I can't quite remember, but I know it was before this:
http://web.archive.org/web/19990428224820/http://www.zophar.net/
Because I remember the talk on the ZMD boards about how, uh... (correct me if I'm wrong) Demi from NeoForce 'designed' the ZD logo, or something.
I remember that NESticle by Bloodlust was _the shit_ that would play damn near any NES ROM I could think to throw at it. The DOS version was better than the Windows version, but I always had trouble getting sound working in it for some reason.
I remember No$GB was the best FREE gameboy emulator out there. It could stretch the screen out and you could choose between black and white or the pea-green emulation. I seem to remember they were working on Super Gameboy emulation, which originally was little more than grabbing the border and displaying it around the black and white emu screen.
SNES emulation was pretty new. You had to have multiple emus at the time, though. SNES '95 emulated games differently from SNES '96, and talk of two new emulators, zSNES and SNES9X were really tearing through the scene. zSNES was going to be coded in assembly language for speed, while SNES9X was going to take part of SNES '95, and part of SNES '96, and jumble them together HOPEFULLY with good after-effects.
I also remember that the SNES emulators of the time really didn't have any UI, so you'd have to use command-line flags to choose whether to enable the experimental sound cores, mode 7 emulation, or whether you were using a "HIROM" or "LOROM" dump. That led to the popular "Emu Frontend" market.
More advanced stuff, like the Playstation and N64 were whispers, but really all we wanted was a good SNES emulator to play Chrono Trigger on.
I can't remember, wasn't there a shareware SNES emulator that displayed everything in shades of BROWN until you registered it?
Genecyst was the shit for the Sega freaks, and Callus was used more than MAME for speed. Retrocade was being talked about, the first multi-arcade emulator with a 'rich' UI. I remember there was a lot of anger surrounding that project, with more than a few accusations of stolen code.
Hm... That's really all I remember, and even then that was probably over the course of several months, if not a year or two.
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