Emulation memories

[Anonymous No.1598584]

Let's talk about the best moment of out lives...
the moment we discovered emulation!
How/when did you discover emulation ?
What were the first games you emulated ?
Any fond memories or interesting stories you wanna share ?

[Anonymous No.1598603]

>>1598584
>Older cousin's house
>he's playing Castlevania: Bloodlines
>on PC
>NIGGA, WTF IS THIS??
>Emulation.
>Ohm-u-lotion??

I had know idea the pleasures that lay before me.

[Anonymous No.1598607]

Not really, I'm just trying to find a controller that I can get to work and I'm set.

Fond memories... every time I save/load I suppose.

[Anonymous No.1598617]

One day at school in the computer lab I found this guy playing Final Fantasy 6 and Chrono Trigger on the PC and thought it was really cool. I lived out in the country and the closest video game store was about 20 miles away and they never carried "Japanese" games, so the thought of being able to finally play all games that were too expensive and I couldn't find anyway was kind of overwhelming.
Oh ZSNES...

[Anonymous No.1598619]

I remember emulating NES games on my old PS1/PSX
I was blown away by it, and i had the chance to play lots of games i couldn't find.
It was on a burned cd labeled "mario" and had thousands of games in it.

[Anonymous No.1598621]

A website called NES cafe let you emulate NES games on browser. I just remember playing mario for hours on my dad's work PC. I have no idea if it's still up.

[Anonymous No.1598654]

I remember when my eldest brother showed me emulation.

It was more to impress me than anything, he showed me Pokemon Crystal which we didn't have at the time, and I was trying to work my head around how gameboy games could be played on a computer.

Although, he couldn't do anything more than play the game, he didn't assign the buttons I think so he couldn't start up the game. I thought it was just broken until I did it myself and learnt everything.

I remember my other brother trying to emulate Shenmue on my new Laptop about 5 years ago, but he fucked up somehow and it wouldn't work, or it would but with all the graphics fucking up and not working, I don't know how he fucked this up, because I sorted out Dreamcast emulation easily.

[Anonymous No.1598661]

My friends at school introduced me to ZSNES and FF4,5,6 and Chrono Trigger. I had an SNES as a kid but didn't even know it had good RPGs. The only one I ever rented was Lufia, and that sucked. I was a big fan of RPGs on the PC so I had a blast. I eventually picked up carts of all those games and got even more years of enjoyment out of my SNES.

[Anonymous No.1598671]

I can't remember the first time, but i remember learing about it from friends.
I remember downloading all sonic games and having a blast.
Playing Mega man X at school etc,good stuff.

[Anonymous No.1598678]

Emulation really started getting traction at around 2004-2005 over here, which is when I learned of it. It was pretty great to see SNES games gaining newfound attention, including games we never got like Super Mario RPG, FFIV/VI, Chrono Trigger and Earthbound.

It was very popular at school, just like flash games.

[Anonymous No.1598681]

>>1598584
I grew up playing DOS games. First emulating was Metroid 2. Pre-internet, so some friend at school gave me a copy on floppy disk. Played it for a few hours, got bored of it. A few years later I played Secret of Mana on ZSNES. Liked it enough to play it all the way through, but it didn't really compare to the greatest DOS games (eg. Doom, X-COM). It wasn't until I played the PC port of FFVII that I really became interested in Japanese games. It's also around that time that I started noticing the bad pacing and framerate of most DOS games. Now I mostly like NES, Genesis and arcade games.

[Anonymous No.1598698]

>Discover emulation
>Download a few games.
>It works!
>Go grab a bunch of old Nintendo Power mags, flip through them, and download everything that looks fun that I never got to play

[Anonymous No.1598845]

>>1598584
>Brother and I discover winkawaks and metal slug
>Installed emulator on parent's computer
>One keyboard, two players
>arms crossed over each other in full autistic glory
>some of the most fun we spent together back then

[Anonymous No.1598941]

I'm pretty positive the very first games I ever emulated were the PC-98 Touhou games soon after I started high school. We still had dial-up at the time, so I played those ones a lot because they were much easier to download than the Windows games. (I remember staying up literally all night to make sure my download for Perfect Cherry Blossom didn't fail.) After that, it would have been either Pokemon Crystal or some other GBC games.

[Anonymous No.1598942]

>2000
>10 years old
>Great fan of the pokemon anime
>Friend comes to my house with his GBC and shows me pokemon blue
>I shit my pants
>Ask my parents to buy me a gameboy just to play it
>They refuse
>A poorfag friend from my class says that he discovered a program on the internet that makes your PC believe it's a game boy
>I have to see it to believe it
>Comes home with 3 1/4 flopy disk with SMYGB and a pokemon red rom
>It actually works
>Play pokemon all weekend
>Trying to catch articuno
>Finally do it
>Realize it's 3:00 am
>Oh crap

And that's how I stayed up late playing vidya for the first time in my life.

[Anonymous No.1599130]

>>1598584

It was in early 1999. My cousin brought me a floppy disk with No$GB and Pokemon Blue, the most amazing part of that emulator back then was that it supported linking. After that I started with ZSNES (it worked like shit back then), Callus and FinalBurn. Had some experiments with N64 emulators too.

[Anonymous No.1599137]

>>1598942
How did you know about the anime but not the games?

[Anonymous No.1599141]

It was late 99 or early 00 don't remember ...
A guy from my class discovered emulation and played snes on the library pc all the time, he played mostly Killer Incstinct if memory doesn't fail me, but whatever. So you know how it goes from there, the guy explained me how it worked n' stuff. I didn't have internet at home so I had to go to a cyber cafe to download the emulator and roms.
Back then I was obessesed with anime so I mostly downloaded anime games.

So the first thing I emulated was the Snes with a couple Ranma and Dragon ball games. I also downloaded Zelda and Breath of fire, the latter because the name sounded super cool.
Even tough I don't understand moonspeak I used to play the Ranma and Dragon Ball rpgs a lot, and I even mamaged to make it quite far without understanding shit. Some time later I downloaded a gameboy emulator with lots of games and another Ranma game, needless to say I spent lots of time with the Ranma game.

Good times....

[Anonymous No.1599150]

You want me to talk about when I discovered Emulation?

Well, to be honest I was fucking completely horrified of it because of all the 'DELETE WITHIN 24 HOURS AND PRAY THE FBI DOESN'T COME AND RAPE YOU IN THE NIGHT' stuff and I didn't try it for years.

[Anonymous No.1599187]

>>1598584
>wanna play old genesis games
>some how me and my sister stumble upon the site "freeroms.com"
>thankfully it somehow wasn't riddled with viruses
>download genecyst x.xx and play shit like Zombies Ate My Neighbors and Sonic
good times

[Anonymous No.1599218]

>"Hey dude"
>"What"
>"I played pokemon red on PC"
>"Ok-wait what, how?"
>"There's a thing called emulator that runs on PC and lets you play the games for free"
>"Gimme that shit"
>Paid 3 dollars for a floppy disk with that shit
>Didn't know how to make it work
>Get some random magazine 2 months later
>Comes with kawaks and some ROMs
>Investigate further
>My neighbor the guy that works with computers has 2 cd's full of neogeo ROMs
>Investigate further
>ZSNES, Gens, VBA M.A.M.E
>Always went to that cybercafe to download all of them ROMs
>Finally have internet at home
>Find out about website with all info about emulators I could ever want
>Find out about emulation IRC channel

And that's how it started.

[Anonymous No.1599321]

My earliest memory of emulation was bundling Pokemon Red and Blue with a GB emulator on 3.5" floppies and selling them at school for $10 a pop.

[Anonymous No.1599369]

>be a poor kid who could only play his neighbor's Master System as video game entertainment
>be a retard for years and never figure out how to get emulators working
>finally get some gameboy emulator and a pokemon gold rom
>load it up
>holy shit this is amazing
>nearly cry tears of joy that it worked
>now 23 and have a massive backlog of games to play
>too apathetic and unsatisfied to play anything

[Anonymous No.1599412]

>>1598584
>How/when did you discover emulation
Awwww man
There was this kid in middle school who introduced me to SNES emulation and tried to be a bro and give me a floppy disc of the emulator and a DBZ game but it didn't work.

Didn't matter because I'm wasn't a pleb and still not and I saw the file names so I went to this new hip thing called Google that was like a dictionary for the internet and typed in SNES DBZ emulator and lo and behold not only did I learn about emulation I learned about the internet and how it has everything.

My very first game I emulated was the DBZ Hyper Dimension, and this was obviously during the Toonami DBZ fever so finding some obscure DBZ game no one knew about, that was a SNES game, that I got for free and able to play on the computer, gave me the biggest mind blowing experience.

The rest is history, I downloaded everything I could, hogged my dialup line for years that made my parents and family mad, but who cares I had Mario Kart and that Vectorman game that was always in stores but I never got to play because some faggot kid hogged the store demo and holy shit Megaman X games I had to wait a literal year before I could visit my cousin and played them at his house then I found that Mario RPG that confused the hell out of me when I rented it that one day because of not being able to go to Bowser's Castle in the beginning no matter how many times I went on that cliff and that stupid tadpole minigame which ran me out of my rental days, played the shit out of Mario RPG which had Culex a supposedly Final Fantasy boss and wow JRPGs are fucking awesome see I knew they were JRPGs because the message boards called them that which after reading for help and hints I saw many people talk about Chrono Trigger and every doomsday thing make a reference to Lavos and I thought ok everyone seems to be talking about this game let's go rent it PSYCHE! so I finally downloaded it and found my RPG that held the standard for RPGs for years

[Anonymous No.1599431]

>>1598698
>It works!
Yes that fucking feeling

>>1599412
So everything else was just downloading games and playing which ones were cool and dropping those that weren't. Anything else is pretty much video game playing stories, lots of games I've played solely on emulators, and with emulation I learned about piracy and started on Playstation burning and filesharing on DC++, KaZaA, and IRC, which must've gotten me loads of viruses but with IRC, I eventually found sub groups and anime besides Toonami

On a fun note, I'm sure I still have a Nintendo Power, I believe it's the one with Kirby 64 on the cover with a white background, and in one of the letters, one kid asked about a Gameboy emulator and roms and if it was illegal. Nintendo obviously said it was

[Anonymous No.1599449]

>>1598698
>It works!
crying_h.jpg
appy_man.jpg

[Anonymous No.1599489]

>>1599137
I live in a third world country. The GB and it's games were not officially sold here.

My friend bought it in the US.

[Anonymous No.1599709]

>>1598584
I remember one time my cousin telling me about cherryroms and how you could download SNES games, when I got back home I looked up the site and was able to find out about SNES9x and ZSNES on my own and managed to get stuff like Super Mario World and Mario All-Stars working. This was also around the time where I had first played Super Smash Bros and was intrigued about Ness and his origin since he was the only character in the game that I had no idea about. So for the next couple months I played Earthbound every chance I got, and the following summer I found Harvest Moon by accident and spent the entire summer playing that pretty much non-stop.

[Anonymous No.1599886]

>>1598584
Early emulation was shit and progressed slowly so my discovery and experience for many years there after was very disappointing. What I played was basically dictated by what games emulators could run playably. By the time emulators for a console were useable the original hardware was going for a few bucks at garage sales so there really wasn't much point. People who discovered working emulation instead of having to live through it's agonizing early development don't know how lucky they are.

[Anonymous No.1599996]

My first contact with emulators was thanks to my brother who showed me a Pokémon Yellow hack called "All in one". REW was pretty new, too.
Shortly after he showed me ZSNES and we played Turtles in Time on one keyboard which was pretty fun although uncomfortable since we had to cross our arms.

[Anonymous No.1600001]

Man, when I was like 8 or 10 at this kid's house in about 1999 or so his brother was a nerd and had a way to play Playstation games on the computer and NES games. I thought that kid was a lying little shit but nope. We then played Sonic Spinball on his Sega Genesis/CD combo, man I didn't even know what a Sega CD was. I thought it was some futuristic shit.

[Anonymous No.1600034]

hey guys im getting back into snes emulation and just downloaded this awsome pack with all the eng/uk/translated games ever made for it
http://thepiratebay.se/torrent/10035258/Cylum_s_SNES_ROM_Set_%282014%29

But what the best emulator to use? I alwas used snes9x but i looked it up and everyone is talking about higan, is it the best? It seems it can play snes the best along with the other Nintendo systems. is there a awesome shader pack for it?

[Anonymous No.1600105]

>>1598584
I can't remember when I first discovered emulation. Maybe around 2003?
Something like that. I think a friend of mine had brought in Gunstar Heroes on a Zip disk or maybe a 32MB flash drive (remember when one of those would cost $30?) and we played that on one of the school computers.
Also, I had never seen Gunstar Heroes before that (even though I owned and loved my Genesis), and I thought it was a 32X game, heh. I was stupid back then.

>Any fond memories or interesting stories?
Here's mine:
It's pretty similar to >>1598845
>years ago (2005?)
>playing Smash 64 on my old-ass PIII-era Dell Inspiron
>certain characters had missing textures because the thing 8MB of VRAM
>plugged in an iMac keyboard so we could have room for all four of us (spent a good half-hour trying to figure out how to bind the keys so we could all play without ghosting, haha)
>absolute fucking blast, total tangle of arms

Shit was magic. Absolutely retarded in hindsight, but damn. We were stupid high-schoolers who didn't have USB controllers (or money to obtain them -- the day I got a bank account and a job, I bought Playstation->PC converters, haha).

also, I was completely floored at how it would stay full-speed on that shittop

>>1600034
Snes9x is fast and works for most purposes.
higan is the most accurate, but you need a pretty beefy machine

[Anonymous No.1600132]

>>1600105
>higan is the most accurate, but you need a pretty beefy machine
beefy in what terms? Because i have a pretty beefy pc in terms of a graphics card and cpu. What shaders if any do people use here for the higan? Also whats the best sega genesis emulator?

[Anonymous No.1600140]

>>1600132
Like, your PC has to be made of bacon.

[Anonymous No.1600161]

>>1600140
This.

But what I mean is CPU.

>>1600132
As for the best Genesis emulator, Fusion gets tossed around as being damn good (and it is -- 100% compatibility with all commercial Genesis, 32X, and Sega CD releases). It's my emulator of choice for all the systems it emulates.

Gens/GS is considered pretty good as well.

[Anonymous No.1600164]

>>1600140
Fuck I'm retarded.

>beefy
>bacon

[Anonymous No.1600169]

>>1600164
Hahaha, so am I, I didn't notice the meat discrepancy either.

[Anonymous No.1600173]

>>1600161
alright i think i have a decent enough cpu, also getting fusion. is there a good pack of all the sega games neatly packaged (and all in English)?

[Anonymous No.1600178]

>>1600173
There should be. I can't remember where I got the Genesis fullset (last time I bothered with one anyway).

[Anonymous No.1600180]

>>1598698
>It works!
>That realization that hundreds of excellent games are now yours to play whenever you want and completely free

[Anonymous No.1600193]

>>1600178
If any one knows a good neatly pack please share it. The snes pack i found >>1600034
here is very nice. one thing though, does playing the games while they are in zip files effect the game at all? or is it fine? Also is there a way too import or scan a folder of games into higans library or must you do it one by one?

[Anonymous No.1600217]

Is this a good pack? https://kickass.to/sega-for-pc-every-genesis-mega-drive-n-32x-rom-and-emu-ever-t6435782.html#main
it seems too have all the megadrive/genesis/32x games but i still would like a sega cd pack. also if there is a pack with just English and translations organized please post it.

[Anonymous No.1600225]

>be me, 25, October 2011
>shit hourly wage job after getting my BA in philosophy and koine greek in 2010
>figure out how to soft mod my ps3
>suddenly free ps3 games
>miss my nes/snes/genesis days
>miss playing arcade cabinets for free with my dad's coin door key at the arcade he worked at for 20 years during my childhood
>figure out how to install emulators on said ps3
>discover neo geo for the first time in my life
>emulating ever since
>still collect rpgs for nes/snes/ps1/ps2
>emulate what I can't afford
>still use that ps3 every single day

I love that ps3. I take it to my friend's garage every single Sunday to play retro games with our kids. Golden Axe II, Gun Star Heroes and Neo Turf Masters are their favorites.

[Anonymous No.1600258]

>>1600164
Yeah. What a retard. Everyone knows bacon is made of turkey which somehow turns into TVP when it's chopped up to make bacon bits.

[Anonymous No.1600278]

>finally discover how emulators work after being confused for years whenever game sites mentioned them
>always felt like I missed out on the classics because I never had that many SNES games
>wondered if my computer was even good enough to run them
>get SNES9X working
>manage to find a non shit emulator site and properly obtain the rom
>Megaman X
>It works
>It works so fucking well
>all that beauteous SNES action on my computer
>no slowdown, sound quality is perfect
>realize I can play games not even released in the US

Now Fire Emblem was my favorite game series, and around after 9 was released I realized that half the series never made it out of Japan

>everyone talks about how Fire Emblem 4 is godlike
>realize that if I do it right, I can play the and in English
>hours later after many attempts and computer dickery, load up the game with the patch attached
>game doesn't freeze
>game is working
>I can play the game I never thought I was able to play in a language I could understand

FE4 was amazing. I felt like
I had discovered some lost treasure. Great game.

Nowadays I can even emulate shit on my phone.

[Anonymous No.1600292]

2000. Back when most emulation sites force you to vote for them in the Top 100. The first game I emulated was the translated Tenchi Muyo tactical RPG on the SNES.

[Anonymous No.1600314]

>>1600292
I played that game once, was it really so popular that it got translated? what year did that actually get translated? there are still so many japanese games left untranslated sadly...

[Anonymous No.1600993]

I downloaded a Pokemon Blue ROM and No$GB without knowing what the word "emulator" meant exactly, but figured it was a way to make a PC pretend to be a GB. When I managed to get it to work, I played it till the early hours of the morning.

My first late night playing vidya.

[Anonymous No.1601032]

>>1598584
I discovered emulation when I was about 10 or 11 years old (2003/2004) at my best friends place. His brother was playing Advance Wars 2 on his PC. I was intrigued.

The very first game was Megaman Battle Network 3.

My friend didn't have Golden Sun (a game I had already finished when we were doing all this) so one day he and I sat down at his PC and played it all day.

[Anonymous No.1601039]

>Early 2000s
>Older brother tells me he downloaded a Super Nintendo "emulator" on our home PC, along with just about every Super Nintedo game to exist
>Later that week, try it for myself
>Scrolling through the list of roms, looking for something that sounded cool from the title, since I had 0 experience with Super Nintendo games at that point
>Whoa, Mario's Time Machine? That sounds awesome
>Play for 45 minutes
>Lost and bored as shit
>Think all games of the Super Nintendo era were like this, and I just can't get into them.

And I didn't touch another emulator again...until my brother downloaded Project 64 a few months later and I played the shit out of Super Mario 64

[Anonymous No.1601042]

12, ironically i hated it and never liked playing games on the computer until a year or two ago

[Anonymous No.1601078]

I think I was around 7 when my brother gave me SNES9X, some Neogeo emulator and a bunch of roms (my dad is a huge computer geek so I already had a personal computer back then). I played the shit out of games like Lufia 2 and Seiken Densetsu 3: without exaggerating at all, I finished both of those games well over a dozen time. Me and my brother also played a fuck of a lot of Metal Slug and various fighting games together and those are easily some of the happiest moments of my childhood. We haven't been very close in a long time, but I have briefly been to his place once and noticed he had a fight stick so I figure he has some fond memories of those times too.

[Anonymous No.1601296]

>fond memories
We were still in the middle of the Pokemon craze, Pokemon gold and silver were already avaible in japan but not in the rest of the world.
A "friend" of mine found a partially translated pokemon silver rom online, the next day he gives me a floppy disk with the game.
It was ultra awesome, playng pokemon silver before everyone else was such an awesome feeling, I can't even begin to describe it with words.
So... the game was playable but like only the first 2 towns were translated, so we didn't really get that far.
I remember talking with the guy about the game at school, some small kids heard what we were talking about and gathered around us trying to listen to our conversation, then they started asking us questions.
The look on their faces was priceless, it was like we were some sort of future gods to them.

I also remember catching a Rattata(or something) and naming it after my crush.
Dude..that was lame ....

[Anonymous No.1601310]

I think I played Chrono Trigger first since we never got it in the EU back then. It was pretty underwhelming and I got stuck at that part where you have to press three buttons for a hour or so. I also played SD3 of course, then I think Teranigma and Soul Blazer.

Emulation also finally allowed me to beat fucking B.O.B. which my mom got me instead of Probotector

[Anonymous No.1601995]

Not a fond memory but still an emulation memory....

I used to have Friday the 13th for NES when I was a kid. I never understood how to play the game or what exactly the objective was.
Needless to say I was super frustrated, and always regretted buying it.
So last year I decided to try to play it again.
Now that I am an adult, with the help of a walkthrough and save states I can finally have my revenge on this game... or so I thought.

I still don't understand the game and the piece of shit still keeps kicking my ass.

>frustration intensifies

[Anonymous No.1602025]

It was probably 1998 or 99, I lived in Istanbul where you could buy pirated pc games that were pretty well made with the cases and actual fucking booklets copied as well, based Turkey. One day in the store I found a cd with NeoRage and about 30 roms on it, including various installments of Last Blade, Samurai Showdown, Metal Slug, Shocktroopers, etc. Amazing times.

[Anonymous No.1602096]

>>1602025

Sounds pretty similar to my first experience. It was also in 1999 and with NeoRageX.

I was always dreaming of owning a NeoGeo, but alas, the price for the games were just way too high. Someday I discovered some ugly fan site in all its web 1.0 glory and found an ominous program (said emulator) with the outrageous claim that you can actually play NeoGeo games with the program. It took me several hours to set the little fucker up since I hadn't the slightest idea about the necessity of bios files and the general concept that .zip files don't always have to be unzipped.

After that, I was pretty much lost for 2 days absorbed in the glorious world of emulation without any sleep. Good thing I was on summer break. I had to plan carefully every download since an average NeoGeo ROM was around 20-30mb which was fucking huge for my poor little 56K modem. In the end that stuff killed my internet connection and I got a few angry yells from my family for the ~300$ phone bill.

It was totally worth it.

[Anonymous No.1604238]

Remember that you must delete your ROMs 24 hours after the download.

[Anonymous No.1604560]

>year around the debut of Final Fantasy VII
>manga charcters, fuck yeah
>game magazine tells about previous FFs and emualtors
>since had no PC capable of playing the PC port, nor had PS, started lurking for emus at school
>found translated FFV
>downloading w/ ~1kbps , getting it home on floppys

[Anonymous No.1604565]

>>1604238
That propaganda was Super Effective on me and I didn't touch emulation for years.

Fucking Happy Merchants.

[Anonymous No.1604591]

>>1601296
holy shit this was the exact same way i got introduced to emulation. cool mang

[Anonymous No.1604593]

An article in a gaming magazine introduced it to me.

I can't remember the first one, but I think I started with the SNES. It was great to discover so many great game I never played in my childhood.

[Anonymous No.1604965]

It was '01 or '02. My friend was playing Beavis and Butthead for SNES on his PC and showing me how funny the NESticle icon was. Shit blew my mind, and I immediately got SNES9x and played Demon's Crest when I got home. Beat that shit with a keyboard at age 12.

Now I have a few hundred GB of ROMs and ISOs, and I'm building a MAME cabinet.

Thanks, Eric.

[Anonymous No.1605148]

Semi-interesting story/history lesson:

Back in like...'96-'97 the emulation scene was just NES and all the SNES emulators couldn't even do sound yet.

I learned that Squaresoft LIED about the numbered Final Fantasys and there was infact a 2, 3, and 5 that never made it to US shores. I came across a site called "RPGe team" that was dedicated to fan-translating FF5. I lost my shit because they had already done everything BUT the story text, not to mention a year later I found other people mostly finished FF2 and FF3.
Some time after the SNES finally was able to emulate sound and I heard FF5 for the first time. It was amazing and I wish I could describe the feeling to you because it was a surreal experience.

Imagine finding out your favorite series had a "lost game" and you literally found it in the street and you try and play it and you find out it's legit and real. I was so happy.

The level of excitement as I played through all of those was such an amazing experience I wouldn't trade for anything. All console/handheld releases paled in comparison in the future.

[Anonymous No.1605251]

I think it was 1998. A friend bought the brand new Pentium 166 mhz with MMX and it ran ZSNES really well. We were all poor, so we got the ROMs for FF 4 and 6 and played them on his PC.

[Anonymous No.1605317]

I got into it through MAME, actually, probably a little over a decade ago. I got into it for one reason, and one reason alone- I wanted to play the Terminator 2 arcade game that I rmemebered so fondly from my childhood. Oh my, the nostalgia rush that overtook me when I finally wrangled that beast into a working state...

Of course, it was nowhere near the glory I remember of standing, on a bar stool if I had to, because I was too short to reach the gun on the cabinaet when I was a kid, and swivelling that turret around, unloading furious vengeance into the face of those chrome T-800s and HKs. But nevertheless it took me back. I could briefly remember the smiles and laughter one more time that my father and I once shared as he pumped coins into that machine, my eager and excited young mind determined to beat that bastard fifth level.. And he kept on putting coins in... It must have cost him a fortune...

I barely even speak to my dad anymore...

;_;

[Anonymous No.1605330]

>mfw i thought the 24 hour rule was real
>tfw i realized I tried the entire final fantasy series up to 6 when i should have played them one at a time to get the most out of them each before the GAME POLICE broke my door down or something
>kid at school tells me it's ok and not a big deal even if technically illegal

[Anonymous No.1605417]

1997ish. Talking about games with my friend and how i miss bomberma for gameboy. He tells me about program called gameboy emulator that can play any gb game on pc. Rest is history.

[Anonymous No.1605475]

>>1605148
I remember that exactly. FF5 was the first game I played to completion on an emulator. I was giddy as fuck and blew through most of the game during my winter vacation in high school. The reaction was even parts of:

>Holy shit I'm playing SNES games on a computer
>Holy shit there's a missing FF game I've never even heard of, and it's awesome
>Holy shit random people on the Internet are hacking and translating games from Japan

Good times.

[Anonymous No.1605479]

>>1605417
Samefag here.

I had every system, but I only had maybe 2 or 3 games for each and rented the rest. So it was great that through emulation i discovered a lot of NES gems that I never knew existed like Lolo, north vs. south, rbi baseball and a ton of others.

It was also great finally getting to play games that I always wanted to play, but my video store never carried like Punch out, Kid Icarus and others.

Almost twenty years later and here I am still emulating, although now on a Wii, and still talking about retro games.

I hope that we'll all still be at it in another 20 years.

[Anonymous No.1605535]

>>1604238
I used to keep my nes roms on floppies and hid them in my sock drawer so I wouldn't get caught.

I was a strange scared kid.

[Anonymous No.1605540]

>>1604238
>please come back every day to look at our shitty pop-up ads

[Anonymous No.1605546]

>>1605535

Imagining that gave me a laugh. Thanks.

[Anonymous No.1605569]

>>1605546

I actually was more afraid of viruses and dialer. Especially the later. I was 16 when I discovered emulation and illegal downloads were something I got used to by this time and the whole 24 hours rule screamed bullshit for me even back then.

But a dialer? Fuck, that was something I was really afraid of.

[Anonymous No.1606779]

>>1605330
>24 hour rule

pfff oh shit, I completely forgot about that

I completely believed it too

[Anonymous No.1606885]

>>1599150
I remember that feeling. I was daydreaming in my social studies class one day about the games I was playing and suddenly started thinking about being hauled off to Guantanamo or some shit. I vowed to delete all my ROMs and become an upstanding citizen when I got home, but I just wound up playing Chrono Trigger all day.

[Anonymous No.1606908]

>>1605569
>But a dialer? Fuck, that was something I was really afraid of.

I just unplugged the phone line from my modem when I wasn't using it.

[Anonymous No.1606927]

When I was around 14 or so. I don't remember how I stumbled upon the site, but the name of it was The RPG Emulation Center. It had a tan background and plain blue text as the title.

[Anonymous No.1607634]

>>1605148
>Imagine finding out your favorite series had a "lost game"
Same happened with me and Final Fantasy.

I played FF7 for the first time back in like 01-02.
It was my first real Final Fantasy too, I had played FFMQ on an emulator back in 99 but that doesn't really count ...
So I went online to find out more about the series and discovered the were games never released in the west and so.
I found the roms for all the games.
I felt like the hottest shit ever playing FF2,FF3 and FF5.
I was all like:
>"Noone else has played this games in the west, I am the awesomest fucker EVER !!!

[Anonymous No.1607812]

Who here went on fantasy anime? even to this day i havent seen such a useful and original site like it. the webmaster doesnt give a flying fuck about giving away roms, even pre patches translations, and really good individual pages for each game.

i know this sounds like an advertisement but back in 2000 this was pretty much my emulation go to site and helped me emulate other games besides squaresoft stuff. anyone else feel the same?

[Anonymous No.1607940]

>>1607812
I used vimms lair, last i checked it was still around.

[Anonymous No.1608613]

>>1599218
pretty much the same here, bro

[Anonymous No.1608625]

In something like the mid 00s (I'm a bit young, I know), I was really into Namco Museum and wanted to play more arcade games. First was flash remakes of arcade games, then came in browser emulators, then came the wonders of hundreds of free and amazing video games. It was my portal to retro video games in general.
>>1607940
This was my site of choice for a while too.

[Anonymous No.1608643]

The first game I ever emulated was Dragon Ball Z: Super Butouden 2, way back in 1997. IIRC it was on either ZSNES or Snes9x, though most likely it was ZSNES because it didn't have a GUI back then and had to be loaded through the command line.

Speaking of old ZSNES, that butchered sound emulation, man:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zHoeQT4b0Ls

[Anonymous No.1608713]

I was 12.
A friend at school was telling me about how his cousin could play this new Megaman game on his computer that I had never heard about (was referring to M&B , SFC version), also, Pokemon. I thought he was full of shit at first, Nintendo games on a PC? Surely you jest!, but being gullible as I am, I sort of believed it, and I eventually badgered him enough so he would let me borrow one of the games. IIRC, it was a single floppy with the Pokemon Blue ROM on it, it had no emulator so I had no fucking idea how to use it. I forgot how but I think by searching around the internet I slowly started figuring out the whole thing. That Pokemon Blue and Megaman 6 were the first couple of games I remember emulating.

This was all on a shitty Packardbell computer with 486 CPU and like 8MB of RAM, it also had no sound card. Experience varied on the system depending on the emulator, INES and GB were close to 20-30FPS (No$GB, Loopnes), same for Master System (Massage) which even had fucking internal speaker support for the sound (sounded like shit, but I sure thought it was aesome). SNES and Genesis worked but all the games ran at crawling 10-15FPS. I specially remember playing FF4 on this and getting all the way to the fight with the Demon Wall over the course of maybe a month, it blew my fucking mind when I got my hands on a modern computer and I could play things with regular speed AND sound, I reached that same point in the game in less than a week.

Oddly enough, I remember emulating CPS-1 on this same machine (Callus) and it was actually pretty close to full speed, even though it's a fucking arcade and way more powerful than the SNES, that's coding for ya, I guess.

[Anonymous No.1608767]

Is it a coincidence that many people started with GEN1/2 Pokemon?

[Anonymous No.1608813]

>>1601296
Discovering emulation for a system that was still current was one of the greatest feels.
Sure, suddenly having access to an old console's entire library is awesome, but being able to play new games Day 1? (or sometimes even before) without going to the store, paying, or even owning the console itself? Maaaaaaan. Nigga, I was experiencing Digital Distribution before it became a thing and jews fucked it up.

I particularly recall the Metroid Zero Mission ROM being leaked almost a full week before release date, A FULL WEEK. Being part of that small group of people other than developers and the press, who played and finished the game before the rest of the ignoramus populace could even get their hands on it felt soooooooo good.

You don't really see that anymore, by the time PS2 and GC were emulated everyone had already moved on to the next GEN, and these days it seems the focus has shifted more to pirating the actual console than to emulate it.

[Anonymous No.1608817]

I found about it in middle school. A friend of mine showed me a website with zsnes so I could play FF3. I was never worried about the 24 hour thing. My family had one of those descrambler boxes that let you get movie channels and PPV for free, so I knew the entertainment police weren't gonna be breaking down the door for piracy shit.

[Anonymous No.1608876]

This was sevenal years ago and long after I'd discovered emulation but
>playing co-op DKC2 in ZSNES with my best online bro
I was 23 at the time and my first/only gf had just broken up with me that week , and we spent the whole weekend marathoning to get 102% or whatever.

Somehow it was hilarious as fuck, too, which I needed. Really helped me get over feeling sad. I think the reason it was so funny was we decided not to use save states and only talked in the built-in chat function in the emulator. We had also both played the game before so we pretty much knew what we were doing, and since we knew eachother and the game so well it was like we knew what the other was thinking or trying to do when they failed and died.

>tfw he's literally dead now IRL and we will never play DKC2 again

[Anonymous No.1608883]

>>1608767
I--wow
just realized gen 2 was in fact the first game I emulated

[Anonymous No.1608970]

>>1608767
Not really, considering that the Pokemon craze began right as emulation started hitting its stride, and many kids could not afford the game.

[Anonymous No.1609032]

I suppose for me it was back when I was in elementary school (2002-ish?). I had grown up with a SNES and a PSX but sometimes my mother would take the TV and I felt compelled to keep playing.
So, somehow I came across emulation and downloaded ePSXe in Kazaa. No idea how I set it up, but I remember playing Medal of Honor at fullspeed on a 466 Mhz Celeron eMachines desktop (that surprisingly had a 4MB ATI card in it). I don't think I messed with it too much, though. I didn't know much about the other emulators out there or know much of the games I hadn't played so I stuck with what I had.

It wasn't until years later, when I got a PSP from a friend and made a Pandora battery (just cut into that fucker and ripped a pin with a pair of scissors) and hacked it that I started emulating heavily. I blasted through the first two Pokemon gens in gym class. Those are fond memories.

[Anonymous No.1609062]

My brother got into emulation when we were in high school in the late '90s. He had a total joke of a webpage that had various emulation links. We used to emulate NES games with Nesticle on our pathetic 33 MHz pre-Pentium 486 NEC machine.

God, that thing was a piece of shit. After a couple of years, its hard drive started to shut down due to overheating or something at random intervals. We'd be using it, and suddenly the usual whirring noise would die, and then everything would stop working the moment it needed to access the hard drive.

[Anonymous No.1609131]

>>1598584
oh mang
I used to visit this shitty demo website called real one (the ones that have a media player) and got a sonic demo for like 30 fucking minutes, so obviously I wanted more and ..googled it? can't quite remember but that's how i found out
Fucking loved sonic 3

[Anonymous No.1609483]

I don't want to start a thread for this so I'm asking here: Is this list right?:

http://nonmess.retrogames.com/

[Anonymous No.1610197]

Anyone know an emulator which has save files you can transfer between Wii and PC?

[Supra_manx97 !!Ue9pzbLKrt9 No.1610252]

> be like, 9 or something
> in foster care
> older kid playing games on PC
> mother fucking Advance Wars? How the fuck?
> also played mother 3 I think, but I had no idea at the time
> get back home finally a few years later
> played Super Metroid when living with aunt, loved it, not my cartridge so couldn't take it with me.
> remembered Nintendo on PC was possible
> yahoo search "Nintendo games on Computer"
> immediately spend entire allowance on PSx to USB converter upon making ZSNESX work
>"save states"? "rewind"? hell yes!

I then moved to PS1.

[Anonymous No.1610265]

>>1598584
One day I went to my cousin's house and they got a computer. They were playing a shit ton of SNES games like the translated FF5, Tales of Phantasia. My mind was blown.

[Anonymous No.1610271]

>>1598619
Nigga I had the same CD. I played that to death. Megaman 1 - 6, Final Fantasy, Zelda and Metroid. Sometimes I'd just be browsing random games and checking them.

[Anonymous No.1610273]

>>1610197
All of them. Actual save files are interchangeable between every emulator ever. Unless you mean savestates, in which case you're scum

[Anonymous No.1610274]

>>1609131
You either yahoo'd it or altavista'd it if we're thinking about the same point of time in internet history.

[Anonymous No.1610390]

>>1608767
Emulating gen 2 before the international release was incredibly common. There were even magazines with the mouse cursor in the screenshots.

[Anonymous No.1610397]

>>1610252
>be like, 9 or something
>played mother 3

Might want to try a little harder to get that age right on your next post.

[Supra_manx97 !!Ue9pzbLKrt9 No.1610502]

>>1610397
I'm 21. born 1992. I don't remember what it was exactly, but it was some rpg that reminded me of earth bound. There was a train that went through a desert or something and there was a rocket on the ground.

I had JUST seen earthbound for the first time at that foster home. It looked similar to me, what can i say. Not even sure if it was even gba, the kid was kind of a dick, barely even let me watch. I could not into rpgs, so I played GT2, CTR and Super Mario World on my own instead.

[Anonymous No.1611418]

I just remembered something ...
First I discovered emulation, then I spent lots of time looking for roms and different emulators n' stuff. Those searches led me to discover hentai...

>Good times !!

[Anonymous No.1611437]

>still in primary school, can't remember the exact year
>have cool cousin who's good with PCs, everytime she came to our home I would beg her to show me some new stuff or how to handle the first games I cracked and so
>one day, my dad comes back from work
>"son, your cousing gave this to me"
>plain cd rom, but wait, what's written on it?
>150 gameboy advance games
>150 motherfucking games of the fucking console I wanted so much that I could never get because my parents thought handheld where eyes' cancer
>Pokemon, Spiderman 2, Golden Sun, FFTA
>Holy shit I pressed spacebar it went nuts wtf
>... The game speeds up?
>I can speed up Pokemon Emerald?
>S-save states?

For a while I had to ask to my cousing to download the games from me and give them to my father when she could because I was afraid of downloading stuff from the internet, but man I played that shit a fucking lot. The cd was the latest VBA version with some edited config file which translated the emu in italian and automatic fullscreen, plus 150 roms. It required installing for some reason.
I still have it, whenever I emulate GBA games I slap the ROM in the folder with the other 200 games or so by now.

[Anonymous No.1613527]

>>1598584
My family's friend family had pokemon yellow emulated on their tv using masterball cheats and it was the coolest thing to me

[Anonymous No.1614223]

>>1611437
>where instead of were

How do people keep making this mistake? They aren't spelled the same, and are pronounced differently.

[Anonymous No.1614245]

>>1614223
You really need to let it go. Some folks on 4chan will always be illiterate, either for not being an English native, or for being stupid by default.
You are fighting for nothing.

[Anonymous No.1614324]

got a raging retro-boner when I first loaded up some old Commodore 64 games on winvice many years ago

then I became absolutely obsessed with hooking up my pc to my tv to give it a proper 'on the couch' gaming feel, but it was many years before I had a TV with a vga port. to substitute I would even record myself playing a game, then watch the avi from my old TV media player

feels good now being able to play my old childhood games on my 32" lcd tv with a usb controller

[Anonymous No.1614756]

>>1609483
you should look at the emulation general wiki rather than some crazy mamedev ramblings

>>>/vg/emulation

[Anonymous No.1615035]

This thread brought back some good memories.

>2002, 10 years old
>mom had a boyfriend who was really into computers and video games
>one day he sends my mom an email with an attachment, saying to give this to me
>it's a program called "SMYGB"
>start poking around the menus, apparently it has something to do with the Gameboy
>look up some info on it
>it's this thing called an "emulator" which can let you play console/handheld games if you have the rom
>download Super Mario Land 1 and 2 since I couldn't think of anything else and I was really into Mario games at the time
>it really works

Later on I found out that SMYGB could do GBC games, so I downloaded Pokemon Crystal and had a blast with that. Didn't get to try other systems until years later, though, since I almost never got to use the internet back then ("not now, I'm waiting for a friend to call" was the usual excuse).

[Anonymous No.1615272]

I got my Original Xbox modded with a shit-load of emulators for $50. I finally got to try out all those classics everybody online was gushing about.

[Anonymous No.1615290]

>>1599489
Huh? Why would they bother to dub it in whatever your 1st language is (if you'd be kind kind enough to tell us) if they don't have games to shill?

[Anonymous No.1617341]

My uncle had a CD that was said to contain more than 500 games. It was a SNES emulator with a personalized launcher. I remember beating Alladin on it. Good times.

[Anonymous No.1617480]

>>1615290
He probably learned English as a 2nd language

[Anonymous No.1617502]

>>1617341
Shit nigga I have a very similar story. Only it was a CD full of MAME32 games. Goddamn it was fun, especially Metal Slug.

>tfw the CD I got from that friend had probably every game audited but there were a ton of them missing

Trying to play every version of KoF and getting an error was really painful.

[Anonymous No.1619753]

>>1598584
Snes was the first machine i emulated. Living in a PAL territory i really wanted to play all the cool shit we missed out on, like fucking chrono trigger. I remember booting up zsnes in the late 90s and being appalled at how shitty super nes games looked on a pc monitor.

[Anonymous No.1619760]

Age 12 or so. It was on Youtube and in the Pokemon fandom.

I've emulated but for the most part I'm anti-emulation.

[Anonymous No.1619779]

Somewhere between ages 9 and 12. I don't remember how, it just came naturally. It was the mid to late 2000s and I was knee deep in gaming culture; especially Pokemon.

I could never get into emulation though. Using keyboards is awkward and I don't want to buy controllers when I can just play it on the actual console. I only emulate GBA games, and then it's mostly hacks. I need to buy myself some flash carts so I can play them on consoles

I'm the type of girl who would rather spend $130 on a cart then emulate. I'm a collector, I prefer the physical copy.

[Anonymous No.1620003]

How/when did you discover emulation ?
>Early Summer 1998 on my windows 95
>yahoo "download nes games"
>an entire geocities page full of them pops up
>Download Yoshi's cookies
>Double-click Yoshi's cookies
>"it doesnt work! it doesnt woooork!! arrrgh!!"
What were the first games you emulated ?
>Akazukin Cha Cha
>Yoshi's Island
>Somari
Any fond memories or interesting stories you wanna share ?
>i never whined for video games ever again. Friends and relatives were surprised about why i never added them in christmas/birthday lists.
>Discovering Rockman and Forte
>Playing US Pokemon Ruby a couple days before it was supposed to be released