In the early ninety's , I went to visit a friend of mine that I didn't see in a long time.
We grew up together and he's the one who tought me everything I new about computers.
He also made me by a Sinclair ZX Spectrum around 1984 because he thought that the overall architecture was better then the C64 ( which every other kid had in school at the time ) while he had an MSX, and later on he got himself an MSX2, 2+,an Atari ST, then an Amiga and finally he decided that he needed more clock speed and moved to PC. His family was doing well economically and he was the only child, his parents were very generous to him * maybe compensating for something?).
While all I got in those years was an humble Spectrum +2, and then his imported MSX2+ second hand.
Of course at that time there were lots of disputes over which computer was better, but never the less the years went by and when I went to see him after a long time ( but still those rivalry weren't forgotten ), he was surprisingly playing the Spectrum version of Space harrier on his PC !
I was stunned, as I never had the chance to import or pirate that game for myself, and there he was, playing it on his PC with the beep sound realistically coming out of the computer beeper !
I was confused, and then he explained to me what it was.
Basically there was the spectrum rom embedded into this ' emulator ' and it was exactly 32KB.
I had a crappy laptop at home, geez I don't even remember if it was 286 or 386, but anyway I grabbed " that rom " along with a cd-rom that he made for me with an early build of MAME and a few hindreds games for it, a PC engine shareware emulator ( which turned out to be one of the best ever and is still updated today ) and a nes emulator with about 60 games, plus I believe there was a master system in there with 10- 15 games, I still keep that CD rom nowadays !.
So that's how it started , and that's my official first ROM, even though it wasn't strictly a game so to speak, the magic was there and the damage was done , I became a pirate already !