What was your first emulation experience?

[TR0N]

Early 2000's mame.

[cr8zykuban0]

mine was with a disc that my friend made for me . it had a lot of arcade shmups like rtype leo, battle garegga, grind stormer, espgaluga, ketsui, etc. I play it with a usb snes pad and my experiences is good with the disc. sadly lots od neo geo and genesis games on the disc dont work but with the few games I can play, its a lot of fun

[ClodBuster]

That must have been Nesticle in the early 2000's. That was the first time I realised how many crap games there were on the NES, long before the Angry Video Game Nerd began talking about that. However, Nesticle started my interest for Mega Man, so I bought the NES games later on, some as cartridges and the rest with the classic Mega Man collection for the PS2.

I was fascinated how good Nesticle ran on my old Pentium I computer. I was not fascinated by how some games like Castlevania III were unplayable due to graphics glitching.


Today, I use emulators mainly along with original cartridges plugged into the Retrode, as well as for some PCE CD games, until my Duo gets fixed again.

[NightWolve]

I think because I met this group called RIGG being run by RPGFan's Stephen Harris (AKA Tenchi-no-ryu) which had CD BIN/CUE rips of the most popular PCE/TG-16 games, my first emulator use was probably MagicEngine. I learned a lot from the group and then the Whirlpool which housed all the fan translation patches. Since SNES was dealt with so much, I went through the RIGG library that Tenchi gave me access to in order to find a game that I could translate, give attention to PCE, and that's what led to the Xak III project.

I remember NESticle too. Heh, now that's how you wrote an emulator! I think before MAME, I found Callus which played the Capcom ROMs like SFII Turbo etc. Used to play with that for quite a bit. I remember thinking it so cool that I got to speak with the ZSNES emulator author, we put them up as superstars for a while back then.

[graffias79]

The first emulator I ever used was AmiMasterGear for the Amiga.  It ran pretty well!

[esteban]

OK, the next step in this is probably going to be boring, but I used a MICROSOFT SIDEWINDER (back when USB was NEW!) pad to play emulated games on the computer.  It replaced my older pad that was a 15? Pin serial port connector)

I know a lot of folks will admit to using the keyboard, too. I tried playing lots of games with the keyboard.

I also had a BARBIE controller w/ 15-pin serial connector. It was packaged with an awesome  "PlayStation Barbie" doll that had a tiny PS1 that Barbie carried in a cute pink briefcase.

[BlueBMW]

I always used one of these bad boys...

[MrFulci]

That was my, "Commander Keen" bad boy. I think it came as a pack-in, or the other way around.

[MrFulci]

It also rocked, "XARGON"!

modifying this, to not deal with wrath of... Nekro.

Nesticle and IHOR was my rom fun time, years ago.

gravis game pad and Keen+jackrabbit+Xargon was legit.

[cjameslv]

OK, the next step in this is probably going to be boring, but I used a MICROSOFT SIDEWINDER (back when USB was NEW!) pad to play emulated games on the computer.  It replaced my older pad that was a 15? Pin serial port connector)

I know a lot of folks will admit to using the keyboard, too. I tried playing lots of games with the keyboard.

I also had a BARBIE controller w/ 15-pin serial connector. It was packaged with an awesome  "PlayStation Barbie" doll that had a tiny PS1 that Barbie carried in a cute pink briefcase.

I had that but ended up loving the gravis exterminator. It was game port connector but had a usb adapter with it and it was the best controller for pc by far! I had this for a long time and don't remember what happened to, must have lost it moving sometime...

[SephirothTNH]

I know a lot of folks will admit to using the keyboard, too. I tried playing lots of games with the keyboard.

I initially used the keyboard.  And got quite good at using the numpad with just one hand.  My desire to have a controller though is what lead me to start doing modding and stuff.  I took the controller ports off of a broken playstation and wired it to a printer port connector and used the original non dual shock playstation controllers. 

I used way to thick of wire on it though so it looked ridiculous.  When I go visit my parents for the holidays I'm going to see if I can find it and take a pic.  It is seriously ridiculous.

[lukester]

While I had the old Mario games on my GBA, I never had straight emulated games...

Though, I got a Bomberman collection disc from Five Below when I was 7 years old. My first exposure to the Turbografx. Almost beat Bomberman 93, but didn't clear it till I was 12 or so.

Later, I downloaded a Genesis emulator, and only got 2 games. One was Bomberman 94 (Mega Bomberman).

I discovered the Virtual Console years later on the Wii, and that's how I got interested in retro games.

[Digi.k]

I always used one of these bad boys...

I used to own that gravis game pad and I also at some point fell in love with the gravis utrasound sound card.

I think MAME was my first taste in emulation just for Mr DO!

[jeffhlewis]

My first emulator experience was an old Windows Famicom emulator called PasoFami...it was so insanely primitive and was buggy as shit - barely played anything. But I remember having my mind blown when Super Mario Bros. fired up for the first time.

I played a ton of Nesticle, Genecyst and Callus (CPS-1) when those came out. Played early MAME a ton, too back when it was DOS-only.

That gravis gamepad sucked ass - but back then that was all there really was, haha. The sidewinder was a bit better, though still not great.

[BlueBMW]

Real men use Gameport joysticks