/vr/ - Retro Games

>>9393536
I didn't stumble upon any website for that stuff. Just heard about it from people I knew on AOL/mIRC, and probably got the files from them first. And of course the first reaction is to test it out with old games you know.

It was a really good feeling, like finding a treasure chest.

I downloaded my favorite SNES and Genesis games.

>>9393536
>I've realised that for some reason when people learn about emulation the first thing they do is play their favorite games instead of trying something new
Having no choice but to play video games on a CRT with most often a worse video signal, the motivation is in seeing something familiar in a new clarity. Like being prescribed eyeglasses and looking at an eye chart. Once you're acclimated, then you discover the amazing possibilities in playing the entire system's library with barely any effort.

Personally my first emulation experience was downloading a rom of some Japanese Game Boy DBZ game, but when I figured out how to get Sonic Spinball running, that was my wow moment.

Many people used to sell their old games and systems to buy new ones, system collectors were rare and usually rich people or people who weren't able to sell their old stuff for a decent price, so when emulation became widely available a lot of people wanted to retrieve their old favourite games, and THEN emulate those for the systems they never had.

>>9393536
>What was your reaction when you discovered emulation and ROMsites full of games you'd always wanted to try?
At first I honestly didn't believe what I was seeing, I thought it was a bunch of viruses or just crapware, I tried a couple and then some more. I swear I spent hours fucking around with what I could find there. My desk chair never felt comfier.

Thanks to these I played many GBA games I wouldn't have otherwise played

>>9393616
I think most people had this experience when they discovered it in the 90s or early 2000s. When my cousin showed me Pokemon on his PC I thought it was some sort of fan remake flashgame thing, not the real whole game. What followed was me lurking various ROM sites and forums, playing literally every GBA game the moment it was released and wasting a whole lot of time on shovelware.

It was a pretty cool feeling. I remember a friend from school introduced me to ZSNES playing Kirby Super Star on his family's old ass PC. Felt like an entirely new world opened up to me.

>>9393536
The first games I emulated were jrpgs I hadn't played for the snes. Because I had since gotten into them on the psx.
Chrono Trigger, Earthbound, SD3, Mario rpg. It was really good.

>>9393536
There was a website that hosted the entire NES library along with a Flash-based NES emulator so you could play them in the browser. I cannot remember the url for the life of me but I remember discovering it in ~2010 and being enamored.

>>9393536
I can't remember, it was almost 20 years ago.

>>9393536
Wow cool. Hey mom, you'll never have to buy me video games ever again.

>>9393536
Evo: Quest for Eden

I was 15/16 years old. It was the year 1999/2000. It honestly sounded too good to be true. Zsnes was the snes emulator and just the fact that I could play all this stuff was mind blowing. I downloaded Breath of fire 1 as one of my first games and Final fantasy 4. Played the shit out of both.

>>9393536
>What was your reaction when you discovered emulation and ROMsites full of games you'd always wanted to try?
I went to gamefaqs and used advanced search to find games similar to the ones I already liked but had never heard of, especially ones that were exclusive to Japan. Puzzles are in my top 3 favorite genres, and most don't require language at all really.

First game was a translated SD3, ironically I discovered emulation thanks to a game mag shitting on it and the translation not being "the real thing".

>>9393536
>I've realised that for some reason when people learn about emulation the first thing they do is play their favorite games instead of trying something new
That's a normalfag thing. Emulators for 8 and 16 bit systems were available only a few years after the consoles life cycles had ended. Anybody excited to play muh childhood games for the first time in decades is a newgames fag or just too dumb for computers.

>>9393536
I remember that in school I saw a guy playing pokemon yellow on a computer in the library, that was my discovery of emulation as far as I remember. When I started using them I downloaded a bunch of snes games because Ive never had one (I had a mega drive) and my favorite mega drive games, I also played pokemon gen3 on visualboy advance because gba was to expensive at the time. I also remember emuparadise was the first site I found with all types of roms available and well organized. It was my go to site till that legal problem they had

>>9393536
I don't remember but it was a good feeling
I only had a very old pc as a kid so my first emulator was zsnes
The games I liked didn't have any errors so I was happy

I discovered Zsnes and nesticle when I was 13 and used them to play punchout, Chrono trigger, Castlevania 3, smrpg, seoken densetsu 3. I only ever had a genesis as a kid before 3d systems came into prominence and it was my first chance to experience all the great games I'd heard so much about, for free. It was totally worth it... One of the best summers of my life.

My reaction to discovering complete romsets of virtually every console on archive.org: "wow I can't believe anyone would be retarded enough to get roms anywhere else"

>>9393536
My dad was so cheap that the first Zelda I played was Links Awakening on an emulator on his computer. He had it set to arrow keys for movement and x and z for b and a. We also had an snes emulator and I played Link to the Past on that. This was probably in the year 1997 or 1998. He also had hundreds of laser discs because when they failed he could get the movies for .99 cents. Later when dvds were out he bought a rotating select 400 dvd player and copied dvds from blockbuster all the time. Now he has jailbroken firesticks all over the house.

>>9394126
>there are retards who would rather download roms individually from Shithead's Shitty Rom Site, wait for the timer and fill out the captcha every time, instead of doing an automatic mass download from archive
>they post on /tg/
>they think we care when Shithead's site goes down or have even heard of it in the first place
>they donated to it

>>9394139
>your dad

>>9393536
It was summer 2000 when a workmate showed me Castlevania II on the NNNesterJ emu after my blank stare when he mentioned playing it on his computer. I was a bit blown away as I had never heard of emulation till he showed me. First thing I did when I got home after work was download the emulator and game. Been at it ever since.

>>9394139
your dad's a fucking King

I never paid for a video game in my life, I got introduced to piracy at an early age and grew up expecting to find everything I want for free.
For me it was the same as downloading any other file on internet, it didn't feel special because I never had that notion in the back of my head that you're supposed to pay for video games. It never was an option for me.

>>9394007
It isn't the real thing tho

>>9393536
I played Mario RPG on zsnes since I only rented it beforehand and never finished it. Then when Pokemon gen 3 came out in Japan I played an unfinished translation of Ruby. I had no idea what the abilities were doing or why some of them induced stat changes at the start of battle but it was easy enough to complete with general knowledge of pokemon.

>>9393536
>'ve realised that for some reason when people learn about emulation the first thing they do is play their favorite games instead of trying something new

Simple answer is, you know how that game is supposed to be played. Beast way to tell how accurate the emulator is.
First rom I played was maybe Pokemon Fire Red? It was impressive to play GBA games right after they came out. But pretty soon I focused on SNES/Genesis games since GBA games often looked terrible blown up on a computer monitor.

Fall, 2006. My uncle is over painting the upstairs of our house. I have to stay downstairs so he can work. I'm on the PC, looking at spritesheets online, bored out of my mind. I notice somebody saying they used Zsnes to rip them. I look into Zsnes, download it, then look around online for a game to play. I go onto Doperoms, download a Star Fox rom, load it up with Zsnes - and I was blown away. I never had an SNES, but seeing it running on our home computer felt amazing. I went and downloaded a few more games - A Link to the Past, Mario All-Stars, Chrono Trigger, EarthBound. Games I'd never had the chance to see in motion before, only online or in print.

Our internet was very slow, so I didn't see any point in downloading games I already owned.

>>9393536
I learned about it in 1997 or so from a friend. Didn't have Internet at the time, so I gave him a list of NES games I wanted and he brought me a floppy disk with whichever of them he was able to find on the tiny rom sites that existed back then. I forgot exactly what games were in the collection I got, but it had Mario 1 and 2, TMNT and Mega Man 1-3, plus Tiny Toons 2 (a game I had never played but thought looked really cool in magazines) and a very old and bad fan translation of Final Fantasy 3 where all the text was mistranslated and everything past the second town was just gibberish. I got stuck in the first dungeon because the dialogue telling you what to do wasn't translated, but apparently that patch made the game crash in the first town after that dungeon anyway.

>>9393536
quite literally this. for me, it was ZSNES.

I was very very young. Don't even remember.

Ironically my first experience with emulation was with PCSX2 20 years ago. I had just moved off to college and really wanted to play Armored Core 2 which I had rented the previous summer at home. I successfully downloaded the iso with the help of God knows what kind of torrent site and maybe was able to get into a menu but that was about all my Pentium 4 or PCSX2 could handle. Years later I’d revisit it and dive into all of my old consoles and favorite games.

>>9393536
I discovered emulation when the Dragon Ball boom hit and fan sites packaged the 16-bit game rom with Kega or Genecyst. From the sound effects and the SEGA logo, I immediately realized it was playing Megadrive games, after that I read the included documentation to learn what is what, and started looking for ROMs online. Emuparadise wasn't even a thought back then.

for me, it's cdromance

>>9393536
I wanted to play manhunt 2 so i looked up "HOW TO PLAY MANHUNT 2 FREE PS2 FREE" and i saw a video for emulation.

>>9394139
I bet your dad has at least 9 inches of dick.

>>9394187
My feels for computer games.
Born too early to know I would be able to play every console game for free on emulators, I would have saved my money.

>>9393536
I have been playing games for a long time but got into emulation only 2 years ago, I started because I wanted to check the handheld versions of Need for Speed games and now I have like 200GB of ISOs

>>9394431
I think you remember things wrong, pcsx2 didn't reach the point where games were playable until ~2006 or so, and even then it took an Athlon 64 X2 to run Disgaea (let alone games that actually did 3d).

>>9393536
It was like winning the lottery.
First game I tried was Super Castlevania IV followed by some Dragon Ball fighting game.

>>9393536
I used to play games on an old TV from the 80s that barely worked. It wasn't far off from this image.
Then I played Sonic 3 on my LCD computer screen and I could see all of the details in the background. It was beautiful.

>>9394557
Like I said, I’m pretty sure all I could do was boot into a menu, or maybe it was just a black screen. But it was most certainly an early pcsx2 build. I remember being fascinated by the possibility of playing a PS2 game on PC. A few years later it was actually possible.

>>9393536
Found FantasyAnime in like 2004 and used Snes9x to play Final Fantasy IV, V, and VI for the first time. I discovered FF through Kingdom Hearts and played IX and X on console, but never owned a SNES so I was just excited about all these earlier games that weren't on GBA yet.
After getting through those I started playing fan translations like the Sailor Moon and Rayearth RPGs, fans translating what official wouldn't felt like the coolest shit ever.
I have never played SNES games on an actual console.

Gamechanger!!

I used to stay up all night playing unreleased SNES RPGs. It blew my mind that we missed out on all of these Final Fantasies.

Playing FFV for the first time was magical.

Almost everyone here mentions zsnes but I've been using snes9x for my whole life. Like this is the only thing I've ever played SNES games on except for Virtual Console. I haven't even tried installing another emulator once. Everyone shits on it for some reason yet I didn't have a single problem with it

I'm afraid that I'm one of those people who, when I finally got round to emulating on my PC, went straight to the titles I enjoyed as a kid

the reason I did that, rather than play new games, was because I hadn't gamed at all for something like 15 years (having spent the intervening time going to university, having sex, partying and making money) and my aim first and foremost was satisfying my nostalgia

After about a year of that. I'm pleased to say I did move on and actually play 'new' games vis emulation that I'd never played before. Including almost the entire NeoGeo back catalogue. Phantasy Star 4, Final Fantasy VI, Resident Evil, FFTA, and many other legendary games

Something along the lines of
>Holy shit, HOLY SHIT, you're telling me I could play every nintendo/super nintendo game ever...for free...on the computer with just a keyboard? That's fucking amazing.
Just without swearing because I didn't swear as a kid. My first emulated game i played was probably just Super Mario 3.

>>9394891
No, zsnes is the one people shit on and say to use 9x instead

>>9394927
that is based

I remember thinking how much fun I was going to have and I would never be bored ever again.

Realized that I played all the good ones already and there was nothing good that I didn't already play.

>>9394891
Zsnes was better in the very early days of SNES emulation, I think they had some of the special chips before anybody else could do them, but fell behind snes9x a long time ago. If you weren't emulating snes before 9/11 you probably didn't have a reason to use it.

>>9394961
Yeah it's more that 9x bothered to improve, zsnes didn't. zsnes is basically a time capsule to what emulators were like in the late 90s

>>9393536
>What was your reaction when you discovered emulation and ROMsites full of games you'd always wanted to try? What was the first system/game you emulated? I've realised that for some reason when people learn about emulation the first thing they do is play their favorite games instead of trying something new

It's crazy how 'old hat' emulation is to me. I first discovered emulation in 2000, when people were talking about it on the SegaSAGES forums. But even before that, I remember reading about how you could play NES games on your PC in 98-99. Back then, I would type 'emulation' into yahoo or webcrawler and the top search result would be Zophars domain. Where you can find everything emulator related. Zophars domain is still here. Zophar only ever hosted public domain ROMs and emulators. Finding ROM's for NES, Genesis, SNES was a bit trickier and I would have to use all sorts of various search terms and scour websites like Alta-Vista, Geocities, and other such places. Back in 2001, I had purchased a physical copy of Bleem for the PC as well. Though I could never get Bleem to work on my old PC worth shit. I never liked Bleem, and found Virtual game Station (cracked version) to be a better alternative. I use to buy PS1 discs either second hand, or just rent them. The ones I rented, I would make ISO files out of using Windows 98se. and save them to my harddrive, mount to a virtual disc drive and run the games via VGS. That's how I use to pirate PS1 games. rent them at Hollywood video. I forgot if I had an external program to make ISO's, or if it was part of Windows 98se? I knew how to make .iso files. I knew how to mount them to a virtual disc drive and I would just point VGS to that. When I had a CD burner, I would burn the .iso files to disc. To save HDD space. cause my PC had like a 20GB HDD.

>>9393536
zsnes, and it was great to experience the library as i only had genesis.
super metroid and kirby superstar were my first I think.

I thought Emuparadise was sketchy, emulators high level tech wizardry and even felt pirating games was "wrong" for whatever stupid reason I may or may not have had at the time, being a no-nothing 18 year old. Before that I recall around maybe 8th or 9th grade, a friend setting up ZSNES for me on my mom's computer to play Earthbound, then a year after graduating highschool another friend set up ePSXe on my laptop for Chrono Cross.

It wasn't until I hit 20 or 21, got my first PC, joined a vidya Livestream group and with enough diligence, advice and fiddling around with the settings in each emu is when I felt more comfortable with the whole thing. I think the hardest experience I ever had with an emu was setting up PPSSPP to play FF Type-0 (and what a fucking nightmare that was) when a fan translation came out.

My country used to sell emulator CD back in the day, believe it or not this was legal back when they still don't know what to do with digital content. Anyone can just download roms off the internet and sell it in convenient store they even include mini guide book teach you how to setup and play each game. There are emulator CD like this for every famous console NES, SNES, N64, GBC, GBA, MAME, NeoGeo and even PS1

My dad brought me one of these and my mind was blown. It took me a while to discovered about romsites since i don't have internet back then but this was a good start

>>9393536
>What was your reaction when you discovered emulation and ROMsites full of games
Wow holy shit now I don't have to go on ebay and look for this stuff anymore

>What was the first system/game you emulated?
I think the very 1st game I ever emulated was Wind Waker on the IGP of a 3570k while waiting for my 1st GPU to show up, I don't think I ever touched emulation again until a few years later when I went through a number of PS1 games starting with Silent Hill 1 on a T410 laptop in my tiny ass university dorm.

when i was 10 years old, in 2001 a friend of my father gave us a cd with a NEorageX emulator for the neogeo. me and my bother used to play Metal slug and Shock troopers. On another cd there was a mame32 emulator with hundreds of games on it. Also i bought this very sketchy pirated cd called ''256 games'' written on it in Bulgarian. It was a an emulator for sega genesis games. played a shit ton of great games on it like Zombies ate my neighbors, Puggsy and Alien 3.

>>9393536
36 year old PC gamer who was always jealous of console games.
I was blown away when SEGA would port their current games and upcoming games to freaking PC.
That way I got to play Comix Zone and Sonic 3 (they even released a demo) on PC.
I also bought Pitfall for PC which existed for SNES and at that point I was thinking:
>Man wouldn't it be great if I could play all those SNES games on PC? That would be like a dream come true. It seems possible so why won't they do it???
Then there was the Pokemon craze and while I had a Game Boy with Pokemon on it suddenly people would start selling burned CDs with a Game Boy emulator and a Pokemon rom on it! I also got one of those burned CDs from some kid who was in my private lessons class. I think I've payed like 5 Euros for Pokemon and ALSO Mario Land 2 which was the biggest thing to me. I own both games but first I thought someone had just ported Pokemon to PC but seeing Pokemon.gb and Mario.gb I was smart to figure out that those are ROMs and it must be possible to many other games. I did not have Internet back then but did my research once we got our own connection.
Later a friend of mine got a Dreamcast and he bought full Rom sets for SNES/NES/SMS (best SMS collection I have to this day)/GB and MD. He actually got this from ebay. I think in the USA such sellers would instantly have gotten sued. Those ROM sets are amazing because no duplicates or other annoying shit like other modern rom sets I have downloaded and it contains like 6 different versions of one game...

>>9394139
absolutely based

>>9393536
I wish there it was a way to access theisozone's links

>>9394139
your dad seems like a nice fella

>>9393536
I got my first computer back in the early 2000s in middle school and my best friend at the time told me about it, first game I played was Pokemon Yellow because he told me about the fast forward feature. I didn't get really into it until I got a USB snes controller a few weeks later. That controller was such a piece of shit I remember getting a better one not long after.

>>9395028
>SegaSAGES forums

The first website I ever visited was Gamefan.com, because I subscribed to the magazine and they advertised their 'new' website heavily in the pages of it. I didn't know what other sites to visit at the time. GameFan had this thing called the GameFan Network, or something... which was nothing more than a portal website that linked to other gaming related sites. From there I found SegaSAGES, which sounds like a Sega fansite. But it was not. It might have started as one. But became a website that would compile game cheats and codes for all game consoles and PC's. The name later changed to just Sages. Then IGN bought out Sages and turned the website into IGN Codes and renamed the forums to IGN forums. The SegaSages forums used to be one of the most popular English gaming discussion forums on the net. It had subsections for each console, cheat codes, news, and one for emulation. The emulation sub section was really popular, as you could imagine. It enforced the rule of 'no linking to illegal ROMs'. Of course IGN nuked the emulation section. From there, I learned a lot about emulators. It lead me to Zophars domain, which was the no. 1 place to go for emulators. First emulators I ever downloaded were Genecyst, NESticle (The NES emulator with balls), ZSNES, SNES9X, NeoRAGE, MAME and I think a few others. I only had a 56k modem to download them all with. Downloading a SNES ROM from some random Yahoo Geocities website would take 10-15 minutes for a 32MEG cart. I also got into PS1 emulation with Virtual Game Station. Which was awesome. I loved emulation. NeoRAGE ran like a dream on my Windows 98 machine. But downloading AES games was a nightmare on 56k. I would also emulate PS1 games with actual game PS1 game discs that were rented, bought second hand, borrowed from friends. I would make ISO images out of them. I was kinda obsessed with emulation. I would play it all on a Win 98se machine with a Gravis GamePad Pro gameport game pad.

It was 1997. Heard about Nesticle, probably on IRC. Downloaded it, and a ROM of a game I had heard about but never played: Final Fantasy. I cannot remember where I found the ROM; ROM "sites" as such did not exist back then. I might have found it on Usenet.

I had already played some console RPGs (Phantasy Star I through III, Dragon Warrior, even Final Fantasy VII). I finished FFI in maybe a few days. It was OK, but to this day I am perplexed by people who put FFI in "best RPG" lists.

Anyway, you didn't ask about the second emulated game I played, but some short time after that I found ColEm and played a Colecovision game I never played before: Mr. Do's Castle.

Then (years later) I got an SNES emulator, and someone posted a complete set of SNES ROMs to Usenet. I managed to download A through K before I ran out of space. Had a lot of fun going through that.

I never really thought about it, but when I'm trying out a new emulator, I always go for something I never played first. Games I wish I had. Even if I never heard of the game at the time, I'm trying to live out the fantasy of having all the games I ever wanted. I never had that many games as a kid. I played the games I had to death. Why go back to them?

>>9393536
i'm from an era before lame ass "ROM" websites. I was getting snes/megadrive ROMs from private bulletin boards. later generations of software for consoles from private ftp. I first discovered MAME ROMs on IRC file serving bots and then later people were starting to release proper packs. some 20 years ago.. long ago, in a suburb far away.. i still remember the MAME ROM collection was very small. now it's one giant bloated MESS. merging the two was a mistake.

>>9393536
Firstly, I was overjoyed and ordered some controllers to match the systems I wanted to emulate.
Then I went straight to shmups.
When I was a kid, I mostly had platformers.
I don't know why, but I never really played many shmups back then.
My favorites from then I already have because I kept all my old hardware.

>>9395721
SNES was first console that i saw that had a disk backup system for in early 90s. i couldn't believe what i was seeing. snes games with copy protections cracked, trained, with intros from scene groups just like on c64 and amiga, all loaded off of disks. it was a wonderful day i have never forgotten. opened up a new world of possibilities. these black boxes for gaming were no longer a mystery as the hacking scene busted them wide open so anyone could develop software for them if they had the time and skill.

Late 1997. Someone told me on school he was playing NES Punch Out on MS-DOS with some graphic glitches. At first I was thinking he was just BS me, then he showed me Nesticle and my life changed forever. In 1999 probably 70% of my hard drive was emulation stuff, especially when emulated music files like SPC or NSF came out. Zophar.net was a big, big influence.

There wasn't a "fullset" site at that time, I get my ROMs on really underground FTPs and on IRC thanks to FServe. I think the first site that had an updated and complete fullset of something was mame.dk (fucking based site, RIP).

>>9393536
There was this page I came across that advertised a new Pokemon game you could play by downloading No$GMB. I ate it up, even though it turned out to be that bootlegged translation of Keitai Denjuu Telefang with the title screen changed to "Pokemon Diamond."

>>9395607
> Zophars domain
Oh shit man I think this still exists because I somehow stumbled upon it a while ago

>I've realised that for some reason when people learn about emulation the first thing they do is play their favorite games instead of trying something new
That was me, I found CoolRoms and just downloaded Pokémon Emerald to play on my phone even though I already had a perfectly working GBA and my copy of the game.
I didn't really know that much about gaming back then though, so I didn't know about any of the good older games I should play. I just knew about what I'd personally played and seen at game shops and friend's houses, I'd never heard of A Link to the Past, Dragon Quest, Metroid or Mega Man etc. Hell, I'd never even heard of the GameCube or N64.

What's /vr/'s approved ROM set in 2022?

Emulated Advance Wars and that sold the system to me. Still have my physical copy of the game.

>>9393536
>What was your reaction when you discovered emulation and ROMsites full of games you'd always wanted to try?
i downloaded SNES and N64 games rapid fire, like losing your virginity you're immediately hard again
>What was the first system/game you emulated?
Link to the Past was the first game i played all the way through on ZSNES
>I've realised that for some reason when people learn about emulation the first thing they do is play their favorite games instead of trying something new
they are in fact their favorite games, it nearly defies the laws of physics to arbitrary pursue things you have less interest in, or don't even know of

>>9394139
My dad is the same. He introduced me to emulators at an early age by giving some cheap computer with pre-configured emus for NES/SNES/MD (+ MAME) and later GBA, bought me a GBA with a flashcart and explained me how to put games on it, had hundreds of CDs/DVDs with downloaded movies, and to this day he has countless HDDs with torrented stuff. He hasn't paid for a movie, game or music album in at least 20 years. Also has two arcade cabinets with computers running groovymame on it (with actual arcade CRTs).
So the idea of paying for movies, games or music is just weird to me.

>>9393536
Amazing and extremely comfy, like I could be happy forever. It's been a huge hobby for me since the late 90s and I wrote for Zophar's Domain at one point.

Converse to that, I suffered hard from game switching, VERY rarely finishing anything. There was also no retro gaming scene to unearth the classics that I had missed or were never localized, so half the stuff I tried I didn't even like very much. Emulation didn't really come into grace until the mid-00s.

>My reaction
I downloaded the legend of zelda and beat it start to finish 2 times in a row using keyboard arrows and Q/E as my buttons.

>>9396340
stop posting this retard's terrible art

>>9396340
That shitty ass art doesn't even represent the time period itself.

>>9393536
It was 1997 or 98. If there was a game I wanted to try, I had to rent it on the occasional weekend that my family would go to the rental store. Then one day I saw my brother playing FInal Fantasy 2 on our family computer, and I was blown the fuck away. Once I found out that you could download practically any NES, SNES, or Genesis game you wanted, it felt like being handed the keys to the candy store. FF2 on the SNES was the first game I played emulated, but the first one I downloaded for myself was Ninja Gaiden Trilogy.

rip emureactor

>>9393536
Discovered it via some nes/snes emu discs that came with my Dreamcast. Had my first playthrough of Earthbound that way and probably killed my disc drive in the process. Every other game ran far too slow to enjoy. Nes disc let me discover Mr Gimmick and Earthbound Zero. After that, i got into zsnes for a little while and tried out Terranigma and then later dicked around with Amiga emulation and MAME. Now a days though, i really never bother too much with it. I own pretty much the majority of what i ever wanted and if the quality is acceptable, i enjoy official compilations of games over fiddling with emulators anymore. I guess it kinda lost its appeal a bit when my knowledge of obscure games and income power level grew and just less time overall to dick around with stuff.

>>9395998
>Oh shit man I think this still exists because I somehow stumbled upon it a while ago


The website is right here:
https://www.zophar.net/

It's be in operation since 1996, and probably the oldest website on the net that deals with emulation. Zophar's Domain would host all of the latest emulators, and emulation related files on their site, and use to be one of the most popular ones too. Zophar never hosted ROM files, outside of public domain ones. I don;t think the website was ever really blasted for doing anything 'illegal'. It still can be a useful website.

what do people think about ps3/360 emulation? does it bring joy discovering random games?

>>9394639
I used to play Ninja Turtles in a NES clone in my old TV. Now I can just get the Arcade rom and make it look more like the cartoons I used to watch

>>9393536
My first experience with emulators came from NeoRAGEX. I used to visit my cousin's house to play Neogeo on his PC though at that time, I never really grabbed the concept of emulators. Regardless, I thought it was pretty fun having to play a bunch of games in one program.
It was only later that I understand the concept of emulators and downloaded a PS1 emulator , ePSXe. I thought it was pretty cool getting to try out games easily though the whole BIO shenanigans and some emulators doesn't run games well like Hot Wheels did sucked.

>>9393536
By the time emulators were available I was too busy playing PS2. By the time PS2 got old and new consoles became shit there was no where else to go but the past.

>>9393536
im a zoomer and my introduction was gba4ios on my iphone 5s back in middle school
didnt mind the touch screen controls because i just played rpgs anyways

felt like heaven but nowadays it's just purgatory
steam deck is my dream device that satisfies everything id ever want but now i play nothing

>>9393536
Don't remember my first reaction but my earliest memory was playing Super Bomberman on ZSNES back in 2008.

Didn't have much growing up so emulation was my main source for gaming.

I think I buggered up a computer at school trying to figure it out by downloading a bunch of stuff off of Coolrom and some other sites because they banned me from the computer lab and said you're lucky they were able to fix it or something like that

1998: "Wow, someone stole an early copy of Sonic 2 and made a website about it. Wait, I can run it on my computer?!"
2000: "Wait, I can find completed games and run them too?!"

>>9393536
I was mind-blown honestly. I first started messing around with emulators at least 10 years ago when i graduated high school. I immediately got into the retro stuff like Nes, Snes, etc. It was a breath of fresh air to replay pokemon yellow, loz link to the past, and discover awsome stuff i missed like Earthbound, little samson, and omega boost to name a few. Nowadays i feel like ive seen it all and done it all. Games from the nes era to the ps2 era are like the only ones that matter and emulation proves it.

>>9393536
It must've been nearly 25 years ago, can't really remember. I don't think there were many sites hosting ROMs back then; pretty sure I downloaded them from fserves on IRC. I remember being pretty hyped to play Front Mission.

>>9397228
I dont think emulation of anything past 5th gen will have any magic for me personally since thats when i became turbo autustic keeping up with all titles being released that were coming out and interested me.

>>9397228
You can't go on the same kind of random deep dives because of the far spottier compatibility as well as massively larger games; you'd want to make sure whatever you were interested in playing worked correctly before you even downloaded it. The newest console you can go bananas playing random games for is probably GameCube since all its games emulate fine and were constrained to a relatively small size.

>>9393665
Pokemon and GB and GBA in general were my introduction to emulation.
I got really properly into it with my PSP though. I got one at launch and lurked the hack scene. once it was hacked and emulators were made for it I just went on a wild dive into emulation. and I have been emulating ever since :)

>>9397228
I honestly haven't explored it very much beyond playing a lot of demons souls online.
I'd like to get into it more. but I still have my PS3 and 360 hooked up so there isn't much I'd need to emulate.

>>9393536
>What was your reaction when you discovered emulation and ROMsites full of games you'd always wanted to try?
I arrived late to the party (2017) but at the same time it was a good things cause there was a lot of stuff already, it was exciting and comfy
> What was the first system/game you emulated?
SNES, I do emulate stuff I never played but I wanted, or stuff I liked but never finished/never understood

>>9393536
The first thing I emulated was Pokemon Ruby in Japanese the day it came out in 2002. It was alright, and I may have emulated one or two more games like Pinball RS and a Pikachu hack of Super Mario Land, but I didn’t truly get into emulation until 2004 or so when seeing Sonic Heroes reminded me that Sonic, which I had only known from AoStH and PC shareware demos of Sonic 3D Blast and Sonic & Knuckles Collection before, was a thing, and so I went hog wild exploring the various games of the franchise before then branching out into NES and SNES stuff I had only known from Newgrounds flashes or their N64 versions until then.

I only owned a small handful of games for SNES and remember seeing the "emulate" word on a forum or something but I downloaded Snes9x, downloaded MMX2 and remember reacting like a caveman that just discovered fire when I saw the game running on PC. I played through most of the games I used to rent the shit out of using a keyboard then I got pic related as soon as I saw it in the store to play Gundam Wing Endless Duel.

>>9393536
It was neat, but I don't remember it reducing my physical console play of the respective games I was capable of emulating at the time.

>>9393536
bought an emulator in the late 90s on a CD with a magazine to bring back the C64 .. didn't know anything about emulation ... Games on the CD were crap but it did work ...

What to say ... seeing the old graphics and listening to the sound of that old system blew me away and I started digging more into emulation with my 56k connection. The treasure I found I still hold dear .. I could replay old C64 games with save feature now and finally could enjoy playing games on systems I never could imagine to afford back in the day let alone playing gems like Chrono Trigger on a PC.

Listening to the music still teakes me back to those days yet I know it weren't the real and true days of exploring that world on an SNES but still I hold that time very very dear and still try to find new gems ...

>>9393823
newfag

>>9394126
its because that's a relatively-recent thing, like 2018 onward. Before then, Emuparadise was legit.

>>9402169
Isn't Emuparadise still good today so long as you've got the browser extension?

>>9393536
ez cool

I got into it in highschool, gave me kind of an empty feeling desu as much as a jackpot discovery as it was. I had liked going to retro stores and looking for obscure games and old hardware as a kid, getting physical carts in the mail, getting the old consoles out every once in awhile. then I knew all that was completely pointless and a pretty decent waste of my adolescent spending money.

>>9393536
>"shit, i wasted money on those virtual console games"
also the first game i emulated was Action 52

>>9393737
There were a few sites like that, the one i used was EVG or something, i remember needing to fuck with like 20 different combinations of URL to get a broken snapshot of it from the wayback machine. From what I recall the owner quit maintaining the site because he had a second site with a dozen more emulators.

>>9403374
Forgot to mention, this would have been 2009. Only read the phrase "emulation" a few times prior and thought it was just a fancy word for a bootleg console.
I saw a video on action 52, it looked really shitty, and for some reason i had the urge to see just how shitty it was. One thing led to another and that's how i found out about emulation.

I also thought Mother 1 was a fan demake of Earthbound since back then it went by Earthbound Zero.

>>9393536
Pokemon red/blue was the first game I emulated. Some kid at school gave it to me on a floppy disk. I went looking for more games later. They were usually just scattered around on personal websites. I grabbed whatever seemed appealing. Gameboy games at first since I could play those on a broken pc I had in no$gmb. Final Fantasy Adventure was one I'd play late at night. Music/sound from pc speaker on an old crt. It added to the atmosphere. Good times.
Bigger indexed sites started popping up and I'd grab SNES games later but they mostly wouldn't run well.
The peak was with emuparadise/ps1 because I could just burn a disc and put it in my console. I grabbed everything I could and would share it with a friend I had at the time. Only had dialup though (Australia) and the games were in multiple parts for a while. It took ages to grab games.

>>9394139
BASED DAD

>>9393536
I felt like I discovered the secret behind the fucking universe. My first was Bugs Bunny's Birthday Blowout on the NES. I've been compulsively downloading ROMs and other media before 2000 ever since.
>mfw I've been constantly catching up to a childhood I never had

>>9393536
I felt like a kid that got turned loose into Toys R US and told that I could have whatever I wanted, no limits. Pretty sure I just sat there in shock for a few minutes. Then when I finally download a ROM, booted up an emulator and actually played, for once "the future" felt like it.

>>9405920
>>mfw I've been constantly catching up to a childhood I never had
It's just so cathartic, huh, anon? It's justice. There were so many games that for whatever reason I never got a chance to play, but now? HA!
>game can't be rented because it was never returned
>game can't be bough because it can't be found
>game wasn't bought because parents said no
Again-HA! Emulation rocks.

>>9393536
>What was the first system/game you emulated?
Oh forgot that part. It's a boring answer, but I booted up Super Mario Bros. I figured if SMB on the NES felt right, then this new "emulation" thing just might be legit.
So I booted it up, fully expecting...something, but certainly not the reality, which is that it looks and sounds like the real thing (so long as you're not playing a blob, i.e., a system on a chip).

>>9405920
>>mfw I've been constantly catching up to a childhood I never had
This is me because growing up in a shithole meant not having any of the stuff most of you guys have nostalgia for on this board. I only had a Famiclone, bootleg MegaDrive and a modded PS1. Almost all of the games I had on these were shovelware

>>9393536
bamp

>>9402175
It is good, but it's clearly a product of its time. Missing titles (Pokemon), the occasional ROM with an intro, PSP games that are split into a dozen parts.
I still use it because I know it like the back of my hand but archive.org is the clear best place to get ROMs right now.

>>9409642
Nta, but emuparadise feels like one of the last great old parts of the Internet before that web 2.0 garbage.

>>9393536
Anyone else can't download music from emuparadise due to hotlink error?

I don't remember how i came across it back in 2011, but my first emulator was Emurayden PSX, some kind of bootleg of Bleem!

I was amazed i could just pop a cd into my pc and it would play a ps1 game.
Later that day i got ePSXe and tried some roms i got out of a old website called freeroms.com, it still works, but i wouldn't recommend it, a lot of the ps1 isos are rips with missing music.

Then later on i found rom hustler, the iso zone, etc ... (i'm still fucking pissed at the iso zone closing, they had a huge collection of games, even for pc)

>>9410652
>freeroms.com
A Mandela Effect happened and now freeroms never existed. It was always "freerom" in this dimension.
Anyone remember oldiesgames?

>>9393536
when i discovered mame. in 1999 i think.i spent the whole night downloading arcade roms from a website, one by one. and then the next day.

>>9411594
What year? I think I discovered ROMs and emulators in 2005.

>>9411594
Sorry, for some reason the year part didn't register. Blame my neighbors for burning plastic.

>>9393536
That site is more then dead now.
>nooo you can't upload patreon stuff is bad even if works better then public release.
>no uploding roms is bad...yes we had in the past but is bad.

>>9393536
>reaction
>"Look at all these shitty games"

>>9393536
Excitement.

>What was the first system/game you emulated?
GBA, Super Robot Wars R, back in 2005

>>9393536

>What was your reaction when you discovered emulation and ROMsites full of games you'd always wanted to try?

Like discovering fire. Imagine all those games from the system you did not own, and come to the realization that you could now play them.

> What was the first system/game you emulated? I've realised that for some reason when people learn about emulation the first thing they do is play their favorite games instead of trying something new

The first thing I emulated was the first thing that was available to me: Mega drive with Bloodlust Software's Genecyst. I went straight to the thing that the console wars told me it was "cooler:" Sonic 2

Truth to be told, Getting a cd with roms in the pre-internet times feels a bit different. It's more like you have been handed an archeological treasure that is "unique" (Did not have a cd writer, losing it would have been bad). Like someone did the Silk Route and brought you that from afar.

As for actually finding rom sites when i had dial-up internet for the first time, it was not great. A lot of the stuff was hosted on sites like Metropoli2000. Once they introduced a queue to download system in 2002, the good times were over. It would take a few more years for Emuparadise and Planetemu to appear.

This brings a few memories of the metropoli2000 "catasthrophe", in case somebody can read spanish or was there and lived it:
http://www.selvacamaleon.net/index2.html

>>9405920
Bugs Bunny's Birthday blowout? More like Bugs Bunny's Birthday beating.

>>9393536
I didn't have access to reliable internet and I had a potato of a computer. My friends and I would go down to the local library and download the files to put on a USB. I started with GBA and played Metroid zero mission and the shining force remake. Now Roms and Emulators are a staple of my gaming life.

>>9393536
gameboy on No$Gb
>>9413453
faggot

>>9413445
>>no uploding roms is bad...yes we had in the past but is bad.
I mean obviously. The site got in huge legal trouble, why would they let you continue uploading ROMs? It's been effectively just an archive for a while, which itself is still miraculous