Once you discovered video game emulation, How long after did you begin making codes?

[OldSchoolGamer]

From the time you first discovered video game emulation, How long after did you begin to make cheat codes?

[Helder]

I discovered Emulation after I was somewhat proficient in PSX & N64 Gameshark hacking, I remember playing all the games I couldn't like over seas games such as Seiken Densetsu 3 aka Secret of Mana 2, and thats when I found that the emulator had a cheat function and I hacked the shit out of that game.
I hacked tons of item codes literally over 200 and then I thought I should go back and play all my favorites and hack them and the rest is history. I can't play many games without some way of cheating/hacking or exploiting something to give me the upper hand or just make a game more fun.

[rimsky82]

I first learned about emulation in about 1998, when I was a junior in high school. I was in Cincinatti, playing in the state orchestra. I was there for a week, and stayed at a host's house, who told me all about emulation. From then on, I just used it to play the old games I grew up playing, but was never allowed to own since my parents were killjoys with video games.

I didn't use them to hack until about 3 years ago. Then it was like a whole new world opened up. So to answer your original question, about 10-11 years. It's a bit unfortunate since it was when I discovered emulation that the retro hacking scene was booming, but now, not so much.

[bungholio]

I first encountered emulation back around the time just before the ps2. I had a gameshark for my old ps1 and hated not having working codes for Quake 2. Never heard of "different versions" of a game that were identical, so I just assumed the official codes were wrong. I then found my own with playstation emulator cheater. I came to this site, and then very shortly after that realized the codes were already found. I was irked. The codes were always around, I just didn't know where to look for them. At the very least though I found a few codes that weren't already found. Have all keys, moon jump, probably some other things I forgot a very long time ago.

It wasn't so much emulators as it was a complete lack of patience that I started finding codes. Resident Evil Outbreak File 1 was the real starting point. I was on the bioflames forums and saw users made a bunch of codes for the first version of the game, and they didn't work on my version. Nobody around to fill a request, screw it. I grabbed whatever I could find for codebreaker v7+ code conversion, and started off with the "2" code type and just kept increasing addresses by 4 and gave them values of 00000000 or FFFFFFFF. I saw lots of other effects before I found a guy's movement speed modifier. Kept saying "I'm not waiting anymore, I'll take all damn month if I need to."

[Abystus]

Well like some other people here I started hacking with RAM codes on the N64 Gameshark. I would say I've known about emulators (used them) since around 1998, and once I found ones with a way to cheat I looked into it. I hacked RAM codes for a while (easy easy easy) before I started applying my programming knowledge to seeing how these things actually work (ASM). After I understood the language I was dealing with, it was pretty simple to follow the logic (for the most part). After that I only used RAM codes as base codes for my ROM codes, though there are some things that are better in RAM like modifiers, but it just takes a little more work in ROM is all.

If your looking to hacking something, then start with RAM known/unknown value hacking. The concept is simplistic (It's all based on order in RAM hacking.), and should be the base for anyone attempting to get into this. Hacking ROM will take a bit more learning, and most likely some programming logic to understand how the code works. I would think it's been long enough now that you should start hacking, and making your presence known as a hacker.

Basic Hacks (Things you see on the screen, or things you can guess are increasing/decreasing to a pattern.):

Infinite Lives
Infinite Health
Weapon Modifiers
Character Modifiers
Level Modifiers
...

Once you have mastered the art of RAM hacking (shouldn't take long), you can move on to the more advanced things we deal with daily. I know you want to play your games, but trust me it's always more fun to play them with cheats you made .

[Lazy Bastard]

I had a Game Genie for my SNES (which I bought for FF4, then discovered that something was wrong with my FF4 cartridge, or maybe all of them, that caused it to crash with a Game Genie...ugh), so when I discovered emulators, I immediately looked around for a way to use Game Genie codes. When I saw references to 'PAR' codes, I looked into them, discovered that they were RAM constant-write codes, and found them on various sites. However, it wasn't until I got a GSPro for the PSX and started hacking games with that, that I turned back to NES and SNES and started hacking those. So...10 years?