Your first emulation

[TheChosen]

Share those memories when you first stumbled upon on emulation. Who, how and what?

I remember hearing about this back in 2001, via email from an old friend. He told me about a program which you can use to play Gameboy games. First I thought it was a joke, and I was amazed when it really worked.

Some of the emulators I tried where too high-end though. Well, for my old computer that is. Then I found SMYGB, which ran great even though the gameplay wasnt smooth (not like I noticed that back in the days). Some of the first games I tried include Pokemon (red n' blue), Links Awakening and Final Fantasy 1 and 2. The game I remember playing the most was Harvest Moon 2, which was incredibly addicting.

I then slowly started to discover that there are more emulations, and much later finally learned that you can emulate pretty much everything on PC. Sadly, my computer was old and couldnt even run some NES emulators (until I found Nesticle). As a total noob, some of the stuff really confused me, like Final Fantasies. "This is not Final Fantasy 4! Its Final Fantasy 2! Why there's different numbers??". I also thought Earthbound on SNES was a remake of the NES Earthbound.

And the rom sites...man. First things that come into my mind are voting and all those hentai ads. I never found any basic "rom warehouse" sites until I got into MAME emulation (which was only couple of years ago), so I rarely ran into any translations, Japanese games or good obscure titles, not to mention many average games. One good site I remember was "Archonaco and Tortillas Quality roms", which was porn and voting free.

And speaking of hentai, did anyone else download those hentai slideshow roms for Megadrive and Super Nintendo? Digging around I found lots of weird "public domain" roms and slideshows that dated mid 90's.

[NGboo]

I think that it was some MS-DOS emulator for Sega Genesis that I first encountered, and soon after that, SNES9x. But, the most amazing "discovery" was MAME (which I found while looking for Cadillacs and Dinosaurs).

[Reiji-kun]

Oct 19, 2010 16:38:20 GMT -5 NGboo said:

I think that it was some MS-DOS emulator for Sega Genesis that I first encountered, and soon after that, SNES9x. But, the most amazing "discovery" was MAME (which I found while looking for Cadillacs and Dinosaurs).

As far as DOS-based Genesis emulators go, I think I used Genecyst for a time. It was a pretty good emulator back then, it was by the same people who made those Bloodlust Software games.

As far back as I remember... NeoRageX, the Neo Geo emulator, was my first emulator. Back years ago, getting all the stuff necessary to run it was annoying. But it was totally worth it once I managed to. I don't use it anymore now that I made the switch to playing those games on MAME.

[muteKi]

I used V-Gen with a couple just-found-them-on-this-one-site roms for the Sonic games.
V-Gen was not a very good emulator. The sound was off (no PCM play, weird sync issues), and the graphic emulation was questionable at best.

My second experience was with the PC Sega Smash Pack. Which would have been awesome if not for the fact that the copy of Revenge of Shinobi included was some bizarre prerelease version and the first volume constantly reset after a few minutes, making playing any of the games pretty much impossible. That said I got more than a few minutes into Phantasy Star II so that has to count for something. (Apparently a no-CD crack would have probably fixed the resetting issue due to it being a weird glitch in the CD check code. Volume 2 didn't have this problem, though.)

[Atma]

Friend in high school sent me VisualBoyAdvance and Wario Ware over AIM saying I had to try this shit, it's crazy. Cue me playing for hours and going holy shit I can play GBA games on the computer.

Now all I want to do is play obscure eroge with yuri themes on the PC98. And lots of Oregon Trail. How the mighty have fallen.

[Weasel]

1996 - my uncle sent us a package containing a burned CD and some instructions. Dad was a bit leery of it, and told me and my brother to stay away from it (this was not too long after the two of us found a virus tucked away on Dad's old collection of BBS downloads). Well, my brother wanted to look at the disc anyway; it contained emulators for NES, SNES, Genesis, Master System, Vectrex, Atari 2600, and many, many obscure others (Coleco ADAM, P2000, and one emulator just called "EMU" that ran a few vector graphics arcade games). The NES, SNES, and Genesis emulators were so old that they barely ran (iNES and Pasofami were the only NES emulators included), so my brother and I amused ourselves with the outdated copy of Massage and played Astro Warrior (SURELY REVIVE ZANONI).

A couple years later, once we'd finally exhausted the staggering collection of Atari games (which included every Mystique game ever, and Pressure Cooker which is still my favorite Atari game ever), we took a trip online and acquired the best available emulators for each platform: Nesticle, ZSNES (barely up to 1.0 and still for DOS), KGen98 (and Genecyst, since some games didn't quite work in KGen98), MAME32 (version 0.31 - prior to the interface overhaul!), and LoopyNES (my brother insisted Nesticle was better, though...) I was so stoked that ZSNES actually played Chrono Trigger at full frame rate (and with working clouds!) and that LoopyNES actually played sounds correctly (OMG, noise channel support!) that I was just blown out of the water by how awesome it all was.

Hell, if it wasn't for emulation, I would never have known what Chrono Trigger even was. Or that EarthBound was a sequel.

Some of my favorite old emulators from years gone by...

VGB-DOS - The first Game Boy emulator I ever used. Didn't support Super Game Boy borders or sound effects, and actually emulated the GB sound hardware via the AdLib chip (so the noise channel didn't quite sound right), but the fake GB border around the game was pretty awesome.

FamiCommunist - The first really good Windows NES emulator I used. Lacked gamepad support, but I didn't care, it ran Earthbound Zero! Also, mad props for the name.

MEKA - This one's still a pretty good emulator, but I feel it's superseded in quality and usability by Kega Fusion. Silly extra options in the menu were pretty amusing, such as the "Mario Is Not A Fat Plumber" check box (produces the message "You cannot deny facts.") and the fact that the scrollbars in the help file have inertia and will bounce off either end if you get them going fast enough.

Retrocade - While not better than MAME, this one won points for me for just how awesome its user interface was. (And also the patch that changes the woman in the introduction picture so that she is topless. Hey, internet porn was a very alien concept to me at the time!)

[Ace Whatever]

Stumbling upon emulation was mostly a result of trying to search for the PC version of Flashback. It was only when I finished high school in 2002 that I finally gained enough internet access to fully research the whole emulator phenomenon (and of course discover the wonders of hentai). I pretty much got into all the mainstream emulators right off the bat starting with Snes9x. I had a brief run with a DOS Genesis emulator (forgot the name) before I discovered Gens. My biggest achievement during college was downloading a bigass collection of Genesis/SNES/GB roms along with guides and codes, carrying them on floppies to my friend's house over the months and burning them all on one CD, which I accidentally wiped when I got my first PC at home...@#$%!

And yes I did get those slideshows. I even got ones for the Turbografx.

Also, playing Beyond Oasis and Super Metroid on a keyboard is not something I want to repeat...

[Weasel]

Forgot to mention: among the SNES games my uncle included on that CD was a bunch of public-domain games, including the infamous "Rape Games." Terrible game. No hentai slideshows unfortunately (because that would have been pretty awesome to stumble upon) but hell, who can argue with Custer's Revenge? =P

[aganar]

IIRC, I downloaded ZSNES so that I could play a Dragon Ball Z game (Legend of the Super Saiyan) my friend had showed me. Japanese, of course, and at the time it ran like crap on my Pentium. Other games soon followed.

[Deleted]

My very first emulation was some Commodore 64 emulator for Amiga 500 a loooooooooong time ago. Don't remember which one and how well/badly it worked. I didn't knew what emulation actually meant or started really using emulators until NESticle for MS-DOS.

[justjustin]

Anyone else remember Arch Nacho and Tortilla Godzilla's Quality ROMs? It was around 2000 when I stumbled upon the site. It had a great sense of humor (when I was 12), and offered a pretty good selection of stuff from mainstream consoles. And best of all, it was probably the only site on the internet where I didn't have to speed-click my way through porn ads to download a game.

First emulator was ZSNES and the first game I tried was, I think, ActRaiser.

[Atma]

Oct 20, 2010 15:06:23 GMT -5 justjustin said:

Anyone else remember Arch Nacho and Tortilla Godzilla's Quality ROMs? It was around 2000 when I stumbled upon the site. It had a great sense of humor (when I was 12), and offered a pretty good selection of stuff from mainstream consoles. And best of all, it was probably the only site on the internet where I didn't have to speed-click my way through porn ads to download a game.

Yes, and I miss it terribly.

[thethird]

Back in, like, 2002 my brother discovered a site with NES and SNES roms and emulators. We all thought it was a scam until, holy shit, we were playing Secret of Mana and TMNT3 on our crappy Windows 2000 PC. Pretty much blew my mind when I was age 10, and I stopped playing the PS1 games I was addicted to until our computer practically disintegrated on the inside.

I will never forget actually playing through most of Secret of Mana with three people on one keyboard.

[Stuart Gipp]

Oh wow, memories. Archnacho and Tortilla Godzilla's was a wonderful site, full of character and a genuine passion for the games they offered.

My first experience of emulation was Snes9x - I was so excited to finally be able to play Super Mario World, which I totally skipped over as a child (I went from Sega Master System to Playstation 2, on account of poverty and videogame-hating parents). I got Snes9x, SMW, and Donkey Kong Country onto floppy discs and took them home to play. Wonderful stuff!

Heh, lots of stuff coming back to me now - I didn't have The Internet at home back then, so I had to get my roms from friends and stick them on floppies (no CD-RW). Anything larger than 1.44mb was out of bounds, until I found out about spanning files onto multiple floppies! That's how I first got to play Ristar.

I remember excitedly phoning my best friend at about 8:50am on a Saturday to exclaim that I'd figured out how to get save states on Gens. Haha, great times.

[r0ck3rz]

'96, I recall just looking online for "games." I came across the Genesis rom for Battletoads, but not knowing what to do with it, I deleted it(only to the recycle bin). I recalled some of the terms used from the site, I think it specifically stated an emulator was required, so I searched for one, remembering that it was supposed to be a Genesis game(didn't know it got ported there). I had gotten Kega, which now goes by Fusion, pulled the rom out of the recycle bin, place in the same directory and used the "load rom" option. That was my start into emulation.

A favorite site for me to visit, which still seems to be up, but doesn't update, is Jose Q's Emuviews. The Rumor Mill section actually gave news of what was around the corner, and it always happened, which was kinda cool to be ale to keep up with.