How was emulation and discovering ROMs like for those of you who were using them in the 90's/early 2000's? I was too young to really figure them out until like 2005-07, by then they seemed pretty standardized and easy to find with a google search, and I could get 5th gen stuff working on even my family's old computer.
Has to use BBS in DOS to call up a list of ROM's and download Super Mario Bros after 3 hours. Quicker than modern triple a gaming
"wow I can play zelda and mario on my pc while grinding in runescape or after playing css"
then I played games I already played and occasionally some translations like fire emblem and mother 3 and then when I wanted to get into it more with real peripherals and newer emulators like dolphin and pcsx2 it never felt right and the more I looked into it the more obvious it became that using the real hardware was the way to go and now I keep emulators installed but never really use them.
There was a new kid that joined my 3rd grade elementary school class and through friends we also became friends. He taught me about emulation and how you could play console games on the computer.
Remember watching him playing Kirby Super Star on ZSNES on the his family PC and being completely spellbound by it. Taught me all the sites and stuff.
A small handful of autists bothered, but basically no one back then played on emulators. /vr/ games only look good on CRT TVs, and sure, we had CRT monitors, but CRT monitors are too sharp to do them justice. They're basically LCD tier.
Emulation only really exploded with the introduction of stuff like Xbox Live Arcade and Virtual Console, because you had a generation of kids and teenagers used to the raw pixel look those platforms presented, and actually liked how these games look on a PC monitor.
What a blurry mess.
That's what the game looks like on real hardware. The NES can only do composite, it can never have a clean output. You just hate it because you've only played these games on an emulator.
Yeah, some people did, the poorgays. Most people didn't bother because those games didn't look good without a CRT TV.
Not really. Chrono Trigger was very popular, it even inspired Square to release FF7 in the US. Just because (You) played it through ZNES on a TN panel doesn't mean everyone else did.
>Yeah, some people did, the poorgays. Most people didn't bother because those games didn't look good without a CRT TV.
Where I grew up it was the poorgays who had consoles while the richgays had computers. And this whole notion that games didn't look good unless played on CRT TVs came much much later in my experience. I didn't care back then and I never read about anyone who did. I even played with the shitty scaling algorithms that existed at the time.
>Yeah, some people did, the poorgays. Most people didn't bother because those games didn't look good without a CRT TV.
My video card had composite-out so I emulated on my CRT
>it even inspired Square to release FF7 in the US
Square didn't publish it in the US though, Sony did.
>poorgays
Poorgays did not have computers and internet access in the late 90s. It was still a middle class thing.
>Most people didn't bother because those games didn't look good without a CRT TV.
Nobody gave a shit about display quality back then, people were just happy to play games. CRTs were actually considered cheap compared to crisp VGA monitors.
>Chrono Trigger was very popular
It wasn't, it barely made a splash outside Japan and wasn't even released in Europe.
Seriously, what the frick are you doing in this thread? Tell me you're a LARPing zoomer please.
It sold between 500k and a million and was doted on by the gaming press. Got re released for PS1 later on. (Not a real port, just a custom SNES emulator that patched english into the ROM on the fly)
And this is why people were gutting PC10s for RGB parts. Left looks better.
Same as it is now, search for "game name ROM". Just back then the first site usually worked, now it's the 3rd or 4th.
>gutting PC10s for RGB parts
still a fricking travesty. It disgusts me that PC10s were destroyed for someone's drakon-tier Famicom mod.
By March 2003, the game's SNES and PS1 iterations had shipped 2.65 million copies worldwide, including 2.36 million in Japan and 290,000 abroad.
HOLY FRICK I still have one of these somewhere
>You just hate it because you've only played these games on an emulator.
Conversely, the same is true. You only think it looks good because you played it on an imperfect display(crt). Nostalgia is a hell of a thing. One thing we can both agree on though, those "hq" filters people use are terrible.
lolwut
Bleem! was infamously released in 1999, and game magazines were already putting articles on emulation before that. Late N64 games and practically every GBA games were being played day one with emulation.
Literally everyone played ZSNES circa Y2K. Chrono Trigger literally became a classic BECAUSE of ZSNES.
Since a lot of classes had computers kids would pass around emulators and share ROMs and ply them.
>Emulation only really exploded with the introduction of stuff like Xbox Live Arcade and Virtual Console
What the frick are you talking about? Emulation didn't become popular with Wii virtual console, it was well established since the late 90s. Me and everyone I knew stopped playing our original consoles when nesticle and snes 9x became popular in the late 90s. The games were free, looked better, and you had access to so many more games. You were definately born after year 2001
>/vr/ games only look good on CRT TVs
no one cared about this shit, especially because emulation meant playing games for fricking free on your computer
>They're basically LCD tier.
not in terms of what actually matters (motion blur)
>Emulation only really exploded with the introduction of stuff like Xbox Live Arcade and Virtual Console
hahahah what the frick? no. emulation was popular as frick before that shit existed. source: me, i was there.
>emulation and ROMs in the 90's
You mean "warez"
In the late 90s I found out about emulation by seeing people playing SNES ROMs on one of the PCs setup at the arcade in my local mall. Never even knew such a thing was possible until then, and I didn't get my own PC until 2000 finally because my parents had shitty credit and couldn't get financing for one or pay for one outright.
When I was young downloading even small ROMs was an ordeal on dial-up.
getting roms sucked until cherryroms came along and actually had all the roms in one place
When people get into arguments about accuracy of emulation today it's amusing to me, considering how we were quite happy about playing the thoroughly inaccurate ZSNES using 8-bit palletised VGA video modes, having to disable the transparency layers so you could see through the fog and clouds, ignoring the grainy sound... ZSNES was coded mostly in assembly because PCs just weren't fast enough to cope, snes9x was arguably better as an emulator but nobody used it because only your rich cousin with his dad's brand new P2 could hope to get decent performance out of it.
60fps MAME was forever a pipe dream. We played CPS-1 games in Callus and kept tabs on the folks as cps2shock to see if they had made any progress in decrypting CPS-2 so we could play SSF2 and vampire Savior.
ROM sites sprang up like weeds but due to the highly limited space offered by free web hosts each site would only have a handful of games. And quite often they'd all just be trading the same slightly corrupted version of smw.smc and it could be a nightmare to track down clean roms. Often times the roms were deliberately modified to get them playable on the broken emulators we used.
Also PC gamepads sucked ass. You usually had to make do with DOS compatible 4-button mapping or some broken 6-button support that may not have allowed you to press all buttons and directions at the same time. It was a long time until USB-HID would solve the problem for good.
Don't get me wrong, it was a magical time, but frick me looking back it was pain and hassle all the time.
>PC gamepads sucked ass.
Yeah, I realize now that I always thought Megaman X was so hard because I was playing it with keyboard.
Another reason why JRPGs were so popular with emulation.
>Also PC gamepads sucked ass.
God, I remember trying to make ZSNES and SNES9x work on my Gravis Gamepad in Keyboard Emulation mode.
HORRIBLE input lag on that shit and hitting the toggle switch would sometimes cause ZSNES to crash my PC.
I had one of the four button ones that connected to a gameport on a soundcard and while it was kinda shitty for action games it was a lot better than playing with the keyboard for rpgs
It was neat. Websites would just openly host the roms without any fanfare because none of the publishers knew it was a thing. And back in the early days of Nesticle and ZSNES there was always some major news to follow, either a game that became playable or a fan translation of a major game people wanted to play like Final Fantasy V.
>mfw my first PC came up with ZSNES, KGen98 and a bunch of ROMs
I remember it taking like 30 minutes to download Chrono Trigger on dial up. Those 4mb games were a b***h back then. Also later, after getting cable internet, getting arcade emulators and being able to play KOF games as they came out, but only NeoRageX could run them. I played 99, 2000, 2001 and 2002 right after they came out and that was always a trip to me.
It was wonderful. Must have first experienced emulation around 98... It was totally mind blowing to see that it worked at all. I recall opening Donkey Kong Country with Snes9x and it booted up with the sound and the animation and everything. It was absolute magic. Of course it only ran half smoothly in a tiny window. Then there were all the smoothing shaders. Kind of funny to imagine that people running crisp crt computer monitors felt the need to come up with, let alone apply those goofy filters. These were all games that had come out fairly recently. There was no way on earth to copy an NES cartridge, for example, and share it with somebody. The scarcity and exclusivity, especially for a child in the 90s, of console and arcade games made them seem unattainably valuable. So to stumble on a resource where you could download and play any Sega or Nintendo game for free was like some combination of Christmas and winning the lottery.
For me I'm not sure if it was mind blowing as much as it was CONFUSING. I was really confused (I know that sounds dumb) by emulation. I kept asking "How does it do that? Its not a super nintendo".
The real excitement moment was playing all the cool Japanese games we didn't get.
Zophars is getting a lot of love in this thread but there was a site that I forget the name of that was cool before. Not Vimm's but there was another one I think.
It's amazing how good things are these days.
I'd like to add that my controller was a Gravis Gamepad.
As for discovering ROMs, I must have stumbled on them through an ancient search engine like Looksmart, specifically looking to see if anyone had ported or recreated NES games for PC. My go-to rom site back then was emux dot com.
Was pretty easy to be honest. Back then people had friends (I know that sounds snarky but it's not the same now as it was back then) and word traveled quick. Excite, Lycos, etc were a lot better than what Google is today. SEO ruined the entire internet. Believe it or not back then you could click the first 4-5 links and actually be able to get good info. Not always but in general. Oh you like circuit bending in 2002? Well there are 5 sites that talk about it. Same with the 90s. I don't remember having any issues. I think NESTICLE really hit it big in around 97, I forget though. I had an NES emulator for my PS1 too that I got from an fserve on IRC.
It's hard to explain but the internet is better now but search engines are complete horse shit. You know that trick for finding info (add "reddit" to the end of the thing you are searching for?) well that is basically what the net was back then.
"Sharks" and BOOM you got pages about sharks.
I bypass search engines these days. Go directly to wikipedia or archive.org. Frick web 2.0
There were already easy to find rom sites by the early 2000's. We'd download ZSNES and try out different games during computer classes. One was that Gundam fighting game. There were also browser game sites. One had the classic Williams games so some people were competing for score in Spy Hunter and Satan's Hollow.
The Gundam Fighting game is another one that was hugely popular entirely through ZSNES.
The Gundam Wing game was the first game I emulated. Still remember looking on sites and learning how to use ZSNES for it. Even installed it on a school computer with a floppy. I found an actual cart in a game store around 98 or 99 but it was too much, $120 for one import game
Watching someone else play that game on their computer is what made me look up ZSNES myself.
when I was like 10 my older brother would play shit like final fight 2 with me on his PC and I didn't even know it was emulated
Emulators weren’t perfect yet. When playing ZSNES, every one in a while a random sound sample would play, like a horn. All games weren’t playable. It was a huge deal when Star Ocean’s encryption or whatever was finally emulated, because it was a very hyped game in Nintendo Power that never got released. We didn’t know at the time that all SO games would suck besides SO2.
Honestly, i didn't really use them. Shit was still cheap to get so it didn't feel like something i needed to bother wish. I tried out some import snes games, the Mother 3 translation when in first came and some mame stuff and haven't really bothered using any emulators since maybe 2012.
I don't miss playing games with my keyboard
Once I get a computer with USB and an adapter for my SNES controller, emulation actually got fun.
somewhere around 2000 i remember having to take a month off of school, so i spent a lot of time on the internet and eventually found a castlevania fansite that showed me how to use emulators
https://castlevaniadungeon.net/
although i don't think they have them now.
i think nesticle might have been my first emulator, then i just started working my way up through more powerful systems.
really remember struggling to find where i could find a bleem cd to buy, then i found emurayden.
Mostly gay and useless until portable devices with color screens big enough to make it useful arrived. I'm sure there were homosexuals saying "look mah! I can play sanic on daddys $2k pc instead of buying a genesis with a dozen games for five bucks at a garage sale. There were absolutely homosexuals say "Dude! I can emulate a handful of arcade games that are older than I am inaccurately instead of paying $1 to buy a port that's better" homosexuals who emulate because poorgay have always been moronic. But just like today, having a bunch of fun old games you can play on the go was a legit mainstream use for emulation.
cringe post.
Hit a little to close to home?
I liked emulators then because I could buy a handheld and play wherever. There was no tiktok back then. Not even youtube. No iphones. Everyone looked where they were walking. A strange world you will never know and can't even imagine.
>I liked emulators then because I could buy a handheld and play wherever.
What handheld emulator could you get in the pre-youtube era?
Too many to list. Google palm, pocket pc, etc.
The early emulators were inaccurate, so that's a legitimate complaint. "Good enough" emulators will always be cope (PCSX2).
But you like emulators now because you can buy a handheld and play old arcade games on public transport.
Yep, it's cringe.
Found ZSNES through a Tenchi Muyo fansite in 98/99. Later on, I searched for emulators and found Zophar's Domain.
it was fun. i have no idea where i got them from.
We used to download individual roms from web pages. If you're still doing that 25 years later instead of downloading a full set, you're a damn moron. (being autistic about saving insignificant amounts of disk space is also a form of moronation)
Huh huh. NESticle.
I remember using ZSNES to try out a bunch of different SNES games, since I never owned a SNES. I thought it was kind of a hassle to use at the time, but it was nice to be able to play those games.
Anyone remember EmüChina in the early 00's?
That had tons of ROMs.
I remember downloading SNES ROMs off Usenet. It was a slow process, even with DSL. And I didn't manage to get every ROM, some of the posts didn't arrive for whatever reason.
I discovered a fan translation of Front Mission in that batch of ROMs. It blew my mind that a game as awesome as that wasn't even released outside Japan. Why leave money on the table like that? At the time I had no idea how much antipathy NoA had toward RPGs, and how many other games didn't get released here.
Back then I bought a USB gamepad to play old console games on my desktop computer. I still have it, although I don't use it anymore (now I usually play old games on my Wii with a Classic Controller Pro).
MAME was a revelation. A lot of romsets were missing in the early days, so you couldn't always play what you wanted to, but still a lot of great games. And to the visiting composite cope crowd - no one gave a shit, it was so amazing to be playing games you were mean to be paying for on your PC CRT.
WinUAE was another moment for me. I learnt more about Amiga hardware setting that up than i'd ever known back in the days of using the Amiga itself. Probably only about 3-4 years in between tbh
I'm pretty sure Zophar's domain only offered software and emulators. I'm bretty sure they never hosted ROMS.
They did for a short time after Edman took over, it seems.
Neo-RAGEx was my emulator of choice.
Had never even heard of the Neo Geo back then, until I found this bad boy.
Compared to other emulators at the time, it was fast and accurate pretty early on, and the games were amazing.
Being a PC user in the 90s and 00s was such a hassle at times, but stuff like this made the difference. Fricking worth it.
I would bring nesticle and a few games on a floppy disk and play them in keyboarding class. Kids thought I was some kind of mega hacker
I remember being annoyed at having to move to Zophar's Domain from another, earlier emulation news and download hub that shut down due to whatever drama they had going on
Saw my first anime nipple in a pop-up ad on a Rom download site, not sure which one that was. Brought in a 128mb flash drive to school everyday and played through pretty much every Snes RPG I missed out on. My first emulation experience was actually with a SMW Rom Hack someone posted on the GameMaker forums.
It was pretty amazing. I remember it was spring/summer 2000 and I went to my friend's house to hang out. He was a couple years older and we went on his computer and he had been playing a ROM of Pokemon Gold (which hadn't been released in the US yet) on a Gameboy emulator.
His computer geek friend had put it on a floppy disk for him so he did the same for me. Being able to play the next generation of Pokemon before anyone else was the coolest thing for a kid in the middle of the Pokemon craze
ZOPHAR HAS MANBOOBS