How did you get into emulation?

[chaos master]

Tell us your story of how you got into emulation.

Here's mine:

Last September, I was going through the first moments of high school. My high school, for one reason or another, issues laptops to the students. Well, a few days into the school year, I saw some kids playing Genesis and N64 games on their laptops. "Poppycock!" I thought. I suspected that they might have gotten the games from GameTap or something (emulation leaves GameTap in the dust). So, by and by, I got a closer look at the games and a friend told me to look up "Project 64" if I was interested. Well, I went home and began Googling this mysterious project like the dickens. I eventually procured the emulator, but I was still in need of some games, or ROM files as the emulation community called it. This is where I hit a snag. All the sites I searched in either forced voting, charged money, or just had broken ROMs. After searching the whole night, I scrapped the notion but kept Project 64 as a souvineir of sorts. After that, I began to see more and more kids playing games that brought fond memories of my N64 days and whatnot. Weeks later, I decided to try once more. Luckily, I found a working ROM site (which has now mysteriously disappeared) and got my first working ROM: Goldeneye. Being a wise nut, I found many more ROMs and I figured out much more about emulation than most of the people in my school all by myself. Soon after, I found CoolROM and picked up some games, but then moved on to the next site. Later, I saw that they had set up a forum, so I decided to set up my base of operations there. And so, my knowledge of the subject and ROM collection has increased steadily since then.

[Mjshl2]

I was about 13 and I had a Pentium 2. I believe thats what was good at that time. I have always played console, I had heard about Emulation from my Dad who showed me Nes, Snes, Genesis, Game Gear, Gameboy Color(which was all that was really emulated at the time). I followed the scene from there and Ive been messing with the stuff ever since. Every day I would neglect my Schoolwork and just mess with Emulation.

[Iconoclast]

I was in Eighth Grade, which I just finished. In my third period, Introduction to Technology and Engineering, I had a classmate I've known since Seventh Grade, Kai Deering. I saw him play these full screen games during class. I asked him about it. He only told me that you had to download them from somewhere. I learned more as I overheard him talking about emulating SNES, a console. I asked him if he had a way to play Nintendo 64 games on your PC, and he said Yes. He showed me the Nemu64 emulator. I take it he got all this from his older brother, who even had his own website. He showed me Super Mario 64, and I was awed. He also showed me Sega Genesis Sonic games and SNES, and I am like, "Whatever." I didn't care about those. I just wanted to take Nemu64 and those ROMs home with me on that USB disk that I lost at the end of the year. I started playing it on my PC; I got DirectX 8 errors and stuff. Even after installing DirectX 9, it acted like I didn't do a thing. I download Project64 and used the OpenGL rendering engine instead of DirectX, and I was able to emulate at a VERY slow speed, not seeing any graphics at all. I don't think I even had a GFX card. I got impatient with my mom, and after months, I got me the new PC that I have now. I told Kai about Project64; he just said he thinks there were a lot of lies about Project64. But I did soon realize that Nemu64 could do things that Project64 couldn't, though no where near vice versa.

To skip a lot of crap, I learned very much about Nintendo 64 emulation using my autistism learning disability against disability, and somehow, in an unspeakable way, learned very much about emulating the N64. What can I say? I experimented with everything, almost every plugin, every Windows emulator for N64, every plugin option and feature, and just beat the hell out of mastering N64 emulation. However, I suck at just about all the other consoles. That's what we have Mjshl2, Kameo, and pizzaman for. But I have experience a little in emulating the NES using FCE Ultra.

[Crazed Dragon]

it was a few years back when i frist heard of emulator from a friend. he told me how he was playing snes games on his computer. dam how i wish at the time i could too,but i was living at my moms and her computer was so dam old and slow there would be no chance of playing any thing let alone even being capeabul of downloading it...about a 2 weeks ago now(i hag been living with my dad for quiet awhile now) my dad got us internet. after i set my self up on the computer i decided to to see if i could find any emulators to my surprize i found some right away. i didn't know there were so many different kind of emulators. once i tried a few snes emulators and got the one i wanted i started looking for some games i used to play the frist one being final fantasy 3 for snes. everywhere i checked was ether some confusing vote for me site or a forum that had no helpful information...that is till this one forum mentioned Coolrom.com i wnet there and right away i found the game i was looking for and got some other old favs too. i kept coming back to this site looking to see what they had then i notice the forum. i check it out. the people on in the forum knew so much(still do) more than me on gaming and i found them really funny. i had never joined a forum before so i was new to the whole idea. its been 6 days sence then and know i ve posted alot of things and plan to post much,much more...

[Iconoclast]

Maybe we should post, in this thread, who's the user to talk to for emulating individual consoles. For example, I should handle most N64 emulation questions and pizzaman should handle most PS2 emulation questions. Everyone can participate in helping for a particular console if they want, though.

[Mjshl2]

Im pretty good with most everything so whatever works for me;)
Saturn, Sega CD/32X, and Dreamcast I know quite a bit about.

[Iconoclast]

OK, and Remorse is a PC expert. Who is now gone. Double///A\\\Ron, gone. A good substitute would be DarthBrady; he's the master of the PC on these forums. Not that the PC can be emulated, but still.

Pizzaman, are you all PS2 or something else?

[Iconoclast]

Im pretty good with most everything so whatever works for me;)
Saturn, Sega CD/32X, and Dreamcast I know quite a bit about.That's right. I see you're a little bit of this and a little bit of that. What they call, equilibrium, on console expertise as moderator of Console Gaming/Emulation.

And chaos master, I noticed that you like to help, too. You have emulators for N64, Sega Genesis, yadayada...what do you think you're best at configuring and stuff?

[chaos master]

That's right. I see you're a little bit of this and a little bit of that. What they call, equilibrium, on console expertise as moderator of Console Gaming/Emulation.

And chaos master, I noticed that you like to help, too. You have emulators for N64, Sega Genesis, yadayada...what do you think you're best at configuring and stuff?
I never really configured stuff, but maybe put me in Genesis?

[Kurt]

I'm pretty inept at everything except Dreamcast, PSX, MAME/NeoGeo/Kawaks/CPS1+2, etc, blah blah.... I'm definitely better (and more interested in) arcade emulation, though.

Anyway, how I found Coolrom: I found out about MAME in it's early stages in late 2000. Really. I, showing the advanced mental capacity I am known for, promptly forgot about it for five years until 2005, when I inserted an unmarked disc and MAME popped up, with a couple games that didn't work. Anyway, my interest in arcade emulation was renewed, so I searched Google for a while, promptly coming across emuparadise.org, which, of course, doesn't have anything to do with MAME. So anyway, I took a look at the links at the left side of the screen and found CoolRom. I bookmarked it and immediately forgot about it until sometime this year, when I joined the forums.

Your school issues LAPTOPS, cm? I had to make do with public school desktops, which are incredibly inept.

[Crazed Dragon]

Your school issues LAPTOPS, cm? I had to make do with public school desktops, which are incredibly inept.i know of a few alternit schools that give laptops...lucky *******z
regular school comp suck mayjor ***...oops went off topic sorry

[DarthBrady]

OK, and Remorse is a PC expert. Who is now gone. Double///A\\\Ron, gone. A good substitute would be DarthBrady; he's the master of the PC on these forums. Not that the PC can be emulated, but still.

Pizzaman, are you all PS2 or something else?

Why thank you for the comment, I'm flattered. And believe it or not, yes, The PC can be emulated. Its emulated all the time, you may do it and not even realize it. Hell, DosBox is a DOS-PC emulator, because it emulates unexisting hardware, as well as emulating the Dos Operating system.
There are Mac emulators for PC, PC emulators for Mac, If you have Win XP Pro you can get Microsoft Virtual Machine Software, And Emulate your PC to just about anything you want.


And to answer the topic of the Thread, How I got into Emulation.

It was when the Back around 1996, when they started making "Nesticle" one of the first free NES emulators. It didnt even come out for like a year later. But when it did, I went Emulator Crazy, And I've been playing with them every since then. Back then, it was too new for anyhting really bad to happen to you for distributing ROMs and stuff, many people thought it was legal, because most of the emulators costed money to get; people just assumed it was legal being naive. I was just starting to build PCs from scrap parts, and started selling them for top dollar, because I would throw a video card in one, and a couple fullsets of ROMs, and people ate it up like candy. But that didnt last...
Once all the emus went free and open source, I only got business setting up the Emulators for the many people who could not do it by themselves. Not much money in it, but I never really cared about a profit, by then I just had fun spreading the Joy of emulation.
I like to think of myself as like a former Emu pirate, turned into a sort of "Volunteer Johhny Appleseed of Emulation" (arent we all?). Seeing the look on someonea face when they get to play NES or MAME on their PC or Dreamcast for the first time, seems far more gratifying to me nowadays.
I only hope it gets better and better over time, as it has been so far. :)

[chaos master]

Why thank you for the comment, I'm flattered. And believe it or not, yes, The PC can be emulated. Its emulated all the time, you may do it and not even realize it. Hell, DosBox is a DOS-PC emulator, because it emulates unexisting hardware, as well as emulating the Dos Operating system.
There are Mac emulators for PC, PC emulators for Mac, If you have Win XP Pro you can get Microsoft Virtual Machine Software, And Emulate your PC to just about anything you want.
That's exactly what I told him!

[pizzaman]

Pizzaman, are you all PS2 or something else?
I don't really know exactally what you mean. If you mean that I only use PS2 emus, then your way wrong. I mess around with NES, SNES, GameBoy, GameBoy Color, GameBoy Advanced, N64, Some Sega, PSX, and PS2 emulation.

But to how I came here is a different story. I got Internet for the first time in December 2005. First the only thing I did was play RuneScape, then I got bored and decided to join a forum my friend made up. I like it, but it soon got boring too, so I went around joining other forums, and eventually came across a couple of N64 ROMs. I was so happy it's not even hilarious. I love those older systems, because they bring back memories of when I was little. Anyway a couple of months ago, I looked around and found some nice ROM sites, like ROMhustler, CoolROM, and so on. And that's pretty much it.

[DarkWizard_PitchBlackX]

Same here.

[cherko]

It's not an interesting story... I heard the older FF games for snes were good, some1 told me about emulation, and I've been playing snes, nes and gba ever since. (I'd probably play n64 too if the roms weren't so damned big)

[DarkWizard_PitchBlackX]

Well it was about 2 years ago... I was googeling a picture of spidey, and when I clicked on it I was sent to a site where the pictures would move! I wondered aobut this...I thought... I should learn how to make these. So I spent about a year looking up how... But then I learned about sprite sheets... It took me another year to learn how to rip sprites. And that's how I got into roms. Animated Gifs.

[savking]

my barber told me about emulators and i googled it, the 1st emu i gt was gens which is great one to start with because theres nothing to it

[RossF]

I was desperate to get my Sega Megadrive back to play Sonic again (especially Sonic 3 & Knuckles) and my mate told me that you can get emulators on the internet to play Sonic 3 and Knuckles, etc. So that is what I did :D

[DarkWizard_PitchBlackX]

I got all of my friends into emulation. And I revived this thread.

[dukenukem155]

Funny story how i started, I heard from my bro that i could play console games so what i did was dl the rom thinking thats all i needed so i looked around and found a emulator and ran it, 1st game i ever tried was Double Dragon 2 for Nes, I wanted to try other games then found emulator for other consols and search for multible sites that has them, then i found this site a year ago :p

[Elric]

A friend of mine told me about Emu's and Translation patches and that was it.
A golden oportunity to play a lot of the SNES RPG's I missed out on because they were never brought over to the U.S.

[DarkWizard_PitchBlackX]

A friend of mine told me about Emu's and Translation patches and that was it.
A golden oportunity to play a lot of the SNES RPG's I missed out on because they were never brought over to the U.S.
That's a great story... I mean it...