Tell your emulation story!

1997, Grade 10 Automotive tech class. There is this new kid who I've just met in the class. He knows shit about cars and no one liked him. He had the nickname of Beavis because he looked JUST like him! Everyone bugged the poor kid, and one day he tried to hoist a car up by the gas tank lol. No one ever let him forget that one.

But one day the teacher was late and everyone left class to bugger off. I decided to go with Beavis to the cafe and play some games (we had After Burner in the cafe at the time! How awesome is that?) and he started telling me that he plays NES games on his PC. I was like... umm, okay. He hooks up an NES to a TV card and plays it on his PC? But he continues to talk about these "ROM" files. I'm like WTF is a "ROM" file and he tells me about EPROMM readers and emulators. He says this "emulator" makes your PC act like all the hardware inside an NES.

Now this new kid, Beavis or whatever his name was always seemed like an oddball and right about now I'm thinking he is full of shit. He tells me you can download the "ROM" files witch are copies of the instructions and data from the chips inside the cart. Effectively an exact clone of the cart. I was really doubting him. He says he has like a hundred NES games and they are exactly like they are on the NES because they aren't ports. He says with the emulator he can run them on his PC and use a gamepad.

I still didn't really know what to think of all this. It was just to awesome to be true! But sure enough I found NESticle for myself and many ROMs to play on it! Next thing I remember my friends coming over to play NES games and be amazed.

I had an AMD 486 that ran at 80MHZ and probably had like 16MB of RAM or something. But it did the job.

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Originally Posted by sega fan

Episode 17, early 2007, yep I was a little late to the party

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Late? You showed up after everyone finished cleaning up the empty pizza boxes and beer cans.

It was 1999. Around sept-oct time frame. I read the article in Maximum PC about emulators by that guy who wrote gaming articles. I thought you had to have devices hooked up to the PC to play roms LOL, along with the software. I thought this sounds expensive, and then one day I got bored and looked it up... sure enough emulation was completely different. Downloaded Genecyst, SOR3... played it on my uncles computer, then a computer at my dad's business. Pure awesomeness.

I believe I started around 2002, with just hacks of games I already played. Mainly just the better SMW hacks, I didn't truly convert from Nintendo to Sega but in the last 2-3 years.

There was a PC at my grandmother's house (an old MS-DOS 486/DX2) before there was one at my house, but I practically lived over there because my parents worked. Anyway, back in the late 90s (guessing '98 or '99, when I was 6 or 7, I'll have to check some file timestamps) my older cousin who was into computers was over there and was bored so he popped in a floppy disk with some games on it. Suddenly he's playing Super Mario Bros., which I vaguely recognized as being the color Mario game I'd played at a friends' house when he got out his Nintendo. (At the time, I had only played the black 'n white Super Mario Land on Gameboy)

I was confused. I thought that was a game you plugged into your TV, as I had previously seen it. It wasn't a computer game too, was it? Anyway I asked him and he explained that some people found a way to make a computer pretend it's a game system. He compiled me a disk containing a copy of NESticle and roms of SMB1, 2, 3, and Adventure Island II. Following this, I spent a good bit of time playing these while I was stuck at grandma's. He also made me a second disk a few weeks later that had more games, Mega Man 2 and Bugs Bunny's Birthday Blowout being the only two I remember that were on it.

In 1999, my family finally bought a PC, a nice Pentium 2/450mhz. This was more than enough for the emulation of the day, and my curious cousin wanted to see how ZSNES would run on it. Sure enough, it ran really well, and he dropped me with ZSNES as well as roms of Super Mario World and Super Mario Kart.

From there, I started going on my own. I got internet access and found more roms but ran out of disks to store them on, and so I secretly stashed them on the hard drive (the rule was, I didn't download anything to the hard drive, to avoid taking up all the space). I started running into emulators like Genecyst, that let me play more Sonic games after playing the PC version of Sonic 3. I found emulators for systems I'd never heard of, like the Master System. By the time I was in second grade, I was totally involved in checking out the latest stuff, and was experimenting very early with 32X emulation, trying to get it to run well on my already aging computer. (I have a piece I wrote in school that year about my efforts. Pretty crazy for being a little kid like I was) Additionally, with Game Boy emulation, I ended up becoming pretty cool in school for a little while, as I had picked up some Japanese Pokemon Gold and Silver roms and could show people the game before it came out stateside.

In the end, I pretty much experienced the entire 8 and 16 bit generations from nearly the same perspective as a kid might have back then. The only difference was that instead of a console, a TV, and a controller, I had a monitor, a PC tower, and a keyboard. I discovered the best games out there, and I imagine that without emulation I may have turned into a pretty normal, pretty stupid gamer. By having access to all of it at a time, I never realized there was pressure on good graphics, and I just played what was fun.

These days I keep emulators on my PCs in order to try out games before I go hunting for them, so I don't buy crappy old games. I also use them for things that I won't be able to afford any time soon, for instance a Commodore Amiga computer. I keep them on my laptop so I can keep playing games when I'm away from home. Apart from that, I now collect to make up for all that illegal rom downloading I've done (a good 6-7 gigs worth back then, which is pretty crazy considering I did it on a dial-up connection... and even more now since I pick stuff up on a whim) I can definitely say that emulation was the centerpiece of my childhood, though!

Wow, as compared to some people here, I'm late to the emulation party (i.e. 2003-2004), but I've had very good experience with emulation. Who knows, I may be making some hacks and homebrews.

Speaking of hacks, I made a few shitty Mario hacks back in the day, but they're wiped off the internet.

Dunno exactly how or when I got started... I think I learned about emulator while talking to someone in a chatroom and mentioning console games (I was still an avid Mega Drive / Genesis player but had hardly tried my hands on anything SNES-related back then).

The two eldest emulators I used were the DOS-based "Genecyst" (0.30, I think) and ZSNES, so I think it must've been sometime in late 1997.

Heh, my first emulator would be this CD-R Disc my mum got me from ebay before Christmas in 2004 that contained that really old DOS based Genesyst emulator. It came with hundreds of old Mega Drive games on the CD that were obviously illegally ripped ROMs of the games. lol. When i first tryed it out, it didn't have any sound, so i just left it until the following year when i stumbled upon that Knuckles Chaotix fansite on this page http://knuckleschaotix.info/hack.htm
It had a hacked version of Sonic 1 replaced with Mighty with a palette swap and slightly modified level designs.

So the first serious emulation addiction really started with Gens from that chaotix site and went on to download many more Mega Drive games and used that same CD-R i got the prior year to play Mega Drive games on.

Now? I'd rather buy all the Mega Drive games i missed playing for the original setup. Doesn't feel the same when you play all those old games on a PC. It just feels better to own a legimate version of a game with the Cart, case and manual with the original console setup including the old controller. I still emulate sometimes, but not as much as i used to.

Heh, never knew there was such a thing called emulation until 5 years ago. ;)

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Originally Posted by Jasper061992

Heh, my first emulator would be this CD-R Disc my mum got me from ebay before Christmas in 2004

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Dammit, must have been that one i forgot to report to eBay in 2004.

I think it all started with the ZSNES emulator, I discovered it by seeing "ripped sprites" and asked how they got them, a member on some forum provided me with a link to an emulator(ZNES) and told me to google "SNES" roms. With myself being a curious person I am, after testing the SNES emulator I changed the query a little, to Gameboy Roms/Emulator, the rest is HISTORY!

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Originally Posted by NeoVamp

Dammit, must have been that one i forgot to report to eBay in 2004.

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You could have knocked yourself out. I wasn't too enthusiastic on the idea back then! :p

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Originally Posted by Jasper061992

You could have knocked yourself out. I wasn't too enthusiastic on the idea back then! :p

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are you kidding? My head was about to explode when I first found out about emulators. Granted, they were still too recent and "obsolete" for me to really have a strong affinity for them (I mean, hell, you could still buy Genesis and SNES games at the time), but I was still incredibly impressed and excited about the implications.

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Originally Posted by 17daysolderthannes

are you kidding? My head was about to explode when I first found out about emulators. Granted, they were still too recent and "obsolete" for me to really have a strong affinity for them (I mean, hell, you could still buy Genesis and SNES games at the time), but I was still incredibly impressed and excited about the implications.

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Well, it wasn't until the following year did i really start to get the gist of it. I was still young, so i still didn't know how some bits about emulators worked. The emulator supplied on the disk was those older late 90's DOS Genesyst emulators.

I do admit i was pretty excited when i was about to play it, but as soon as there was no sound, and that it played a bit shoddy reality kicked in, i just quickly lost interest and didn't think much more about it.

One of the things i liked most about Emulators was that they weren't too good at the time,
so you were trying out speedhacks and new versions were released almost weekly,
and then you'd hear about another emu that was supposedly better,

And for me that was the most fun i ever had with emulators, seeing it all be build from the ground up.

And of course finding out about early attempts at translations, who could forget Final Fantasy II?

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Originally Posted by NeoVamp

One of the things i liked most about Emulators was that they weren't too good at the time,
so you were trying out speedhacks and new versions were released almost weekly,
and then you'd hear about another emu that was supposedly better,

And for me that was the most fun i ever had with emulators, seeing it all be build from the ground up.

And of course finding out about early attempts at translations, who could forget Final Fantasy II?

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Oh yeah, I remember spending hours scouring for ROMs of games I wanted and being eager to see if they would run. It was almost a game in itself to try to find ROMs you wanted to play.