My first emulator was Visual Boy Advance specifically Zelda Oracle of Ages which is a GBC game. I had no idea what I was doing. I played it during school during a free period when I was done with what I was supposed to do (sometimes I would be naughty and play during lectures to the semi consent of my teacher. He knew I was playing it and when he needed my attention he would let me know. Mr. Rogers, you were amazing!)

It was a wonderful experience!

Mine was the super nintindo my all time favorite game is super mario world 

My first emulator was Wessel SNES, but I think it was actually called SNES9X. I still remember playing Kirby´s Mega Collection as my first game on the Emulator. At first, I didn´t want to try it out, but then I checked it out once, found out what it was about, and I ended up quickly loving the program. This is how I was introduced to this type of emulation, by the way.

NesterJ when I was searching for trying to play the original SMB1 on a PC way back in 2009. Was surprised everything was how it should have been and original at first, and now I use RetroArch on Solus and emulate a lot of games, even those I didn't grew up with.

My first emulator experience was back in 1998 when I discovered the freeware version of Nesticle for Windows 95. I loved it. Emulated NES games pretty darn well considering the hardware they had to work with back then. Was very influential for its time and adopted really cool features for the time like being able to record gameplay and the homebrew hack tools that basically paved the way for the Video game music genre.

It emulated it 'well' because it was very hacked up to work on very old hardware, just like how ZSNES is inaccurate for the same reasons.
Though yes, it was definitely an influential emulator. Shame someone leaked part of the source some day and it got discontinued.

I'm not sure what you mean by "hacked up" but yes, It was built for old hardware/platforms. Even fairly cheap hardware. So you didn't need some slick fast computer to run the games.

What I was referring to is that the emulation was fairly well done for it's time, considering it was the grandfather of emulation. Sure, there was improvements to be made, but it was VERY solid for something that was just coming into existence. Remember, this was released in 1997 from a kid in high school and it introduced the world to emulation as a whole, not to mention the features I mentioned in my original post. Also, it introduced SAVE states and helped popularize them in future emulators for all systems. It's hard to say Nesticle wasn't "accurate" as it was the first NES emulator...so at the time there was nothing to compare it to other than the original hardware.

It was sad that the creators code was stolen and cracked by another guy on the project, but I feel like the project would have been scrapped eventually anyways, because his project immediately inspired other emulator projects that would improve upon his original idea

I meant hacked up as in it has a lot of speed and compatibility hacks otherwise things wouldn't have worked properly, somewhat like ZSNES does. But yeah it was definitely a great achievement for its time.

  my first emulator was stella x v1.1.2 which I still use for playing atari 2600 games offline since I sold my atari about 5 years ago I also have project 64 that I  use for playing mario kart and roadster trophy which are a couple of n64 games that I enjoy playing but since I am unable to play n64 games on Viz I use project 64 to play them offline

My first emulator was the "Game Boy Player" for the Gamecube. That was AWESOME. I remember being pumped to play Megaman Battle Network 3 on a big screen, with a Gamecube controller. I didn't even know of emulation at the time, so this was my first foray into it.

I saw an awesome speedrun the other day (year) that used this. A guy played KIRBY TILT N' TUMBLE using a Gamecube. It. Was. Awesome. Run starts at 7:35: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=o8bdlg8BsHs

VisualBoyAdvance, by today's standards it's the worst GBA emulator I've ever seen but back then I didn't know that so that emulator was amazing to me back then. Still have fond memories of playing all the GBA games on it, still need to get my old hard drive full of ROM's

My first emulator was NESCafe. I had mixed feelings about it, but mostly my opinion was that it's a good emulator. I haven't used it in many years, but I'll list the pros and cons that I remember:

Pros
-Game Genie codes can be entered into it easily
-It has a rewind option (but now so does Mednafen on vizzed!)

Cons
-The speed is slower than it should be
-The rewind option wasn't that quick to use (Mednafen on vizzed is much better for that!)
-Different color scheme than it should be

Back then, I hadn't discovered VirtualNES so it was the only emulator I used for NES games. I was OK with that until I found out that there are other emulators that play games at a good speed.

My first emulator was PCSX2. I was trying to figure out how i could play GTA: San Andreas on my pc with this emulator (i did not know pc had "actual video games" at the time). Though i couldn't actually get it to work, i did however get other games to work later on. Still great to use for those PS2 only games.

My first emulator was probably Project 64. I used it when I wanted to do some LPs on my youtube channel and played a lot of Paper Mario.

I actually think it was Kega Fusion - though I will update if I'm wrong. I chose quite the advanced emulator to start my trip with. Like OP, I was a pre-teen, so obviously I wasn't the smartest in the world. Still, though, I had this huge fanboy instinct for FMV games when I was younger and still do now, (but not to a gracious extent.).

It was pretty much at the time where I aced Night Trap using a walkthrough sat for at least 2 hours trying to complete it, oh the good old days.

My first emulator was Visual Boy Advance as well. While it might not be the best GBA emulator, it allowed me to all the GBA games I wanted to at the time and that's all that really mattered in the end.

I don't remember the exact emulator I used, but I remember it was a NES one. This was back in 2003 if I recall, a friend of mine told me about emulation and said I can download the games right to my computer for free. Of course looking for emulators and ROMS, there were people saying that if I have the game longer then 24 hours, I'd go to jail, which looking back, I laugh about, because when was the last time someone went to jail for downloading a ROM of an outdated game? Either way, I am glad I did, I love emulation, I think it is so bad ass, and it helps preserve retro/classic gaming.