Find out about Emulators?

[JacobZu7zu7]

This is a question for all who reply,

 

Around what year did you find out about Emulators?

Add any story if you wanna'.

 

It took me about 2002 to realize what they even were,

 

Sad cause I tried to download a game online and that was in 2000.

So that's about 2 years being Emulatorless....

[oesii]

I think it was 1998, knowledge of MAME and a cable modem were all I needed to get into the swing of things. Once you've played around configuring one or two emulators the rest of them are easy.

 

I've tried several dozens of consoles and computers through emulation, many of the sites I used to read five years ago are still around, www.zophar.net, www.retrogames.com, and www.emuviews.com . Although none of them are as good as they used to be because a lot of the original developers have burned out and left.

[Nukey Shay]

I was trying out this amazing thing called America Online (version 1.5 or 2). Yes, I learned the hard way. Anyway, I was trying to find out more about some Nes games that I had bought from the local video store. I'm thinking that it was the summer of 1998...not sure about that. Came across something called "Roms" and did a search on them. Tried out Nesticle and it ran without a hitch Looked around for other systems much the same way (including Atari roms to end up here...or at least the Nexus). Within a couple weeks, I had downloaded Nesticle, Genecyst, No$gmb, Zsnes, and yes, Z26! Mecca!! With all of the horror stories about Mame, it was a few months until I worked up the nerve (and the patience for downloading large files) to try it. But it too ran right out of the box (though slowly on my 486). I've known my way around MS-Dos since 1989, so that helped...I guess. Used Sparcade for awhile until I bought a Celeron.

[liquid_sky]

proally around 1997/early 1998 too when i heard about nesticle.. downloaded it on my horribly antiquated pentium-120 system.. but it worked good eenough

[NE146]

It started way back in the mid 90's when I was looking for old games (and any info about them) online... And of course that led to the REMAKES of games (like Kurt Dekkers). Eventually I found out the Colecovision was emu'd and that freaked me out and was probably the first console emu I tried. These were the days before mame. But once the NES was emu'd.. the whole thing broke loose like a flood and then emu's were everywhere.

 

So I guess I'm talking 1996 or so?

[LDA#$AF]

I bought a pocket PC in 2002 and learned that there were emulators built for it. It took me a minute to realize that a Pocket PC is a lot more powerful than even the big 8-bit computers and could certainly run an emulator.

 

Emulation to me was always in the context of terminal emulation before that.

[Nukey Shay]

That was my first impression of the word as well. Since I'd grown up during the days of Mimic and 2600 adapters, it at first struck me as some kind of hardware that allowed the PC to play actual Nes CARTS. That thought lasted about 5 minutes or so when I discovered that the mysterious files called "roms" contained the entire games.

[BeerGnome]

I fell into MAME first.. around 98 or so.

its been downhill ever since.

 

My first one was mame32, but I soon slipped back into DOS becouse it seemed to operate better.

I just downloaded my first copy of the new winmame, its gotten a lot better, as has my computer and its memmory handaling, not to mention.. everything thru the Arcade@home GUI has just gone to shit for some reason, back to command line loading.

 

once I have more space I'm going to build a MAME machine.. I'm thinking cocktail layout and build that fancy ass Arcade contoller thingy into it.

[Sharky]

Good question...

 

I found out about emulators late in 2001.

I got hold of PC64 and was overwelmed to actually play my old childhood favourites on my own PC.

 

Later on I found myself emulating Atari Lynx and then the Atari 800 followed on as Atariwinplus came out.

 

Then I thought I could try and get more advanced and started using MAME.

 

Then I dared and emulated the Amiga and Atari ST soon after.

 

Today I have over 35 emulators emulating most of the popular machines of the 70s, 80s and 90s with over 6800 games and building...

[KAZ]

I'll put my comment in...

 

Back in college, my friend told me about some guy that had all the Nintendo games right on his computer. I was absolutely amazed, and thought this guy must be some sort of computer hacker/genius...and with a great computer or something.

 

This is back in like 1993, or first year of college.

 

I was heavy into "mudding" back then. Especially on this place called "The Great Hunt".

 

This is how I spent most of my time with computers, until around 1998 or a year out of college. I found out about Mame, and I just thought it was unbelievable to be able to play games for free.

 

When I finally got my own computer in like 2000, I went on a spree finding every emulator I could. I found neat stuff like Super Nintendo spcs, which are the actual music!

 

Then I burned some neat disks and decorated them. One, for example, is my Nintendo disk. I decorated it with images from Nes.

 

 

Last but not least, I recently got a super quick computer...

2.5 ghz, 512 MB ram, 80GB hard disk.

 

Being this computer is about a trillion times faster than my old 400 mhz gateway, I can now play Street Fighter, Mortal Kombat, and even Nemu's N64 Super Mario 64!!

 

I recently ordered a playstation adapter that allows to hook them into my pc's usb ports!

 

 

Now I've picked up MESS again, and I've got all of my console emus in one place. It floored me when I discovered that NES on MESS doesn't need a bios rom??!

 

 

The drawback is that I no longer can use z26, it plays crazy choppy and slow on this XP. Stella just doesn't do it for me, it seems to "hiccup" every now and then, and the sound crackles sometimes. Sorta irritating.

 

MESS better hurry up and fix their 2600!