I often wonder what triggers people to start using emulators and begin to collect retro games.
For me it started back on the Atari ST around 1987.
I first discovered you could emulate Acorn BBC, Sinclair ZX Spectrum and Commodore 64 games on the Atari ST when I was looking through a PD library catalogue. So I ordered a couple of the emulation disks from the library and gave them a go. The emulators back then were not that great but were fun to play around with trying to get some games to run.
But it was once I managed to afford an Amiga that I finally got into emulation more, as the Amiga emulators worked much better than the ones available for the ST at the time. The ZX Spectrum and C64 emulators worked quite well and I managed to get hold of some PD disks with quite a few games on them to play. A PD PC DOS emulator also worked quite well to run business software such as Lotus 123 which was useful for my college work, and an Acorn BBC emulator worked quite well too, which gave some nostalgia due to it being the system I grew up with in School.
But my fascination with emulation grew much more in about 1998 when I finally managed to afford a new PC and the number of emulators available for the PC was amazing compared to other platforms (and still is). And then in the 90's the PC emulation scene started to really gain ground.
I still remember getting hold of the first working Nintendo 64 emulator, UltraHLE, in January 1999 and being amazed at how well it emulated the supported games. I was lucky enough to have a Voodoo 2 card at the time so it worked really well, and Mario 64 looked better than on the real console, much to the annoyance of a friend with a real N64 at the time. And UltraHLE is often referred to as the emulator that changed the scene from one of a close knit community just having fun trying to emulate different systems, to one about trying to emulate systems perfectly so games and software could be used. Therefore emulation as we know it today is less than 10 years old.
I also remember the first commercial release of MAME and being amazed by the ability to play original Arcade games on a PC. That same year I integrated MAME into a design project I was making for my end of University final major project, which was a history of video games multimedia presentation, and with MAME it allowed the user to play the games while using the presentation.
Since then I've tried every emulator I can get my hands on, and collect every file collection I can find, and I've never had enough HD space available for it all.
I'm currently most interested in Sony PSP emulators. It is amazing what is now available for the PSP. Emulators now exist for nearly ever retro system you can think of from the 8 and 16 bit eras, and most work perfectly. A portable Amiga. Now that is worth it alone!
So what got you start with emulation? When was it? and on what platform? And what made you start collecting retro rom collections?