hitters, Sonic the Hedgehog, Phantasy Star 2, 3, and 4, even Ristar!

Needless to say, I spent waaaaaaaaay more time playing the SNES games.
What can I say. It was simply the better console.

 

[KOFXI is peak]

The earliest I can remember is a GBA emulator on an old samsung phone, galaxy S4 or something. It was the coolest sh!t ever for a nintendo kid like I was.
I distinctly remember that it always crashed when entering the water temple in Zelda Minish Cap, I always started again from the beginning and got back there, hoping for a different result and not knowing about updates or far better gba emulators. Then I learned about N64 emulators but they were so buggy (or the phone was so weak) that I instead got virtual console games on Wii U (once again, not knowing about input lag or the dim display). Fast forward to the year 2025 and I'm enjoying kickass games I never could've afforded and/or known about otherwise like Panzer Dragoon Saga & Marvel vs Capcom 2.

 

[NotGodlike]

Well, to me it was SNES and DS mainly. Desmume was godsend back then because DS wasn't very spread out in my country compared to PSP, which I owned like everyone else.
I mainly emulated this system solely for DSVanias and Sonic Rush games, but eventually I've spread out to more and more titles.
Several years later I own real thing now lol (DSi XL). Not going to let it go anytime soon

 

[mana]

My first emulator was Nesticle. I got it from my uncle who always sends me stuff from his country. It came on a floppy disk along with 8 NES games. That emulator was pretty bad. Visual glitches in almost every game, similar to what you'd see when there's dirt on a cartridge’s contact points. That was like 26 years ago holy shit.

 

[bluedude-98]

An older cousin of mine burned MAME32 and ROMs for my brother and I when we were kids (like 5-6 years old). We played that CD on our little Windows 98 PC so much we wore it down and eventually we lost it over the years. Some of my favourites as a kid were CPS1 games like Final Fight, Cadillacs & Dinosaurs, Captain Commando, and Bionic Commando.

 

[Waffles's iconWaffles]

Mine was extremely painful, but beautiful nonetheless:

A friend of mine had, somehow, gotten his hands on a floppy disk containing both Pokemon Yellow (Spanish Edition!!!) and a primitive emulator called "PlayGuy".

Now, my first hour was spent kindly trying to glue all the pieces of my blown mind back together, but then I just looked on in awe as I was playing the most popular TV show on my PC... as it happened! I dreamed of overtaking Ash and making it to the Pokemon League before he ever did.

But, alas, it was not to be.

Pokemon Yellow was not only my first emulated game, but also my first RPG... and it showed.

I spent HOURS trying to beat Brock, then just assumed my save would be there when I returned the next day. It was not.

Did I care? No! I played that first part again and again until the disk itself called it quits.

Getting that reading error at the height of my fandom was a brutal punch to the gut, and I wouldn't return to the game until five years later, when I'd get my own internet connection.

What a ride.

 

[Pearly]

I starting using a GBA emulator on my PC when I learned of what roms were, and from there started looking into running emulation on my dream cast, as that just required burning CD roms and it ran without modification, at least on my day 1 release EU dreamcast, not sure if protection measures were included on later models.

I learned about running "unlicensed" copies of games on my PS1 when I was 8, but this was mainly to play a handful of games I had on burned CDs that I got from other people and what they had was very limited, if that counts in some way? It was on original hardware so I guess not?

As for flat out emulation, I didn't have a GBA anymore at the time and I missed playing the games I had, then I came across emulation, fast forward to now and these days I have everything modded but my ps5 slim digital and my switch OLED.

Though I played mega man X on a PC in a friends house on his Dads PC, it was only the first stage available, no clue why..., I'd assume it was snes emulation but why only the first level? I was too young to remember the details of that one. Emulation would've been really handy for me to know back then.

Emulation is really really important, so we can preserve games, otherwise in the great capitalistic world we live it, games would be lost to time in the pursuit of "please buy the latest product" and forget the old.

Never take this golden age of emulation for granted!!

 

[Zachery2112]

When I was a child, my dad let me play games on his Amazon Kindle. He had installed some GBA emulator on it so that I could play The Legend of Zelda: The Minish Cap. Years later, I figured out how to jail break an iPhone to install apps on that. So if there is anyone to blame for me pirating hundreds of games for emulation, it's my parents. They were a bad influence.

 

[FR4M3]

My dad installed DeSmuME on my PC because I couldn't stop begging him to buy me a Nintendo DS and all Ace Attorney games.

W Dad, not only he saved money but he also enlightened you with great knowledge and experience.

 

[mlastes1987]

I grew up sheltered and didn't have much. My father bought us a Sega Genesis and games with bounced checks and that was the only console I owned until our grandmother bought us an n64 for xmas. We ended up getting two copies of SM64. My first foray into emulation was in the early 2000s after I got my own computer. I started with VBA and ZSNES and the old PJ64, epsxe and Gens. Emulation was still pretty buggy and compatibility is nowhere near where it is today. So many absolute champions have come out of the woodwork to bring emulation to a modern age and allow people like me who didn't grow up with videogame consoles outside of a few, and even then, I didn't own them my brother did. Now I get to play games I saw as a kid, but never got to try. I get to play on nearly every console that exists on one PC. And back in the day after Emuparadise got shut down roms became harder to find until the Redump project. So many champions have worked endless hours to bring us English translated games that we never got to see, and now emulation has started to creep into the newer generation consoles, with RPCS3, Xenia and ShadPS4. It's amazing.

 

[DotdotMod]

I'm honestly not so sure when exactly I first touched an emulator, but I think it was playing GBA games on my uncle's old Windows Vista laptop. It was a kind of hand me down from my uncle to my dad, but since it was really old nobody used it or cared about it, so I was allowed to get my grubby hands all over it (I actually still have it to this day!). I also remember nobody being able to remember the password for it, so I would just download a bunch of games and emulators on my trashy android and transfer them there to play.

This was kinda my first real exposure to really big franchises like Mario, Pokemon, Zelda or Sonic. I especially remember being really addicted to Pokemon emerald in particular. I think I had like 103 hours in that game if memory serves me right.. Since then I got my own laptop (and by my own, I mean got it as a hand me down from my dad lol) and "graduated" to playing more advanced stuff like PS1, N64, Dreamcast and even some classic DOS games. Times were truly simpler back then..

 

[Pearly]

Mine was extremely painful, but beautiful nonetheless:

A friend of mine had, somehow, gotten his hands on a floppy disk containing both Pokemon Yellow (Spanish Edition!!!) and a primitive emulator called "PlayGuy".

Now, my first hour was spent kindly trying to glue all the pieces of my blown mind back together, but then I just looked on in awe as I was playing the most popular TV show on my PC... as it happened! I dreamed of overtaking Ash and making it to the Pokemon League before he ever did.

But, alas, it was not to be.

Pokemon Yellow was not only my first emulated game, but also my first RPG... and it showed.

I spent HOURS trying to beat Brock, then just assumed my save would be there when I returned the next day. It was not.

Did I care? No! I played that first part again and again until the disk itself called it quits.

Getting that reading error at the height of my fandom was a brutal punch to the gut, and I wouldn't return to the game until five years later, when I'd get my own internet connection.

What a ride.

It was much like this to not have a memory card back when you had to buy one and they weren't cheap, I played sonic adventure over and over as I didn't have a memory card and I didn't mind. These days, I would give up if lost too much progress.

When I was a child, my dad let me play games on his Amazon Kindle. He had installed some GBA emulator on it so that I could play The Legend of Zelda: The Minish Cap. Years later, I figured out how to jail break an iPhone to install apps on that. So if there is anyone to blame for me pirating hundreds of games for emulation, it's my parents. They were a bad influence.

You can run emulators on a Kindle?? As in the black and white digital book reader thingy??

Learning to jailbreak things is great though, you could make that a career if you went into cyber security focused computer science degree. I know a guy that went from getting kicked outta school from proving his schools security was garbage by hacking it, and he started with jailbreaking an iPhone.

That's what I'm doing, I'm almost finished year 3 of a computer science degree, and in all honesty I am only good at all this stuff cause I don't wanna be paying collectors prices for old games. I buy games on my PS5 and switch, but everything else is "scienced" into working on things it wasn't meant to run on!!

 

[Zachery2112]

You can run emulators on a Kindle?? As in the black and white digital book reader thingy??

Learning to jailbreak things is great though, you could make that a career if you went into cyber security focused computer science degree.

No, it was the Kindle Fire that came out in 2011. It had color to it. 90% of what I've learned from computers is related to me hacking random video games or figuring out how to emulate them. I suppose I can rest assured that there is always a chance for a career in computer science since I know how to hack a PS Vita.

 

[Pearly]

No, it was the Kindle Fire that came out in 2011. It had color to it. 90% of what I've learned from computers is related to me hacking random video games or figuring out how to emulate them. I suppose I can rest assured that there is always a chance for a career in computer science since I know how to hack a PS Vita.

My classmates currently, you'd be surprised how many of them are there because of video game piracy from when they were younger. If you can do the coding stuff alongside that, it's actually quite easy.

Stem degrees are hard, but computer science is easier if you've years of experience in using it in this manner. Pure coders aren't as widely capable as anyone that basically mods software or hardware or OS for example, being able to code and manipulate or "engineer" end of life hardware/software or work with linux etc, is all much better than pure coding, that mainly for interviews, building systems uses chunks of pre-existing code and its put together in different files.

I was brand new to coding 3 year ago, before that it was all just modding stuff or things related to that since I was 8, I now have an average of a first and on track for a first degree, so about a 3.7 in the American format of grading at third level, and that's skipping 90% of lectures and just attending labs to do weekly work and getting assignments done. I often make the joke that I just wanted to play megaman 8 and now I'm here.

I have a modded vita too, I love that machine, playing xenogears on it currently.

 

[Captain Murphy]

A friend of mine showed me to a place called, Plasticman's emulation zone. Holy crap that was ages ago. I remember being in disbelief that I could play final fantasy IV on my computer.

 

[MasterEn]

i don't remember the specific first time that i came across an emulator, but i do remember playing those crazy game knockoff systems from the state fair and one that my aunt got off of one of those shopping channels and the unlockable nes games in animal crossing for the gamecube when i was younger.

 

[Bakuma1997]

As a kid we had a pirated PSX at home, and the local flea market was a short walk from our home, so my mom promised me 2 pesos for every 10 i got at school (The max score in elementary school), with that allowance i found a "Mario Party 6" game in a plastic bag, obviously my innocent, Internetless 9 years old though it was a port, so i buy it no questions asked, this blue screen recieved me

To my dissapointment (For a while) i paid for a glorified Multicart, however after playing out some of the games i found out... they weren't that bad

Shatterhand, Vice: Project Doom, Gekitotsu Yonku Battle, heck, that purple disc was where i found about Crystalis AND Mother 1

Regarding actual emulators my first emulator was ZSNES, having access to my first internet captable computer allowed me to find some classics and even some obscure ones, a single mistake led me here

 

[AncientBehemoth]

Early GENS and ZSNES.

 

[Evaccaneer Doom]

Using GameOldies to play various games like Sonic, Kirby, Mega Man and so on

 

[Dangerzone334]

I'll start:

The first emulator I used was Callus 95, I'm in a 3rd world country where internet wasn't much of thing up until a decade ago and the tech was not at all affordable, so we never got most of the stuff officially released here. Plus being in a middle class family with narcissistic parents didn't help either.

I bought a CD of some game that I don't remember (it was of course a illegal copy) which fortunately or unfortunately didn't work. So I went back to the seller and asked him to give me a different disc of the same game but he didn't have another copy so he said he'll give me another game but he won't change it again if it doesn't works. (because people will just copy the game to their pc and return the disc and demand their money back)

So he gave me a option to choose between "PepsiMan (PS1)" for PC or "Cadillacs & Dinosaurs" for PC. Which of course is an arcade game which meant they were supplied with emulators. Although this wasn't stated on the box.

I was intrigued by the Cadillacs & Dinosaurs copy because I had seen CoinOp Kiosk in the pay to play game parlours that I used to frequent at that time and really wanted to try that game. So I picked that instead of Pepsi Man.

When I got home and tried running the game I of course had problems because I couldn't manage to load roms into the emulator. Because I was only 8-9 years old, didn't understand English much (it's my third language) and we didn't have internet. Just this old Pentinum 3 with crap ton of malware on it. So I spent like two hours figuring out what every thing meant, what "roms" was, why were they in zips, how to load them, why they needed to be "loaded" etc.

Also the fact that it had no instructions didn't help plus the build of Callus didn't have proper WinXP like GUI, it did have GUI but it was like those win 95/98 & Dos like GUI with black screen and green GUI or green text. Kinda like the early builds of ZSNES but without the colors and the animations.

While i was doing all that my brother got pissed because I didn't know shit and told me "I should've bought the Pepsi Man game" because it atleast would've worked. (it of course would not have worked because PS1 emulation would've been more performance intensive than CPS1/2 on the Pentinum 3 plus early builds of epsxe were quite complicated and I definitely would have had hard time figuring out that emu too) And he kept on berating me for that for the time being.

Sometime after that he got fed up of waiting and left to play outside while I was still trying to piece everything together. And after a while suddenly I managed to hit "Load Rom" and selected "dino.zip" (that's the name for the Cadillacs & dinosaurs rom zip iirc) and lo and behold the game booted and I was over the moon. Even though I couldn't play it because the key bindings needed to be set. So it took me a couple more minutes to do just that and I finally managed to successfully setup three players via the knockoff PS2 controller for Player 1 and Player 2 & 3 being on the keyboard.

When my brother got back and saw me playing Cadillacs & Dinosaurs with two players (I was setting up the key bindings) his jaw dropped. Dude was like "how the hell did you figure it out?". I didn't say anything and gave him a side eye. Then I proceeded to close the game boot another rom called "punish.zip" and started playing Capcom's The Punshier beat 'em up. Then my brother was like "there's more than one game???!" which after that I proceeded to show him the list of the Rom files and tell him all these files you see are individual games and told him I got you more than a dozen games for the price of one (it was a CD-R so around 720 MBs of ROMs and that emulator). He immediately started throwing a tantrum and yelling" you just got lucky!", " what if you couldn't get them to work like ever? What would you have done then?" I simply told him "that's the thing I did get them to work".

After that I just chuckled and handed him the controller and we started playing two players on Cadillacs & Dinosaurs and one of my friend who lived next to us showed up to our house after a while to play so I also got him on the keyboard with me and we played Knights of the Round/Dragon (another Capcom beat 'em up) and had a blast. After two hours of playing I asked my brother "should I go exchange this disc for Pepsi man?" he didn't respond just kept smiling.

The second emulator was Win Kawaks. Which I unfortunately don't remember where I got it from.

The 3rd was No$GBA and I played GBA Doom on it on my AMD Sempron via a Knock Off PS2 controller. That was also my first introduction to Doom in 2010.

Later sometime in 2011 my brother got a Disc of God Of War 2 for "PC" and it had some old version of PCSx2. Which didn't ran on our i5-680 (2C/4T) because the emulator was not there yet and GOW II is one of the most demanding titles. But at least that DVD introduced me to PCSx2, 40¢ well spent.

Those were the days.

Post automatically merged: Thursday at 9:32 PM

It was around 2005, I was 11! The first emulator I used was Fusion! The computer monitor at the Boys and Girls Club has a CD with the emulator and a few games!