Often enough we do first console you had/played on/put real time into, first gaming experience of a given genre and get some interesting answers depending upon age of the person in question, circumstances and more besides. If we have done emulators then it has not been for a while and thus here we are.
Technical firsts in emulation get debated to this day ("porting" dynamic translation efforts between the commodore 64 and things using similar chips, which is most things, being where that usually ends up) and https://www.vice.com/en/article/9a4...mbitious-emulator-that-redefined-retro-gaming (who knew Vice could do something interesting) is about when it got real for most (read those with high end computer and internet talking) people.
Do try to make it an emulator in the sense that most here would think of it in that you pick and choose what you want to play or have to construct it from ROMs rather than "well technically a NES emulator was written for this PS1 game".
In my case... probably 1998 or 1999 my friends and I would go to a computer fayre in a village near one of their houses. One of them would sell CDs including bundles of ROMs (and hacker compilations but that is a different discussion).
To that end Genecyst, a megadrive/genesis emulator, is the emulator that forms my earliest memories of such things.
Even got a little box to turn VGA signals into RF to play it on TV (main way to have a large screen at the time) from the computer fayre a few months later, still have it somewhere around here as well.
Several months later a friend would get the SNES equivalent one but I never really got into that and while I shared with all then others were a bit precious about copy-paste (whole £5 or maybe even £7 I think it was that cost) so it never spread as far in the group, he might however consider that his formative one. The internet was a thing but it was also something you either booked in the library, went to the town library during the weekend, later begged parents to use (cost on your phone bill in the UK) and there was even a kid in school whose dad worked for a big company and consequently paid for an ISDN connection (basically two lines stapled together to double the speed). To that end new ROMs were not a common occurrence at all and we mostly played the several hundred bundled with it (I was slightly upset to find Crusader of Centy was the same game/different region as Soleil), occasionally leading to a bit of what is dubbed pirate syndrome around here but with Streets of Rage 1,2 and 3 ever the option that was largely mitigated.
Today I know what all those fancy options do but back then I might have clicked on them to see (that is the sort of thing you did pre internet). Load ROM, change region, savestates to the point of hammering keys and keeping a bunch in rotation... all good. No cheats though beyond what any menus might have provided (no real intro/cracktro scene on the megadrive unlike the Amiga) which is perhaps an odd one as we did have things for the megadrive, N64 and PS1.
Sourcing ROMs would more likely come in earnest in during the Amiga phase that followed soon after (we all various played Amigas which meant cracktros and copied games were the default there, plus PC) as we could not figure out how to dump games to PC (click these three banners and then click download, naturally we deleted it after the 24 hours).
Game revolution (the main gaming site yahoo used, google was not yet the dominant search engine) even had an emulation section https://web.archive.org/web/2000101...revolution.com/download/emulator/emulator.htm so that was where I learned a lot more, though that was a year or two later.
However I am both old and not old enough/rich enough to have had a computer during the earliest days so maybe you came in during the early N64 instead, maybe the nesticle stuff linked at the start is stuff you were there for, maybe it is many years later. Share your experiences.
Technical firsts in emulation get debated to this day ("porting" dynamic translation efforts between the commodore 64 and things using similar chips, which is most things, being where that usually ends up) and https://www.vice.com/en/article/9a4...mbitious-emulator-that-redefined-retro-gaming (who knew Vice could do something interesting) is about when it got real for most (read those with high end computer and internet talking) people.
Do try to make it an emulator in the sense that most here would think of it in that you pick and choose what you want to play or have to construct it from ROMs rather than "well technically a NES emulator was written for this PS1 game".
In my case... probably 1998 or 1999 my friends and I would go to a computer fayre in a village near one of their houses. One of them would sell CDs including bundles of ROMs (and hacker compilations but that is a different discussion).
To that end Genecyst, a megadrive/genesis emulator, is the emulator that forms my earliest memories of such things.
Even got a little box to turn VGA signals into RF to play it on TV (main way to have a large screen at the time) from the computer fayre a few months later, still have it somewhere around here as well.
Several months later a friend would get the SNES equivalent one but I never really got into that and while I shared with all then others were a bit precious about copy-paste (whole £5 or maybe even £7 I think it was that cost) so it never spread as far in the group, he might however consider that his formative one. The internet was a thing but it was also something you either booked in the library, went to the town library during the weekend, later begged parents to use (cost on your phone bill in the UK) and there was even a kid in school whose dad worked for a big company and consequently paid for an ISDN connection (basically two lines stapled together to double the speed). To that end new ROMs were not a common occurrence at all and we mostly played the several hundred bundled with it (I was slightly upset to find Crusader of Centy was the same game/different region as Soleil), occasionally leading to a bit of what is dubbed pirate syndrome around here but with Streets of Rage 1,2 and 3 ever the option that was largely mitigated.
Today I know what all those fancy options do but back then I might have clicked on them to see (that is the sort of thing you did pre internet). Load ROM, change region, savestates to the point of hammering keys and keeping a bunch in rotation... all good. No cheats though beyond what any menus might have provided (no real intro/cracktro scene on the megadrive unlike the Amiga) which is perhaps an odd one as we did have things for the megadrive, N64 and PS1.
Sourcing ROMs would more likely come in earnest in during the Amiga phase that followed soon after (we all various played Amigas which meant cracktros and copied games were the default there, plus PC) as we could not figure out how to dump games to PC (click these three banners and then click download, naturally we deleted it after the 24 hours).
Game revolution (the main gaming site yahoo used, google was not yet the dominant search engine) even had an emulation section https://web.archive.org/web/2000101...revolution.com/download/emulator/emulator.htm so that was where I learned a lot more, though that was a year or two later.
However I am both old and not old enough/rich enough to have had a computer during the earliest days so maybe you came in during the early N64 instead, maybe the nesticle stuff linked at the start is stuff you were there for, maybe it is many years later. Share your experiences.
Maybe I should have asked experienced users how to do it.
