First Emulation Experience

[Anubis]

Do you remember when did you find Amiga emulation and feeling first time you successfully downloaded and played a game? Do you still remember getting getting Guru Mediation screen again, and agin, and again...

For me it was WinFellow + Classics for UAE web site.

Just incredible feeling listening to Alien Breed intro.

Not long after that (or probably around the same time) I found total-emu - first emulation forum I joined.

Still nice feeling being able to see Classics for UAE website, even no download works.

How did you loose your emulation virginity?

[tero]

For me it was AIAB. today it is found here:
https://aiab.ultimateamiga.co.uk/
back then it was aiab.emuunlim or something similar.
Compared to workbenches i've seen till then it was really impressive. I build my 1200er to install something like that, but in the end i made my very own workbench. While i still use emulation till today i prefer the real thing.
But AIAB kept me going on Amiga, and i'm glad it did.

[Anubis]

That was another great site back then (and still is), I still have game pack downloaded from there, and I remember being blown away with settings, but since I liked to have HDF rather then directory, I copied it.

I did use AIAB until Bloodwych's ClassicWB.

I still remember frustration with emulation on P2 - 333MHz laptop - did not work well with WHDLoad.

[tero]

That was better for me, my first x86 cpu was an amd k6 with 500mhz. i updated that one for uae, iirc it was an athlon at 1200mhz. That was good enough at that time

[Shatterhand]

Back in 96 I still had an A600 as my main computer at home. A friend of mine had gotten a 386 PC machine. He asked me if he could borrow me some of my games, I told him our computers were different and he would need an emulator to play my games on his computer. (I don't know why or how I already had heard about emulators, I am pretty sure I had never seen an Amiga emulator before).

Couple of weeks later he came back to me, said he had bought (Yes, bought) an emulator for Amiga games. It was a floppy with some DOSUAE version... it had no GUI and we had no idea of how to use it. I brought some of my Amiga games to his house and of course nothing worked. I had no idea a PC would not read Amiga floppies back then, I just thought we were too dumb to figure out how to make it work, or someone had just screwed with my friend.

Of course we probably also needed a kickstart file (which I have no idea was included on the floppy he bought) and I doubt that, even if it had worked, we would get any decent emulation back in 96 on a 386 CPU.


In April 98 I got my first PC (A Pentium 233 Mhz with 32 mb of Ram), and as soon as I got internet access (After I had seen "the internet" for the first time at another friend's house), the FIRST thing I did was search for Amiga stuff.

I quickly found UAE Talk and Emulation Talk (does anyone remember those? Oh my God)... then I understood why I couldnt make DOSUAE work 2 years ago at my friends PC.. downloaded WINUAE, FELLOW and DOSUAE.

I remember some games worked in one but not the other. DOSUAE was very rudimentary, Winuae had the best emulation but couldn't run full speed on my setup. Fellow was really fast but lots of games didn't work.

Many of my nights back at that era was downloading Amiga games (at Dial Up Connection 2 to 4kb/s if you were lucky). I remember when Back2Roots begun distributing games LEGALLY, it was a really huge deal. I downloaded a SHITLOAD of mods from there back at the day too. I remember at some point Bobic (The site owner) had a huge list of "Compatibility" for Amiga games where he tested what games would work better on what emulator and what config.

I also remember there was a site called "The Amiga Dreamzone" that had a SHITLOAD of Amiga games, though downloads speed were painfully slow. I am trying to remember the name of the owner of that site, I remember I once complained (on emulation Talk) about the speed of that site and he got really pissed at me and I felt really bad (I was just 15 years old and he was completely right )

And then at some point, probably on Emulation Talk, someone told me about EAB. Then at some point EAB had a crash or something (It was back in 2001), so a new site was up..... and I am *amazed* the same database is up since then, 18 years later. I registered on the first 24 hours of the new EAB being up, and I see I am one of the very few users from that time still around (Though I had long periods of absence for sure ) .

I lost interest on emulation at some point, didn't feel like playing with emulated stuff, I just wanted to use real hardware.

AND...back in 31 December 2014, I received my current A600, which since then made me go back full power here at EAB.

I think I answered a lot more than what was asked..... but as the sad nostalgic chap I am, it's always nice to remember the good old times, even though some of them are less old than others

EDIT: Damn, it feels really weird to notice I was half my current age old when I created an account on this forum. For more than half of my life I've been a member of EAB.

[DamienD]

Are we just talking Amiga emulation?

My first emulation experience must have been around 1998 with arcade emulators... obviously MAME, Sparcade, Raine etc.

My first Amiga emulator must have been around 2003 on WinUAE, or possibly WinFellow. Sites for .ADFs were BackToTheRoot / Classics for UAE etc.

[Retro1234]

First Emulation experience I was at college meant to be learning but spent nearly all the course playing Mega Drive and Snes games

First Amiga was probably about the time I joined EAB first was UAE for DOS I can't remember the site but had lots of JST games and ADFs with pictures not BackToRoots.

[LanceT]

Still have some of my Original CD/DVDs dating from 1996 till about 02
Some Epic Marketing, some from a gentleman in Brazil and other Mag sources.

[005AGIMA]

Easy. For me it was toward the end of last year when I was kicked suddenly in the nostalgias.

Emailed a mate in the UK who I went to school with as we'd discussed it via email before but at that time, I hadn't had the itch.

he put me onto Win_UAE and gave me some links and instructions (and *cough* roms)

Got it all working. Fired up Batman. O.M.G the feeling of hearing that intro music again. Yes I'd heard it via YouTube vids but this was on MY machine....wait so were the videos....anyway you know what I mean.

Played Batman Level 1 all the way through after about the third try memory was in full effect....and THAT is when I got GURU MEDITATION lol

Didn't make me angry. Made me laugh.

Did get a working version of Batman in the end.

As as detailed in other threads, have also moved on to legit Roms via AF V8 DVD and also Amiga Essentials for Android.

Have dropped emulation for the moment though, as I pick up my A500 in December. I want the next time I hear those tones, to be on the real thing

[Hewitson]

Assuming you mean Batman The Movie, yeah that tune's pretty unforgettable. That funky bassline!

[chip]

I PERFECTLY remember when i started Amiga emulation with WinUAE

It was year 2002 and first game i tried it was Gods trained by Energy

I will never forget the wonderful trainer tune and the Gods intro tune

[005AGIMA]

Originally Posted by Hewitson

Assuming you mean Batman The Movie, yeah that tune's pretty unforgettable. That funky bassline!

Yep Batman the movie.

Same one that came in the Batman pack in the UK.

The sound of my childhood

[BrooksterMax]

I still kept my A500+ all the way through to today. Whilst at Uni 99-2002 did fire up Amiga emulation and playing Hunter and Lemmings as I didn't have the room or space to take much with me. I used the university labs, and Zip disks to bring everything back to my PC from downloading off the web.

Emulation was a good way of getting my Amiga fix but for short blasts.

[Hewitson]

Originally Posted by 005AGIMA

Yep Batman the movie.

Same one that came in the Batman pack in the UK.

The sound of my childhood

Did you ever play Batman The Caped Crusader? That was far superior to Batman The Movie, in my opinion.

[Gordon]

I think it was around 2005 when CF cards came in and used win-aue to help me get set up.

I respect people who use emulation like Win-UAE and Vampires to play games but I only use it for setting up.

[Hewitson]

I personally wouldn't even use it for setting up a drive. The experience is so much nicer and more nostalgic on a real machine.

What WinUAE (and most other emulators) are brilliant for though, is coding. Being able to cross-compile your code and test it in an emulator makes development a million times easier.

[gimbal]

Oof, difficult question. I do believe Amiga emulation was one of the first things I did back when I had first access to the internet (using a 33k6 modem...) and having a terrible need to play my old Amiga games again, having lost my Miggy years earlier. I replaced many games with lesser PC versions over the years but there were some games that simply were never ported to the PC platform and the craving could not be satiated.

I can remember really strip-searching the usual sites for ADFs and using every search engine available to try and find more of them. This was before Google, I used altavista and yahoo the most. All to complete the collection of games I used to have. Ah the joy of discovering a shady site which held that one ADF that no other site had... until I discovered planetemu and I basically completed the set right there and then, with the help of EAB to get 3 or 4 games/applications not available on that site.

I remember playing around with Winfellow a little because it could play one or two games that WinUAE at that time could not, but I used WinUAE most of the time. Back then it ran on a janky Pentium 120 with Windows 95... it worked quite well, with some framerate issues here and there.

After that I really got the taste and I did a catch-up of an entire childhood devoid of Nintendo and Sega systems. Heck, I even used Project64 to play N64 games... with the keyboard. The horror...

[Hewitson]

Originally Posted by gimbal

After that I really got the taste and I did a catch-up of an entire childhood devoid of Nintendo and Sega systems. Heck, I even used Project64 to play N64 games... with the keyboard. The horror...

Yep, I can relate to that. I have since invested in an NTSC system which can play JAP/US games. No controller issues, no playing substandard games.

Ironically I also own a Datel Universal Adapter, which allows PAL games to run on an NTSC machine.

[Coagulus]

My first Amiga emulation experience was probably that fake emulator that showed the 1.x hand and made the disk drive do stuff. Was still exciting. Then UAE and Fellow for DOS kept me going until Windows was fast enough. Now it's even on my phone!

[Mikerochip]

My first emulation experience was with ... a Juno first emulator I think, but I couldn't get it working, so I tried a few different arcade machine emulators.
I think the first successful emulator I got to play was a ghosts and goblins emu for dos.

Back then, in 1996, there were only a handful of emulators, and even less rom images floating about.
I remember MAME coming out in 1997, but it was very slow compared to most of the single system emulators, and chugged along on my 486sx25. It could play a few games I think though, that didn't have emulators for them.

The first useful computer emulators didn't show up for a while, I think.
I remember seeing PacifiST for Atari ST emulation, which amazed me.

And until Neo Geo stuff started to be dumped and spread around, my entire collection of roms and emulators fit on 6 floppy disks!
(Which I still have!)

But one of them went bad, and I lost the contents for a while, since they were PKZipped across all the disks.

I'm trying to remember which sites I visited for emulation news.

I remember Daves Video Game Classics.
And Zophar. And EmuUnlim too.
And Emulation9. That was a great news site.
And RetroGames.com. That along with Daves were probably my favourite two.

Geocities was pretty good for finding specific game dumps too, sometimes.

zSNES impressed me, and Gencyst, and Nesticle too
And the whole UltraHLE fiasco.

I never had an Amiga, and tried a few times very unsuccessfully to get any sort of Amiga running. Eventually I did get a standard A500 booting when I figured out what Kickstart was, and what the workbench did.
But I've no idea when I first got that A500 running.

That was over 23 years ago...

But I remember it being a very exciting time to own a computer!