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MN12BIRD in the NES emulator thread made me think of an interesting thread idea: tell the story of how you found out about emulators. Obviously the young uns will be something like "my older brother had it" and always had it as a given (and never played the original stuff as a kid), but the rest of us probably had some "OH MY HOLY FUCKING MOTHER OF GOD!" epiphany moment at some point in our lives that introduced us to the awesome world of emulation.
so, post your story!
This could be an interesting thread.
Alright, I'll post a story.
It all started several years back with a little game called Chrono Trigger. I had heard about it but I didn't have a copy for my Super Nintendo so I looked around for one. During my travels I found some stuff on emulation. At that time I knew very little of it. After further searching I found an emulator for Mac OS 9 called Silhouette and a rom of CT. A lot of the graphics were darker than they clearly should have been and I only had a keyboard to play, but I thought it was pretty damn awesome. I grabbed more and more games and my emulation snowball kept building speed.
In recent years I've grown to dislike emulation. Personally it dilutes the value old consoles have since emulators are technically superior. Not to mention perfect sound emulation is hard to come by, especially for the SNES and Genesis. I still use it for video recording (intend to get a video capture card to replace my dead DVR) and demoing but it's no longer my favored choice for playing games.
My buddy had every single NES game on his computer. I believe it was 99 or so. It was an "OH MY HOLY FUCKING MOTHER OF GOD!" moment. Later I started getting more computer savvy I downloaded MAME. For once I finally got to play TMNT at home. It was a 10 year olds dream coming true. It really got good when I found a used video card in a thrift store with a S-video jack on it. Playing on a real TV is freaking awesome. the only thing missing was a real controller. A $15 ebay Genesis to PC adapter fixed that. It really got out of hand when I flipped my extra Crt on its side to play vertical shooters.
well i started out long ago with a mac emulator that was my first emulation experience it basically only did the black and white paint program and a calculatorbut i thought it was really keen to have a 386 running windows 3.1 run a macintosh it was short lived then i found about the commodore 64 emulator i think it was called cs64 and also about how to copy games over to the real commodore so that period caused my collection of 100 c64 disks to jump to about 500 disks full of games then the bloodlust software nesticlehttp://www.sois.com/tpc/images/nesticle3.jpg,callushttp://bloodlust.zophar.net/Callus/callogo.gif(which always bugged me with its coin counter and after a while things woudl go blinky,genecysthttp://www.emulationzone.org/articles/faq/gui.jpg a nes a genesis and a capcom cps1 emulator wow i was playing arcade games at home about that time there was a stand alone tmnt arcade emulator going around the boards then mame was neat caus eit could emulate like 100 old games i also got a atari 2600 emulator i think "z26" and coleco vision emulator after fighting many viruses getting roms off the net then i started using one called raine http://rainemu.swishparty.co.uk/html...ne_1000000.pngthat was a good arcade emuator good because it worked better than mame on my slow ass computer it also had a weird video mode called eagle which made evrything look like colored marshmallows kinda but it was awesome
also tried handy a lynx emulator http://www.atariage.com/Lynx/emulati...rial/IMG09.pngbasically i only ever emulated what i was slightly familiar with
i never tried emulating atari computers,amigas,apples i just have a mental block i cant go and learn all these computers or my head will go all scanners i swearhttp://www.gifbin.com/bin/1238157980..._explosion.gif
For me, it started back in about 97. I actually first learned about emulators from the next door neighbor when I clicked on them out of curiosity on his computer. I played Final Fight and Yoshi's Island on an ooooold version of ZSNES and was almost in disbelief at what I was looking at. I might've been less impressed than some since N64 was already out at the time and I was deep into Goldeneye, and even PSX and Saturn were old news by then. Still, as a Mac owner with no money, ROMs were the only way to expand my video game library.
The emulator I used the most, somewhat ironically, was a Playstation emulator called Virtual Game Station since I didn't have a real PSX (required game discs, however). In a fortunate coincidence, I picked up a Macally iShock gamepad, which just so happened to be a great choice for emulation of other retro systems.
Around 2005, I started emulating more and more as I started missing all of the old games I used to play, especially Sonic 2. Eventually, emulators led me to want to start collecting, and now I have well over 600 physical unique games (CD/DVD and cartridges).
Now that emulators have finally gotten to the 99% accuracy mark, I have started using emulators almost exclusively again as I get annoyed by the lack of save features and the hassle of digging out games due to my retarded current setup.
the SEGA PC Smash Pack....
never really played too well, even in Win98. WinXP it was even worse. got fed up and did some internet searching and... HOLY CRAP! :D
now a days i have a dedicated PC just for emulators.
I remember I read about emulation in gamepro or game informer I don't really remember which one I'm sure I still have the issue somewhere, and it pretty much blew my mind lol. Started searching around on the web for a snes emulator, and eventually downloaded znes, and a ton of games played a lot of chrono trigger, and final fantasy 3. Then my computer took a crap, and really never got back into it now I just play on real hardware, and have pretty much all the games I downloaded before anyways:p
I've used emulators since I was 12. My first emulator was a GBA emulator called VisualBoy Advance. I played some Beyblade game on it and some other games like Sonic Advance 3 (lol bootlegging, 2003-2004). Ever since, my emulation craze started to snowball and eventually I settled for Genesis, SNES, Master System, and NES emulation.
I started using emulators when I was 8, around the summer of 1998. My dad gave me a CD filled with NES ROMs, all of which were selected through a frontend and the emulator included was Nesticle. I had loads of fun trying out tons of NES games I had never heard of, and I started collecting all the NES games that I liked from Nesticle. Nowadays I use emulators on a "try before you buy" basis.
I learned of Nesticle in a computer class in HS (I think it was 1997).
I remember taking an arcade emulator, along with "Outrun" on a floppy drive (!!!!) to run on the school computer because it was a blazing fast 200mhz.
It was compared to the 486/66 I had at home.
A friend of mine discovered a NES emulator and found some NES ROMs somewhere in 2000 and I got some too, and it was major fun playing Contra on a 486SX at 10FPS :P
Somewhat later I discovered Kgen98 and MD emulation and then I saw what my MD without carts and stuff was capable of, except sound, I had no sound card then... whoawhoawhoawhoawhoa
I'm not sure exactly when, but looking at the file dates on some of the stuff on my PC, it looks like late 2006. (that would be my senior year in high school)
I had known about emulation before, namely with Bleem, but this was my first time actually getting into the "roms" stuff.
Anyway, I got ZSNES it for the sole purpose of playing Star Fox 2, which I had recently discovered and was exceptionally excited about. It took me a while to find the properly patched fan completed english version (in the process finding the final beta and the early beta/demo version with the multiplayer feature intact)
However, that was pretty much it for a long time. My brother had a bunch of N64 and SNES stuff along with soem NES stuff on his PC for the last couple years though. (though not since his got partially dissassembled late last summer, since which he's not had his on PC)
But to be honest, it was Fusion which got me really into emulating consoel games (and into the Genesis in general, along with this site ;)), I started with Virtua Racing last spring and that was it for a while, I think then a couple 32x games (VR Deluxe, then Doom iirc) and moved on from there.
Though I've been playing a bit less more recenlty, in part due to the d-pad breaking off my Thrusmaster Firestorm dual analog 2, and in part being more busy with school. (I've been thinking about getting a saturn USB pad off ebay, but $20 isn't that great, and I've also been wanting to build a dedicated old gaming PC, moderately powerful -probably a fast PIII/Celeron running win 9x good for older win9x games, DOS games, and some emulators -and havign gameport support for a few pretty nice gamepads and joysticks)
Anyway, yeah, that about covers it.
Edit: unless you cound DOSbox that is. ;)
Oh dear, let me see...
I had discovered emulation in, I think, 2001, when in daycare, one of the supervisors had shown me that he can play gameboy games and super nintendo games on his computer. I was pretty amazed, and he gave me two floppy disks, one with ZSNES and one with Super Mario World... The sound did not work on my shitty 266MHZ Celeron for some odd reason, though.
Later I proceeded to download REW and some ROMs at a site called "Olly's News & Link List", and also discovered a way to play my old C64 again! I had CSS64 1.5 on my machine and, oh joy, the poor 4 GB HDD became full of ROMs in no time :)
My first time I discovered Sega Mega Drive emulation was around 2001.I still have the CD with those files! See http://oerg866.randomsonicnet.org/archive1998-2004/2001
The PNG is a screenshot of the save state of Sonic 2 I made back then :), a genuine playthrough, which stopped at Oil Ocean Zone because my Gamepad decided to just die.
So, the emulation thing really didn't do anything until 2004, when I joined a C64 forum and basically just started emulating the crap out of my poor Pentium III :P.
Little did I know, I started collecting the real consoles =P - Now I think that emulation is always inferior to the hardware in sense of classyness :)
I found out around 2004-2005, starting with Gens+.
I started playing Shining Force once again.
I lack a fancy story.