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Early Days of Emulation

JCK75

Member
I found my old CD cases in my Ex wifes house in grabbing more of my stuff
Was looking through it and found this..
back when you paid money to emulated games.. almost tempted to install it and see if it still works.

k01o7psd0ELUk10C.jpg
 
I remember playing Megaman X3 back in 2001 on PC via ZSNES. That was....fun haha. Same with Rockman and Bass.

Same with Romancing SaGa 3, Bahamut Lagoon and Star Ocean. Playing the Super Famicom imports was so much fun and a fucking tragedy because they never got a Western Release.

Bahamut Lagoon is officially 30 years old and NEVER got a Western release. Yet, Live a Live got a remake 2 years ago, in which the original came out in 1994. Star Ocean First Departure was a remake made in the style of Star Ocean 2, though I'd love the OG version to get an official Western port.
 
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When I was a broke high school student I would play translated versions of Super Famicom JRPGs that never came over on my PC with ZSNES.

- Star Ocean
- Tales of Phantasia
- Bahamut Lagoon
- Seiken Densetsu 3 (Trials of Mana)
- Final Fantasy V
- Romancing SaGa 3
- Treasure of the Rudras

It was a great time to be alive.
 
Anyone remember Bleemcast?

Imagine that kinda shit today, lol.

Insert an emulation disc in your PS5 then take it out and insert an Xbox 360 disc to emulate.
 
Early?

I remember emulation in the mid 90's struggling to get good performance out of a Colecovision Emulator. You then had nes, snes and Genesis and Mame only ran older titles. It was pretty exciting and they would run on your office PC and ROMs were easy to find.
 
Man, in 2001 High School, I made it a mission to install Marvel vs Capcom on every Computer at the school I touched. One morning on the intercom, they brought up not playing games on the computers LOL. The shit you could get away with back them. I would see other students playing the shit. Computer class became an Arcade!!!
 
Man, in 2001 High School, I made it a mission to install Marvel vs Capcom on every Computer at the school I touched. One morning on the intercom, they brought up not playing games on the computers LOL. The shit you could get away with back them. I would see other students playing the shit. Computer class became an Arcade!!!

As a computer tech in a high school I admire the effort.. the admins were always trying to get me to block Halo in the labs but I'd just find out where they kept the source and I'd just join them.
 
It absolutely blew my mind when I first saw Super Mario Bros. running on my friend's PC. I couldn't believe it.

We used the save states feature to finally beat Mike Tyson's Punch-Out and The Legend of Zelda lol
 
I'm a Breath of Fire fan because it was at the top of the ROM list in ZSNES I had when I was 7.

I taught my middle school about emulators. I haven't been that cool since.
 
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Emulation felt incredible in its early days. Nesticle, Genecyst, ZSNES, UltraHLE...inaccurate with lots of frame skipping, sure, but it was crazy in retrospect how soon you could play this stuff after the real consoles were released. Now we're lucky if we can reasonably emulate stuff that's 15 years old.
 
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When I was a broke high school student I would play translated versions of Super Famicom JRPGs that never came over on my PC with ZSNES.

- Star Ocean
- Tales of Phantasia
- Bahamut Lagoon
- Seiken Densetsu 3 (Trials of Mana)
- Final Fantasy V
- Romancing SaGa 3
- Treasure of the Rudras

It was a great time to be alive.

Fan translations have had their share of amazing moments too, lol.


RT6HWxq9SH7KYMO6.png
 
I remember being in grade 6 which was around 98 and 99 and my friend was saying that sega genesis and Super Nintendo games could be played on PC and I had KGEN and juggled between Zsnes and SNES9x and nearly lost my mind. Especially with Super Nintendo emulation because I always wanted one even though my parents got me a Sega Genese for Christmas in 93. I remember when those emulators had a hard time running donkey Kong country and Street Fighter Alpha 2 couldn't run on those emulators until the 2000s.
 
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When I was a broke high school student I would play translated versions of Super Famicom JRPGs that never came over on my PC with ZSNES.

- Star Ocean
- Tales of Phantasia
- Bahamut Lagoon
- Seiken Densetsu 3 (Trials of Mana)
- Final Fantasy V
- Romancing SaGa 3
- Treasure of the Rudras

It was a great time to be alive.
Playing Romancing SaGa 3 was so much fun. The newer port is good but only runs at 30fps, not like the 60fps Super Famicom port.
 
Talked with a friend about emulation the other day, we had a laugh remembering how we played KOF99 with an emulator and Microsoft Sidewinder controllers.
It was animal abuse to use 'em. So I bought PS1 adapters shortly thereafter.
It was probably 26'ish years ago.


Ms_sidewinder.jpg
 
ZSNES, Gens/Kega and Bleem 1.5

My early childhood and the first means of playing some great JRPGs that were otherwise inaccessible to me.
Same man! That first playthough of Chrono Trigger on ZSNES... I still remember it, so good! (even if my retard ass got stuck a few times lol)
 
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Back in the late 90s a friend of mine popped a disc into his PC. On it was SNES/Megadrive emulators, and pretty much every game rom.

That was me discovering emulation, and I couldn't believe what I was seeing.

There I was- lucky to get a couple games a year. Yet on PC you could just play the entire library like a dirty pirate.

Anyway, got my own PC soon after and found myself rummaging through Zophar's Domain.
 
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Discovering emulation with Nesticle and ZSNES made me interested in computers. That plus a great site named Cult of Kefka or something like that. edit: oh nice you can look at it on internet archives!
 
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Talked with a friend about emulation the other day, we had a laugh remembering how we played KOF99 with an emulator and Microsoft Sidewinder controllers.
It was animal abuse to use 'em. So I bought PS1 adapters shortly thereafter.
It was probably 26'ish years ago.


Ms_sidewinder.jpg
I remember these being pretty awful, but I liked the original Sidewinder joystick in Descent.
 
It must have been around 1994, before home internet was really a thing, I remember reading in a magazine about emulation of 8-bit computers.
I drove to the nearest internet cafe, downloaded an Amstrad CPC emulator and about 10 disk images of games onto floppy discs.
I got home installed, ran and played these Amstrad CPC classics on my PC.
I thought it was the coolest thing ever.
 
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Emulation has come so far. Now I have a retro emulation with my Samsung s9 tab that plays anything from Atari to Switch. Literally an arcade in the palm of my hands.
 
I found my old CD cases in my Ex wifes house in grabbing more of my stuff
Was looking through it and found this..
back when you paid money to emulated games.. almost tempted to install it and see if it still works.

k01o7psd0ELUk10C.jpg

Bleem was always shit! The only good commercial PS emulator was the Connectix Virtual Game Station which was actually stable.
And yes, I too still have my Bleem CD somewhere!
 
Randy Linden does not get the credit and fame he deserves, a true canadian hero and unheralded for his work. From Amiga Dragon's Lair, Emulators for C64, to Snes DOOM, to Bleemcast any many more projects. Clever coder with great outside the box thinking and overall nice guy. They don't make them like this anymore, another success from the C64 underground.
 
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I was at my local arcade in 96/97 (cant remember exactly) and we were playing KOF97 or 95 like we would always do, and some dude comes and says he has "all" these games at home on his Pentium.
We laughed and carried on.


Plot twist: he wasn't lying.
 
I remember playing Megaman X3 back in 2001 on PC via ZSNES. That was....fun haha. Same with Rockman and Bass.

Same with Romancing SaGa 3, Bahamut Lagoon and Star Ocean. Playing the Super Famicom imports was so much fun and a fucking tragedy because they never got a Western Release.

Bahamut Lagoon is officially 30 years and NEVER got a Western release. Yet, Live a Live got a remake 2 years ago, in which the original came out in 1994. Star Ocean First Departure was a remake made in the style of Star Ocean 2, though I'd love the OG version to get an official Western port.
ZSNES was also my first time using emulation in the late 90's. It allowed me to play Final Fantasy V with a fan created English patch.
 
I remember when my parents bought their first computer in 2001, one of the first things I did was to play Phantasy Star 4 since the only time I ever saw it anywhere was the one copy at blockbuster that I rented multiple times . Initially I just looked up games I was interested in and saw words like rom and emulator and had to see out of curiosity . Once my young mind comprehended what I discovered I went ham on genesis and snes roms lol ... my mind was blown!!!
 
Did this cost money to use?

Bleem was something like $30 - $40 dollars overall. I had it for my PC as well. I don;t know what happened to my disc though, it just vanished. There was never a monthly fee.

I still have the bleem cd but I don't remember using it for much at the time it came out.

Honestly, I remember being disappointed by Bleem for Windows.The Connectix Virtual Game Station was a better emulator overall on my old Windows 98SE machine. I used that to play rented PS1 games. I would also create disc images of the games that I use to rent and would run them in a virtual disc drive.
 
I had the Tekken 3 and GT2 Bleemcast discs I got from Electronic Boutique. Made the games look great. Shame they weren't able to release the bigger compilation discs they had planned. I think Sony sued the dude and drained his resources so he wasn't able to do it.

Earliest emulator I used was Nesticle with the cut off hand. :messenger_grinning_sweat:
 
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It must have been around 1994, before home internet was really a thing, I remember reading in a magazine about emulation of 8-bit computers.
I drove to the nearest internet cafe, downloaded an Amstrad CPC emulator and about 10 disk images of games onto floppy discs.
I got home installed, ran and played these Amstrad CPC classics on my PC.
I thought it was the coolest thing ever.
Couple years later for me.

In '96 (and right before the big Nesticle boom), I discovered the MSX via emulation. Sure the scrolling was choppy, but to find a stash of Konami goodness unseen in the states was pretty great.
 
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