Earliest Emulation Memories.....

[Oldskool]

I'm just curious as to when most of you guys jumped on the emulation bandwagon.

Personally, for me it was with Dave Spicer's Sparcade.

At the time I discovered it, Dave had just withdrawn it from the public domain, and those in the scene did not distribute it as per Dave's instructions.

Man did I have to search hi and low on the net to get it.  

Sparcade emulated Pacman and Galaxian among others, and I was in 7th heaven.

It's still available at:

http://www.sparcade.freeserve.co.uk/index.htm


And while I'm at it.....the best website at the time to get your emulation fix from was Dave's Arcade Classics (which is now deunct).

Ahhh... the memories.....

I used to get nostalgic over arcade games, and now I'm getting that way over old emulators.  

[JoyMonkey]

Didn't Dave's Classics turn into Vintage Gaming Network? As I recall, Dave's supplied me and it seems the rest of the world with emulation news and roms until it hit the mainstream press and they got into copyright trouble for giving away millions of roms.

As for my earliest emulation memories, it was early 1997 when I was in college in Dublin. A classmate introduced me to a Galaxian emulator (I think) and I soon came accross Mame. The rest (and all that came before) is history.

[Nailz]

Yep, I remember Dave's classics, that was THE site for a long time.  I came across Mame at about rev .5 or so, and remember the big deal everyone made when they went to the new version numbering.

[Oldskool]

Didn't Dave's Classics turn into Vintage Gaming Network?

Hmmm....

The old link which I believe is http://www.davesclassics.com now takes you to some other site, UGO.com.

[Trenchbroom]

My earliest emulation memory was with the Commodore 64--C64S was the emulator.  I remember that I just FREAKED when I saw that I could play Bruce Lee on my PC!  Then I realized they wanted $70 (!) for the emulator so after booting up a few old games on the timed demo version of the emulator I deleted and forgot about it.

It took me about four months before I realized that arcade games could be emulated as well.  I came across a site called Atmospherical Heights (any really old timers remember that site?) where I found Sparcade and then MAME shortly thereafter....MAME .6 if I remember right.

I loved Dave's Classics way back then, but now I find Retrogames to be the place for updated emu info.

[paigeoliver]

With me it started with Nesticle. Then onto other console emulators (all DOS versions).

I kept trying Mame, and thinking it sucked, but that was because the only rom I downloaded was Datsun 280ZZZap, which isn't the best game in the first place, and seemed to have some serious issues in the early Mame versions.

Eventually got into arcade emulation via Callus, and that System 16 emulator, and eventually moved onto Mame.

[Tailgunner]

My first "emulation" experience was Epic Pinball, the first video game emulator I remember was Cinemu, an emulator for Cinematronics vector games. I downloaded it so I could play Tailgunner, of course.

I naturally picked up Microsoft Arcade when it was released, followed by the Williams arcade packs.

My first experience with MAME was around version .32. I remember playing Galaga using it, but not much else.

[Stingray]

I'm pretty sure the first one I discovered was an earlyish version of MacMame. .27 or something. After I found that I quickly discovered Stella and iNES. I was in heaven!

-S

[GGKoul]

Mine was MAME; with lead me to find many others.  Lusid's website was my source of inspiration.

-GGKoul

[rampy]

My first was David Spicer's Sparcade... way back when you used to get INDIVIDUAL rom image files (i.e not zipped) from some RGVAC (i believe) ftp archive for games like pacman and frogger.

I remember playing a horriblly small/jerky window of super mario brothers on a japanese NES emulator pasofomi that had kanji (or whatever!) menu characters, on my cyrix 486/66

Nesticle was truly a revolution back then (Sardu, where are you!?)

Dave's was ok, before he sold out.. but jim's emu news was THE happening place...  (anyone rememmber the url? it was an aol.com/something... .///  found it! hey... would any of you guys happen to be rednalb from the chat room?

blah...

rampy

[Trenchbroom]

Nesticle was truly a revolution back then (Sardu, where are you!?)

Nesticle was a revolution, but Callus was flat-out stunning.  Here I was, unable to get full speed from Capcom's 8 bit games in MAME on my P150 and all of a sudden...WHAM!  Full speed butter smooth CPS1 games at my fingertips!

Sardu was the man.  Immature as all hell, but THE MAN.

[glitch77]

Genecyst version XXX  

[DYNAGOD]

you can use this engine to search old server caches going back YEARS!!
so you may yet be able to get a glimpse of the ver.32 mame release just being announced  

http://www.archive.org/web/web.php

very sweet tool