More Emulation Memories

The time I discovered emulation of more retro consoles and the time I tried emulating them on my phone!

A few weeks ago I shared some stories about some of my first experiences with emulation, mainly related to Nintendo 64 emulation.

At the time, I didn’t even know you could emulate other systems, I guess I was simply too young and ignorant, and I didn’t learn about other emulators until much later.

I discovered GBA and SNES 4 or 5 years later. through an adult friend who had those emulators on his laptop, I’m of course talking about snes9x and VisualBoyAdvance. He had a lot of roms and he actually traferred all of it to my computer with a USB drive.

My friend introduced me to a few games, like The Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles, and also Pokémon—maybe Gold or Crystal, it was definitely not a GBA one. But the most important discovery of them all, would be the Metroid series.

I knew of Samus thanks to Super Smash Bros, but I didn’t know anything about the games belonging to her franchise. I remember I surfed the web for a while looking for some sort of Metroid for the Nintendo 64 to try, without success.

To show me what’s up, my friend started a new game. There were a lot of platforms to jump on, and many rooms to explore. He got all the way to the first boss, a creature that turned into a ball and turned the floor on fire as well. After shooting it a while, it eventually turned into a giant virus cell, and after beating it, he unlocked the same ability to turn into a ball!—and the rest is history.

I already knew of Pokemon because of its popularity here in México, with the anime and also the tazos—a very popular toy in Mexico that came inside chips bags and we collected all the time. I knew it was about collecting monsters, but I didn’t know about its gameplay at all until then.

Despite all of this, I barely played those systems on my computer.

It wasn’t until I got my first Android phone, that I met someone in middle school who had an emulator on his phone, it was My Boy! for Android, and he was playing stuff like Pokemon Fire Red and also Fire Emblem.

This was neat, it was a GBA running on a phone, just as pocketable as the real thing, and with features like fast forward and savestates.

So—through some questionable sources—I started playing too!

I did quite a lot of progress on Pokemon Fire Red like that, and we even exchanged pokemons via Bluetooth. I also tried some Final Fantasy, and I recall asking my adult friend for help since I didn’t really understand the turn based combat of it, and everytime I died, I started all over again unlike on Pokemon! I didn’t even know you could just save anywhere in the overworld. Despite his help, I ended up abandoning the franchise back then.

Later on, I was gifted a PSP by a different friend, and I started gaming on it quite a bit. I only had some PSP games like Star Wars The Force Unleashed and Need for Speed Most Wanted. But one day, I lost my PSP charging brick, and I didn’t have enough money to get one.

A couple years went by until I finally got a new charger, but then another issue happened. My joystick was a mess! Because of this I tried to play games that only used the dpad. A lot of PSP titles worked very well, but I wanted to expand my library, and I ended up discovering hat emulation for the PSP was possible! I’ve written plenty about the software and adventures I’ve had with my PSP before, so feel free to check those out.

There’s probably more stories to share here, memories to look back to, and I may write about them later on.

Today, I am quite happy playing on my Miyoo Mini Plus and emulating tons of games from the PS1 and below, and Pico-8 too!

This is day 58 of #100DaysToOffload

https://fosstodon.org/@joel/112621095640283403

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