Tell your emulation story!

Geez, that's been a while. I don't think I remember all the details, but it went something like this...

Somewhere in the late 90's, not long after I had first gotten access to the internet, I got my hands on a couple of SNES roms of some various games. I don't know which ones exactly, but probably something like Mega Man X and Final Fantasy VI. I did not know what to do with these files or how to play them, so that was a bit of a disappointment. I didn't know anything about emulators or that they even existed, so that was pretty much that for those games.

Later on, still in the late 90's, I somehow discovered the existence of KGen and got my hands on some Mega Drive roms. That's been a large influence on the rediscovery of my love for 16-bit games. Since then, I've always had one or the other MD emulator on my computer. Once KGen became outdated due to the switch to Windows XP, I switched to Gens. I also had a little detour with PGen on the PS2, and more recently I switched to Kega Fusion for my MD emulation needs.

Right now I have all sorts of emulators on my PC. The aforementioned Fusion for MD/G, bsnes for the SNES, ePSXe for the PS1, DosBox for all the good ol' DOS games, Nebula for the Neo Geo CD, PCSX2 for the PS2 (as far as it works) and of course MAME for everything arcade. And that's just to name a few.

Having said that though, no emulator can beat the real thing for me. So if I truly care for a specific platform or game, and it is in any way feasible for me to get the real thing, then I will. Emulation is a nice substitute when it's not feasible, and it's great for testing purposes, but it has its limits.

The 8086 emulator card in my Apple II europlus, although that was of course hardware based emulation, and I only ever ran DOS and XTree Gold on it, dont know if it would have run any early PC games?!

I think the first instance of software based emulation I came across was emulating the Spectrum on my Amiga which would be around '94 ish I think.

I had heard a little bit about emulation in 90's. I didn't own a pc back then so I didn't bother checking up on it. I do remember that Virtual Game Station along with Bleem. It didn't take very long for the PSx to get emulated while the Saturn still hasn't been fully emulated yet even though it has been out for 14 years or so. My first experience was with NESter on the DC. Then I went to MAME which was the shit I then tried out other systems and jsut had sum great fun.

I remember playing Chrono Trigger some time in the late 90s.

Wasn't the first game I played on an emulator but it's the earliest memory I have. Getting ROMS used to be such a hassle back in the day, so many unsavory sites.

From what I remember i got into contact with emulation via this friend/classmate of mine,
One day we went to his home and he showed me Nesticle, I think i then gave him a box of 3,5 disks the next day and he made me a copy.

That must have been around spring 1997.

After that i went online to check for more emulators, and I found this early version of Snes9X,
the one without the GUI and this speedhack in it.

and i was amazed when i got Chrono Trigger to boot, it wasn't playable but just seeing that game run on our family pc and not the snes..
I mean Nes was cool and all, but this was.. even more awesome!

After that came Kgen and Kgen98 and Genecyst and the Snes9x Versions with the awesome DOS gui,
and also Zsnes (which had a pretty crappy gui in the beginning)

and then of course the N64, but i could never run that.. it needed a powerful 450mhz to run at a playable speed. :o

And after that i went into the whole xbox thing and after that i stopped emulating and returned to the original consoles with the collecting,
and the flashcards and the homebrew and the whatnot.

Edit : though my real first emulation experience would have to be that C64 emulator on the family Atari ST pc,
But being a kid at the time i could never get that to run.

I found out about emulators the day I first played the arcade version of Arkanoid in 2004. I got hooked to the game then, and wanted to play it at home, so I got onto my computer and looked for a way to play Arkanoid at home. That's when I found out about MAME. I got MAME and Arkanoid, and was playing for a few hours straight. And from then on, I branched out to emulators for consoles and home computers: NES, Super NES, Master System, Genesis, Saturn, Dreamcast, PlayStation, GameBoy/GameBoy Color/GameBoy Advance(these 8 are only to try out games I don't have), MSX, Sharp X68000, and Fujitsu FM Towns/FM Towns Marty(getting an MSX, Sharp X68000 and either a Fujitsu FM Towns or FM Towns Marty is just too pricey for me to ever get my hands on the original hardware).

I remember Next Generation did an article on n64 emulation somewhere around the late 90s and I was soooooooo jealous @ the picture of OOT in high res

I remember first reading about emulation in some computer magazine from 1997 or 1998. They talked about C64 and 2600 emulators IIRC. I didn't pay too much attention as I focussed on collecting Saturn and Mega Drive games.

With Tomb Raider 2 being a PSX exclusive (and let's not forget about Final Fantasy 7) Saturn sales pretty much came to a screetching halt in 1997. So after Saturn support slowed down in Europe, I switched to Nintendo 64, stopped collecting video games and simply enjoyed the games I had (Zelda, Mario Kart, F-Zero).

Fast forward to early 2002: A friend of my brother bought a couple of Dreamcast CDs at ebay. They included SegaGen, NesterDC and Heliophobe's SMEG. I was totally blown away. Here we had a console that could play hundreds of classic Sega and Nintendo games all in full RGB glory and with decent new controllers! - I had never even seen NES and SMS via anything other than RF! and practically all of the controllers I had for Mega Drive, NES and SMS were falling apart. Not to mention that physical copies of most of the games included were nearly impossible to track down. This was freaking insane!

I tracked down a Dreamcast and spent the following months learning how to burn these things myself and trying to perfect my own compilations.

Although I am aware that there are better choices out there nowadays (especially Wii), I still do enjoy playing some NES, SMS and Mega Drive via my Dreamcast to this day.

Back in 2001 after I got my first PC, I was tooling around on the Web when I came across someplace that mentioned emulation. I looked it up, and that's when I found the original mame.dk website. This was back when you could download ROMs from there (they disabled it not too long afterward). I was pretty nervous about the concept after reading all the warnings and such, but I gave it a try. Darius was the first game I emulated, and I eventually tried out the Samurai Shodown games.

After that, I dug up R-Type Leo which I remembered from an old EGM article, and I've been emulating older arcade games off an on ever since.

A friend of mine had told me about NES emulators and later I went online and found out about Nesticle. I downloaded that, and a few ROMs and was on my way. It wasn't until years later did I get a PC gamepad to play them with, although it's not too hard to play NES on a keyboard, with it only having two buttons and all.

Later I tried Genecyst, which I liked, but wouldn't play a lot of the ROMs I wanted. It was a long time before I discovered Kega Fusion, which is a fucking godsend and will always be my Genny emulator of choice. I also remember trying a bunch of other NES emulators, Jnes, Nester, FCE Ultra, VirtuaNES, and RockNES come to mind. Back then my favorite was always Nesticle, the only thing I didn't like about it was the sound emulation was a bit off.

Now I emulate the NES, SNES, Genesis, SMS and TG-16, but nothing compares to the real hardware itself.

I'd known about emulation since as far back as the late 1990's, thanks to a GamePro article on it (on MAME). I first saw it with my own eyes around 2000ish, when I saw this kid I used to know run Pokemon Gold/Silver on his laptop, quite awhile before their U.S releases in the Fall of 2000. It was around 2000-2001 that I first witnessed console and arcade emulators (Gens, ZSNES, and some CPS emulator, though I didn't know what they were called at the time). I was in awe of them, yet couldn't do much about it since I didn't own a PC at the time, nor was it me who was playing (it was always some other kids in my Junior High classes).

Flash forward to late March 2002. Not long after getting my then-spankin' new Dell Dimension 4400 that February, I begun scouring the web for emulators and ROMS. It didn't take me long to find the emulators, but finding ROMS was tough at first. Not just that, but I had trouble making everything work, as I was an overall PC n00b at the time. Then, during one all-nighter on the week of March 31 (I was on Spring Break vacation from HS), I downloaded the Sonic 2 & "Gunstar Heroes" ROMS along with the Genecyst emulator, and for the first time ever the familiar sight of 16-Bit goodness popped up on my computer screen. Genecyst ran like a complete dog though (must've been an old version, or just incompatible with XP), so I looked around a bit more and stumbled upon Gens. It was the emulator that I recalled seeing before, being played by someone else. When I fired up the ROMS, and saw them being played at full-speed and with faithful sound, I pretty much died. It was a mind-blowing moment that I'll never forget.

I spent the rest of that vacation feverishly downloading more ROMS, more console emulators and more ROMS............I had actually bought myself another Model 2 Genesis from GameStop just a few weeks earlier, after having sold off my 2nd one to a former friend (unfortunately, the one I sold off had great sound, yet the "Reset" button was fucked up, while the one I bought had HORRENDOUS, noisy sound), to continue playing my Genesis collection, but after that fateful night I very rarely touched my NES/Genesis/SNES again, which eventually resulted in me selling off my whole cart-based collection in January 2006 (to the famous "VideoGamesNewYork" store here in NYC). Incidentally, I first gotCable internet in my home less than a month after discovering emulation. This of course further fueled my hunger for emulation, and has greatly helped me in downloading from the smallest NES and Game Boy ROMS to the biggest PS1 & DC ISOS throughout the years.

After I discovered arcade emulation during the Summer of 2002, I very rarely went to arcades anymore, which isn't saying much since the arcade scene here in NYC was already dwindling by that point. Being a big fan of fighting games, that discovery was equally as mind-blowing, if not moreso, than discovering console emulation, because now I had arcade-exact reproductions of my favorite fighting games at my fingertips, after having tolerated Capcom's crappy PS1 ports for years.

Emulation dominated my video game time throughout most of the last decade, as I all but ignored the current and next-gen consoles that were out. As I grow older, and as my attention span shortens at my guilt of playing video games while not doing anything productive increases, emulation has pretty much become my main video game fix, with the PS2 (closing in on a decade in the market, with tons of dirt-cheap games at GameStop) not too far behind it.

I'm such a filthy stinkin' pirate, and I love it. :D

Around 1997 or 1998.. while talking with various people in AOL chatrooms about gaming... i was lead to a link that forever changed my life... International house of Roms... it was from tehre i got files.. and gragualy increased my collection over time..

Funny thing was at first i didn't know that youy have to have an actual emulator to play.. so i had a buch of game files.. and was upset that they didn't work on my PC... later on a saw how foolish that was..

Good times..

Around 2000, a friend of mine was playing Super Mario Brothers on an emulator (I think it was iNes since it wasn't free). However, I didn't get into emulation, or knew it was called that, until 2006. I saw some people playing ZSNES, Gens, and Project 64 at my school. I was amazed that they could do that, so I downloaded all of them, except for Gens, because I thought Kega Fusion would be a better emulator. I had fun playing smoothed N64 games, Mega Man Wily Wars, and foreign Dragon Ball games on ZSNES.

Mid 1996 for me. I remember it clearly. NES emulation. Quite a few emulators. SNES emulation tended to really suck at the time, but NES was damn playable. I had a AMD 5x86 (486 socket) overclocked to 160mhz. Even since then, I'm been a huge emulation fan. Being able to play games I've never seen before or always wanted to try out. God, there have been sooo many emulators that have come and gone. Milestones were Kega, MagicEngine, some NeoGeo emulator that I can't remember anymore, Callus (Capcom emulation), Zsnes/snes9x, REW(and no$GB for my GB deving). I still use emulation to this day. Emulators have gotten soo close in accuracy and even offer improvements over the original consoles - overclocking, better video filters, brighter/better video, etc. I still used my original consoles from time to time, but mostly for testing out code/stuff/R&D and the occasional nostalgic run through on the classic gamepad/SDTV setup.

1996 was when I got my first job as a computer tech for a local computer shop. I remember in 97-98 I would tend to go out on the sales floor and load up the computer demos with emulators running games. I specifically remember SOR was quite popular among the employees that would take breaks when the store wasn't busy.

Hm. First emulator I had was actually a GB emulator - boyfriend sent it to me, along with a couple of games, Dragon Warrior Monsters being one of them. I played through the whole game on that thing. One of my most favoured procrastinationicisms when I was supposed to be writing essays for uni :p

Later on, I downloaded Nesticle, purely because of i-mockery and its hilarious rom hacks. (I'm not much of a fan of the nes, so I've barely used it for proper games - though I do have a few dodgy collections of nes games on "Mega Joy" systems and the like, which are occasionally fun.)

Kega Fusion is easily my most-used emulator - which doesn't need much explaining, really. Though I might add that if it wasn't for that thing I'd not have played any GG games for ages - despite owning loads of games, playing on a real GG almost always leaves me with some level of headache :(