At the time, I didnāt even know you could emulate other systems, I guess I was simply too young and ignorant, and I didnāt 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, Iām 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.
I knew of Samus thanks to Super Smash Bros, but I didnāt 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 whatās 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!āand the rest is history.
Despite all of this, I barely played those systems on my computer.
It wasnāt 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.
Soāthrough some questionable sourcesāI 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 didnāt really understand the turn based combat of it, and everytime I died, I started all over again unlike on Pokemon! I didnāt 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 didnāt 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! Iāve written plenty about the software and adventures Iāve had with my PSP before, so feel free to check those out.
Thereās 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!
