What was your gaming history?

[Exhuminator]

Then ZSNES came out, and it was a revelation. Nesticle, then even better emulators for NES.

ZSNES was the first SNES emulator I saw in action. The first two games I tried with it were FF5 and Demon's Crest, both worked, minus transparencies. I spent a lot of time with NESticle during 1997 and 1998. Also Genecyst. I also really enjoyed NO$GMB, used it to play Link's Awakening back when I was too broke to even think of affording the game.

Only issue was back in those days, how hard hentai and warez co-existed with rom sites. lol, tricky stuff. Maybe that's why I'm a pervert now.

I was part of the problem. The very first website I ever made was a hentai gallery back in late 1996. My own ISP took it down!

[Xeogred]

I bet I saw your gallery. You've shaped one side of my entire life Exhum...

Man, you guys are ringing some bells with ZSNES not doing transparencies right originally. That sounds so familiar. I was a bit younger and had no income to spend, so emulation was actually how I first discovered most of the JRPG greats like Chrono Trigger, Secret of Mana, Final Fantasy VI, etc. Nesticle is definitely the name I remember for the NES emulating haha.

I tried to stay loyal to ZSNES until the end. I think it's still DOS based and everything. It wasn't until just a few years ago when I finally admitted that snes9x is the superior option. I guess others argue for bsnes being the most accurate, but... my loyalty is with snes9x now.

[marlowe221]

I bet I saw your gallery. You've shaped one side of my entire life Exhum...

Man, you guys are ringing some bells with ZSNES not doing transparencies right originally. That sounds so familiar. I was a bit younger and had no income to spend, so emulation was actually how I first discovered most of the JRPG greats like Chrono Trigger, Secret of Mana, Final Fantasy VI, etc. Nesticle is definitely the name I remember for the NES emulating haha.

I tried to stay loyal to ZSNES until the end. I think it's still DOS based and everything. It wasn't until just a few years ago when I finally admitted that snes9x is the superior option. I guess others argue for bsnes being the most accurate, but... my loyalty is with snes9x now.

HIGAN (formerly bsnes) is certainly more accurate, but snes9X is often far more practical and is easier to use.

[Exhuminator]

I respect byuu for what he did with HIGANE/bsnes. But it's rather impractical on multiple levels, despite its extreme accuracy. So, SNES9X + a Buffalo SNES pad is my emulator of choice. I used to be a ZSNES diehard, but over time SNES9X proved itself superior.

[AznKhmerBoi]

In bold are my favorite console.

1989 - NES (Played for the first time in Cambodia)
1993 - SNES (Flea Market with my dad got SNES with Street Fighter 2 turbo)
(Still remember just reading the manual non stop).
1995 - PS1 (Brother and I saved up our lunch money (I get 8$ a week for lunch).
1996 - N64 (Got the big N for my Bday from my rents)
1999 - Dreamcast (younger brother received it for his Bday. (we share).
2001 - PS2 (Got it as a bday gift (the red box ps2/Grand Tourismo)
(Spent my summer break playing just GT)
2001 - Gamecube (younger brother bday) (again we share)
2002 - Xbox (2nd time that i bought a sys with my own money)
2007 - PS3 (yes i paid the ridiculous price of 600$)
2007 - Xbox360 (bought from Gamestop in Pittsburgh, PA)
2013 - PS4 (Didnt reserver a copy so i ended up paying 100$ more than retail)
2016 - Xbox1 (bought off craiglist, enjoyed it for about 4 months and now gave it away)

[Jmustang1968]

86/87: figured out how to hook up my dads 2600 on a small b&w tv in my room. Played Asteroids a bit. Also played some homemade floppy games from a friend of my grandpas on an Apple IIC
88/89: NES for Xmas
90 or 91: Genesis
92: Sister got a SNES that I would "borrow"
93: Sega CD
94: PC - When I really started getting into PC gaming, have continually PC gamed since
96: N64 for Christmas
98: Finally got a PS1 after kicking myself for getting a 64 instead
00: PS2
03: Xbox
05: 360 release
06: DS Lite (My first handheld)
07: Finally picked up a PS3
12: Wii U
13: PS4
16: Xbox1

[Sarge]

Yeah, to say they were intertwined was an understatement. I had to find solid sites. You'd be looking everywhere for a dump (not so easy back then!), and come across porn pop-up city. Crap! Abort, abort! (And hope no one was looking!)

[Tanooki]

Emulation history would be crazy to breakdown, I was probably there from the start myself haha. And yeah, had a few computer classes in middle/high school where I could easily get the work done in 5-10 minutes, and just played roms the rest of the time.

Only issue was back in those days, how hard hentai and warez co-existed with rom sites. lol, tricky stuff. Maybe that's why I'm a pervert now.

To your second point first, no doubt.

On the other, I couldn't even remember it all. Truth is really my first experience goes back to right to 1995 before I got online via college in June that year. On a local BBS I found the original iNES, VGB Win (both warez'd of course), and that SNES cock tease called VSMC. Anyone remember that? The NES one came with a smattering of a few early MMC1 if that releases as it was so early on. Gameboy was oddly bundled with the emulator in a zip file that at 56k probably took me an hour to download or more on dialup and it had probably 50 GB games in it and it was insane. I didn't care that Marat then (and still oddly now if you find it) can't program an audio core for sh-t in the least bit...I got to experience stuff I only read about in Nintendo Power. VSMC was mind blowing though, damn it took a long time to download 512kb and 1MB sized SNES files on dialup but the fact they had it running basic stuff silent was fun. Then when that teaser VSMC96 popped up with mode7 demo going on, and then really early god awful screechy SNES audio in FF2 it was nuts. Game didn't run, but the title and intro did through to the end.

I could write heaps of stuff in both the emulation end how I learned a lot from it, helped out some emulation authors (even with shady stuff as I used to have access to old dev docs for the GBC among others), and that I was also part of a NES rom hacking(making headers) and dumping group, ran one for a time too until it merged with Vertigo 2099 if anyone recalls that one. Checkered past as you can guess.

[Xeogred]

My family computer growing up was so bad that Seiken Densetsu 3 lagged.

[Sarge]

I was going to mention VSMC. Definitely remember that.

My computer wasn't actually fast enough to run ZSNES with transparencies at 60 FPS. Most games would drop into the 15-20 range. Honestly, I played a lot of RPGs, so I cared, but not enough to not play!

KGen was also one of my favorites. I moved away from Genecyst because the sound engine in KGen was better, and it ran beautifully on my Pentium 166 MHz.

Heck, I wish I could recreate my whole setup. I used a really awesome DOS shell/ROM launcher called Universal ROM Launcher (URL). You could set it up to run specific command lines, use PKUNZIP to unzip your ROMs to a temp directory and then run (most emulators didn't support ZIP files then!), and had a really cool smooth-scrolling text viewer. Good times, and I had pretty much every emulator worth using set up with the launcher.