What was your first foray into Emulation like?

[Llammissar]

First? ZSNES was one of the few things that actually ran decent on the 1999 family computer! (...once I messed with the resolution settings.) I admit I'm still nostalgic for that jank-ass UI even though I know it's not a good emulator...

 

[-Ruri-]

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 :)

Hehe, I already use it! I use Delta since way before it was even on the App Store lol. It's great that we have good emulators on iOS now! Back then the iOS emulators situation wasn't great, so it's pretty neat that we have a lot of great options now

 

[WokiBakoki]

Born in '02, thankfully I dodged the early days of emulating. For me it was all about flash games on the family PC. One day, I'd guess around 2011. I go checking out random flash sites and scroll down a bit. Mixed in with some flash games are some retro games. I saw Zelda 1 and 2 and I guess I just had the intuition to know "This isn't like the others, this really is the first one! Wow!" To be fair, I thought Final Fantasy Sonic was actually made by Sega so maybe I was right by accident.

It played via a built-in browser emulator, so I just played with the keyboard like any flash game. After exploring Hyrule in the first 2 Zelda games, I wanted more. So my searches for "sonic games" became "old games" and I started checking out firsts for franchises I knew. I actually didn't even learn what an emulator was for a long time. I guess I just assumed people converted the old games into browser games with tech magic. So when I eventually found you could download a program to run games just like a console. That was a real "we live in the future" moment.

A lot of people I watched on Youtube way back showcased old games too, so I learned about Castlevania through Egoraptor for example. After a few years I had a pretty wide knowledge of classic games, even if I could only beat like 2 of them myself. Nowadays I've become far more interested in the world of bootlegs and unnofficial stuff. Which had lead me here. Seeing all sorts of random games from Japan getting translated is so cool. Like here's all the stuff we missed out on back in the day. Huge respect to people going through all the effort just to make a bunch of crappy old games playable worldwide.

 

[Brunkler]

idk which was first but it was either Zsnes playing kirby superstar or project 64 playing stuff like DK 64

 

[Xdqwerty]

The first emulators I recall ever using were visualboy advance/no$gba and project 64 1.6

 

[shunaria]

It was during elementary school my dad brings one of his school computer to home along with one CD-R disc contain snes emulator and over 100 roms. Only manage to beat two games :
Biker Mice from Mars
Kyle Petty's No Fear Racing

I never touch emulator again, until last year of my high-school with GBA emulator and become addicted with emulator until now.

 

[Natsuyasumi]

My childhood best friend, Cody Robinson, had ZNES and Nesticle emulators on his computer. I didn't have a good enough computer at my house to run them for a long time, but eventually I got a hand-me-down Windows 98 PC and he gave me a Floppy disc with the emulator and another floppy with some games. This was probably 1999 or 2000.

I remember playing Paperboy, Skate or Die, and the original Mario for NES on Nesticle.

The only game I remember playing on ZNES was Chrono Trigger. That was how I beat it for the first time, on my old beat up PC. The monitor broke about 3/4 of the way through my play through and stopped displaying Red/Magenta color, so the Black Omen is always tinted deep blue in my memories

I then took a long break from emulation for a long time. I got into collecting real hardware and games in the mid 2000s, then took a break from video games in general for most of the 2010s, then got back into them hard in the late 2010s, mainly by emulating the games of my youth through OpenEmu. I've been hooked ever since!

 

[sun0wl]

Like being a kid in a candy shop.

Especially having grown up at a time when there really weren't that many games on the market to begin with, and when my parents only had enough money to buy one or two for me at Christmas or on my birthday. It was incredible being able to freely access so many classics I'd missed out on. Not to mention the novelty of being able to enjoy Pokemon and Summon Night in the computer lab with my friends at school, lol.