What was your first foray into Emulation like?

[Onionstarz]

My nephew had MAME on his windows ME PC, the 1st PC i ever used a lot.
1st game i played was a SNK fighter, it was either Samurai Shodown or KOF and some random "Adult" JP only arcade stuff.

 

[TentaclesMod]

So, when I was an small child, like 7 I guess? I was made to drop Pokemon because of the whole stupid satanic panic. At around 11 or 12 years old, I discovered that said panic was utter bullshit, showed to my parents, then got into a rebound into it. Then while browsing some spanish fanpages (I'm Venezuelan) they had roms in spanish and emulators and instructions on how to use them and I was so excited when I first got that Pokemon Sapphire rom running in VBA. Although it required a couple tries before I figured how to make it save since I would save within the game but after closing the emulator and starting it later all progress would be lost (it just required a small change in saving settings)

 

[DjQuick2008]

Was a snes emulator which i still use bsnes i think it is would have to go on my other laptop to check and see started on that around 2019 on my all in 1 pc. motherboard crapped itself but already had the emulator saved to a usb stick with the games so was able to recover it.

 

[minimug]

I was 11 or 12, It was in and 1999 i started using "Genecyst" and "Nesticle" (ridiculous names but real genesis and nes emulators back then). I played through a couple poorly translated famicom rpgs, but still stuck to my psx console and dreamcast until around 2002. I got into Zsnes one summer when Aeon Genesis started releasing some good translation patches. I didn't go head first into Emulation until about a decade ago. I am kinda OG now that i think about it... emulating for 26 years. I was copying those old .md and .nes files to floppy disks at the library and my middle school. I could not play snes games until usb drives became common because the files were often bigger than 1.44 mb (didn't have the internet growing up)

 

[_-_AceDragon_-_]

I was 11 or 12, It was in and 1999 i started using "Genecyst"

I got into Zsnes one summer when Aeon Genesis started releasing some good translation patches.

Genecyst was my first emu too but I didn't realise it at the time. I found with a copy of moonwalker and it was an executable program which auto launched that specific rom. Didn't realise that it was an emulator that could play any game. Iirc it had like a blood dripping thing going on with the interface.

I used to swear by snes9x but switched to zsnes years later.

Bleem for PS1 if anyone remembers that too.
Aeon genesis used to be great.

Post automatically merged: Jul 13, 2025

Does anyone remember an old rom site called cult of kefka? It went down in around 2002. It was one of, if not, the first roms site I ever used. Definitely the first one I became addicted to visiting, much like i am now with cd romance / retrogametalk.

I found a bunch of snes games like SOS, Terranigma, Tales of Phantasia (which had only just been translated) and super metroid. I used to love browsing reviews and finding games I'd never heard of, while listening to a midi of Aeris theme embedded in the page.

I found an archive of the site recently and thought it'd be nice to share with anyone who has the same nostalgia for the cult of kefka.

The Cult of Kefka: Reviews and ROMs - press 'S' to stop music

SNES, GB and NES ROMs that actually work, SNES game reviews by someone who knows what they're talking about, and no ads on the entire site.

web.archive.org

 

[Toast Rider]

Earliest I can remember is Nesticle. If my memory doesn’t fail me (I was seven when this thing dropped), I used it almost exclusively to play Mega Man games.

 

[Captain Murphy]

A friend of mine from high school introduced me to emulation. He told me about a place called 'plasticmans emulation zone' where I could play ff4 on my computer. Very early iterations of snes9x. I was beyond excited that this worked. It was the beginning of a budding romance.

 

[Graw]

This:


Sometime in the late 90's-early 2000's I can't remember exactly.

 

[Lena CE]

Downloading a Genesis emulator on my phone in high school! Started getting really into pre-32 bit gaming around sophomore year of high school and since the early 2010s were still the wild west of the Android marketplace I was able to just download a really solid emulator for free right from the app store. If I remember right the line of emulators I went with was the Tiger line?

Either way, I used it to finally play OG Mega Man via Wily Wars as well as play the hell out of games like Contra Hard Corps. Got so good at Hard Corps on my phone that I could 1cc it!

Eventually I'd get emulators on my modded PSP so I could play GBA and NES games!

 

[BigHairyMarty]

I was introduced in 2001 at the age of 15 when my sister's ex-boyfriend brought along a CD containing ZSNES, a modest selection of roms, and a copy of RealPlayer with a Lord of the Rings trailer.

Whilst he and my sister's friends were hanging out in my sister's room, I was happily sitting at the end of the hall, checking out what games there were on the disc, with Link to the Past becoming a quick favourite of mine.

This enjoyment soon turned to frustration however as the ex-boyfriend decided to commandeer the computer, deciding that his number one priority at that point in time was to show everyone the Lord of the Rings trailer no matter what.

This wouldn't be a problem on a high end PC from that year, but for a mid range PC from 1997, all you got was a blurry slideshow. Indeed, not only was it a completely futile endeavour trying to watch the trailer on such a computer, but it was also a completely futile endeavour pointing this out to him multiple times as he was that determined to waste my time trying to show us all something that we could easily wait to see at the pictures later that year.

Apart from that, the rest of my emulation journey that year went more smoothly. Although I couldn't get a decent Master System/Game Gear emulator, the NES and Mega Drive emulators served me well.
GBA emulation wasn't ideal, but it was fun trying out MegaMan Battle Network for a little bit since that was the only one that worked even at half speed with no audio.