Three Bits on Emulators — Early Web Memories
Three small bits I remember from times between 2003 and 2005.
(This is a post for the Bear Blog Carnival October 2025, hosted at winther blog.)
Super Mario RPG was the first game I emulated on my computer. Reading about Paper Mario, I found a website with download links for a ROM and snes9x. The site had also a full walkthrough of the game; useful because I was very bad at games. Before downloading the enormous 4-ish megabytes, I asked my mom if I could use the dial-up internet to do it.1
A few years later, I played Pokémon Ruby (on the original VisualBoy Advance). This was the first Pokémon game I could actually play. I had emulated the older ones, but was way too bad at them (I beat Blue with a level 80 Blastoise). The third generation Pokémon are the true Pokémon for me to this day.2 Around this time I first found out about serebii.net; still a wonderful resource for Pokémon.
A bit later I found about MegaMan Battle Network (4? I think?). Had some fun playing it, but never could finish. Lots of memories trying to understand the walkthroughs in English at GameFaqs. I did have the (at the time) magical help of Google Translate; before that I had used paper dictionaries. I also had my first contact with real Japanese trying to play the sixth one before it had an English translation.3 I’m now slowly going through all the games on my Switch.