What was your first foray into Emulation like?

[Mahan_Native]

the first emulator i ever used was ePSXe. i used to play Metal Gear Solid 1 & Jackie Chan a lot.
i was genuinely shocked.

 

[Izzy]

Mine was with the Dreamcast. I never knew it could run emulators and I had a few I got from a scifi comic expo some years back, so I started it up and next thing I knew, I was playing NES, SNES, GB and Genesis on my Dreamcast, I've since been into emulators after that.

 

[Raggs]

Nesticle in the late 90s. At first I was convinced nothing would happen when I ran it. From trying random Japanese roms I worked my up to revisiting my Dragon Warrior games. By the time college started I was playing Final Fantasy V and Chrono Trigger on my laptop.

EDIT: Butz... yeah

 

[X y b e r - S k u ll]

For me, my first experience with emulation technically started in primary school. I wanna say it was around '07 and our schools IT technician/IT teacher had a folder hidden on the school computers with pretty much every SNES game ever made (I assume for his own amusement during any downtime he had). Since computers in our school were all on the same network, every computer had this folder and once word got out about it, that's pretty much all we did when we had IT class. Off the top of my head; the games I remember playing the most, for some reason, were Super Mario RPG, Contra 3, UMK3, FF Mystic Quest, Super Mario Kart and The Magical Quest. Eventually it got removed but me and a few friends managed to later convince him to put it back (Mostly because we all got REALLY into Mario RPG and got pissed when we couldn't play it anymore) but on the condition we had to keep it a secret from everyone else, which we did until we finished primary school (funny sidenote: I remember as well we found a video file on those school computers that contained Vampire Hunter D: Bloodlust which absolutely blew our 9 year old minds at the time).

At the time, I was a huge fan of people like the AVGN so I was quite curious and interested in older games from before my time. I had a Wii as well and the Wii Shop channel was a godsend for a kid like me trying to get into older games. One problem though; all the games cost money and being a little kid with 2 other siblings and a single mother, you don't exactly have disposable income to throw at things like that, so downloading games from there was like an event more often than not. As my taste for older games grew however, the more the Wii Shop seemed so limited. I'd be reading through Wikipedia pages about games like Earthbound and Chrono Trigger and was so desperate to play them, but I had no idea when or even IF Nintendo would add them to the shop. That was when I got my first proper introduction to emulation via a classic Youtube tutorial. I downloaded Snes9x and the rest was pretty much history. No more Wii shop channel was needed (Except for certain N64 games I really wanted to play as I couldn't even fathom N64 emulation at the time for some reason), I had pretty much every SNES game I wanted to play at my finger tips and all for no cost at all. It's still quite crazy to think at the time PS3 was new and now I can literally play PS3 games on my PC thanks to emulation.

 

[Dakarus]

2006, I was in 9th grade. I recall downloading ZSNES and first playing Final Fantasy Mystic Quest

 

[xuvetyn96]

DOSBox, I used it to play Doom. It took me forever to figure it all out and get it running the way I wanted! I was not only new to emulators at that point, but also tech stuff in general, so using a program with no GUI was pretty alien to me. It definitely kickstarted my interest in emulation, though.

 

[WestleyWolf]

My first time with emulation was in 2008 when I discovered I could play Dreamcast with NullDC and PS1 with pSX. they both actually ran very decent on a single core processor though with bugs but I was actually amazed that it was possible. this was at a time when my Xbox 360 had red ringed on me and my only other choice was to keep playing on PS2, PS3 or PSP though I didn't have that many games for each of them and most of them I got bored of at the time. I didn't have a USB controller yet so the best I could do was do with what I could on the keyboard. I didn't have a working Dreamcast or the actual PS1 games I could play yet but I really wanted to actually conquer a few games i never could beat or use cheat codes until emulation was a possibility.

 

[koutameoshifan27]

literally on the day i got my highschool diploma my 3ds broke and i couldn't fix it, but i almost had smt iv beat and i felt like i couldn't go without it, so i downloaded citra. never went back once i figured out how easy it was. my pc was absolutely awful back then so it could barely handle it, but i still forced more roms upon its trembling back. never did get back to where i was in smt iv though..

 

[FR4M3]

> Boys & Girls Club?

You gotta tell us more about that? And why and how we're 11 yeal old's allowed?

Post automatically merged: Yesterday at 12:45 PM

> Boys & Girls Club?

You gotta tell us more about that? And why and how we're 11 yeal old's allowed?

 

[otogirisou]

it was revealed to me in a dream

 

[Carpenter7788]

I was 6 years old when my eldest brother introduced me to VBA. I always watched him play Kingdom Hearts, Castlevania, and Pokemon back then, getting annoyed whenever he doesn't skip a cutscene. Whenever it was my turn to play, I always go for Fire Emblem due to its flashy animations, even if I did not understand anything back then.

 

[twistedbee]

i also miss those days. my first time with emulators was in 1998 involved a CD that i cant remember where i got it from but it had hundreds of SNES games and ZSNES on the disk as the emulator. After spending some time figuring it out i spent that whole night, like 7 hours, playing Harvest Moon, and establishing a life long love of retro games.

 

[OmegaPunch's iconOmegaPunch]

When my family moved out after I finished elementary, I was hit with depression cause I had to say goodbye to all my friends that I wouldn't be able to see again.
I wanted something to cheer me up...
Something to get me through this pain...
Then, while I was scrolling google play looking for some mobile games (I used to exclusively play mobile games as a kid), I stumbled upon this small little app that goes by the name of
"PPSSPP".
It looked intriguing, so I downloaded it thinking it's some app with pre-downloaded games inside.
But then it said it needed "ROMs", with this moment being the first time I've ever heard of that word.
So I searched the internet for "ROMs" and stumbled upon "emulatorgames.net" where I downloaded my first rom ever:

And the rest...
Is history.

 

[nobitakun]

Damn, this made me remember one of my most WTF moments in my life. Let's explain the background:

I was one of the fortunate european people who played Chrono Trigger (USA version) in 1996 thanks to a video rental store in the town where a friend was spending summer vacation with his parents every year.

We both had a story, because we started playing RPG renting in a video rental store near his home (the regular one). The game was Illusion of Time (that name is only for PAL version I believe). We got so impressed by the story, graphics and type of game that we fell in love with it. From that moment, we wanted to know more about what RPG's were, about more games and so. That was the year 1995 I believe.

After some months dreaming on RPG's, my friend called me one day from his vacation home (classic landline chitchat :D) and told me he rented a RPG that was from Akira Toriyama (we were fans of Dragon Ball at that time), and I was thinking he was just cheating me, but he seemed to be serious. So, when he got back from vacation he talked with his parents and asked them to have me in there for next summer, and they agreed (they were so nice!). That year I was all the time thinking about that game, how it would be (we didn't have internet nor any way to check anything).

Summer arrived and the very first day we arrived I was so anxious I couldn't sleep (we got there very late, shops were already closed). The next morning, after breakfast he walked me there and it was a place I could never believe it existed. A rental video game store full of import games. I was freaking out seeing tons of games with anime in their covers. Then he got the box of the damn thing and showed it to me. Yes, that cover with Chrono attacking the Golem with Frog and Marle in the back. I couldn't say a thing, just looking at it like it was something from outer space. After like 30 minutes of walking around the store, we rented it, for a week. The game cart's shape was different, I was very surprised (as most of you know, PAL and JAP carts share same shape).

When we arrived home I swear, we played the intro like 20 times before starting the game. I was genuinelly freaking out how a videogame could be that impressive.

After a week, we didn't finish it, and as we didn't know how long it would take, we rented it for a month lol. After that we finished it of course, and played it until the very last day, trying to find all the secrets and stuff.

After I returned my home I started to feel down because I wanted to play more and then the game started to appear in dreams. After a few weeks I got the decission to buy it, because I had some savings from birthday and xmas from last year. I told my friend I wanted to ask the owner of the rental store to sell it to me, so I waited to the next summer and went again to his summer house. But the owner already sold the game and he didn't have it anymore. I was so sad that I couldn't control my tears and started crying. It was one of my most shocking moments in life :(

But one day of 1998 my friend ringed to my doorbell after class and told me he had a surprise he wanted to show me. Then he introduced me a friend he had and told me he wanted me to see something but didn't tell me anything else. I was so excited but also nervous, I was asking all the time I wanted to know. We were walking to this new friend's house and then we walked into his room, and I saw a computer. A Pentium II 350Mhz (I don't remember any more details, it's been a while lol). I was really lost at that moment, but my friend told me "just wait", and after a few seconds I started to see on screen some strange program full of menus, and this new friend doing something I couldn't understand fully. The screen went black a few seconds then I saw that intro again, the very same pendulum with the very same sound...my skin and face went white and I was feeling very cold. I couldn't say a word, just breathe and stare at the screen in silence. I don't know how much time passed before I came into myself and screamed at my friend "what is this! how did you do it!" he started to laugh a lot and the other friend was also laughing.

Then the other friend (which was a little bit older than us and kind of a tech savvy) explained to me what was an emulator and how it worked. I was still thinking there was some kind of magic behind it lol.

After playing for 2 or 3 hours we had to go back home, but that was my first experience with an emulator.

Maybe too long, but it's been fun to explain :D

 

[AstroBelmont]

My first emulation taste, and my first ever gaming experience if you can believe that, was with this DVD called Super VCD 300. It was bundled with a DVD player that even inlcuded cheap ps1 pre-analogue looking controllers.

Among the most iconic games i remember Super Mario Bros, Pooyan, Battle Tank, 1942, Bomberman, Mega Man and Adventure Island.

Ever since that day, i was never the same.

 

[jiyuuboyetsvi]

trying to play Kaizo Mario on ZSNES. also trying to remake the rom hack from the youtube video Super Mario Frustration brick for brick in a flash based mario maker type game LOL

 

[valuedbird]

Probably... 1999 I want to say? I have a vague memory of using Nesticle and gazing in awe as FF1 was on my computer screen, just like it was on my very busted NES.

 

[CyberAngel573]

ZSNES. Probably when it was still new.
It was slow and sounded awful. But it was my first time playing Seiken Densetsu 3. And I loved it.

 

[GardeniaSky]

It was a goddamn mess. I really wanted to play Majora's Mask so I tried Project 64. Took me forever to get it set up.

 

[RetroLuvr]

A friend in 5th or 6th grade introduced me to gba4ios and I've been in love with emulation ever since

 

[Boog111]

ZSNES to play Final Fantasy V when it was first translated.

 

[VultureCrisis]

I'm very new to it actually. I was 15 in 2006. I was mourning my N64 which had just died. I just got my first laptop and my friend told me "you know you can just emulate it". So we downloaded Project 64 and behold, a literally unplayable Mystical Ninja Starring Goemon technically "running" on the screen.
The hawk in the opening exploding into polygons at three frames a second is a vivid memory.

I promptly went back to half life 2 and mostly forgot about emulation for the next decade, for a while i had a small phyiscal collection of PS1 and PS2.

Fast forward to 2023, I'd been checking out some of the older pc classics I missed like Deus Ex, System Shock 2, etc for a couple years. This sent me down the rabbit hole of "let's see if all the games from my childhood sucked or not", and from there I started a rom collection of anything that looks interesting or that I missed as a kid like i'm catching pokemon. It's been a fun time discovering all the things.

 

[Uncle_Jo]

I went to college, 1997. I had a laptop. Nesticle. I've been emulating NES games now for almost 28 years. I still have CD's I burned in that era with all kinds of roms.

 

[-Ruri-]

My first experience with emulation was GBA4iOS on my iPhone back in 2016. I loved playing Pokémon Fire Red on it! Unfortunately that emulator had a problem, basically the app certificate expired after 7 days and I didn't know that so after 7 days I lost everything T_T but goddamn they were some intense 7 days. I'll never forget them, it's what got me into retro gaming as a whole lol

 

[Piper Halliwell]

My first experience with emulation was GBA4iOS on my iPhone back in 2016. I loved playing Pokémon Fire Red on it! Unfortunately that emulator had a problem, basically the app certificate expired after 7 days and I didn't know that so after 7 days I lost everything T_T but goddamn they were some intense 7 days. I'll never forget them, it's what got me into retro gaming as a whole lol

You can definitely bring it back again with Delta on iOS which is basically the successor to that! In case you wanted to relive those days again :)