ahhh... "tell the story of how you found Macscene", eh?
Yeah... I was part of the emulation.net refugee crowd when that site went dormant and I wanted software updates. Back then I'd seen emuscene once or twice, but emulation.net seemed enough more straightforward to find the emulators, and I didn't care much for forums. I stuck around, though, joined the community at some point, and then went through undergrad and grad school, Sonic 2 hackery, nearly building a NES on a FPGA, and releasing some homebrew NES demos/games, finding the forums here to be a great resource/feedback-mechanism for all of it. These days I do miss the heady progress in new emulators that the '90s-early-'00s showed, particularly in the NES and SNES domain, but honestly there isn't much left to perfect on those fronts, and since I don't have the skill/knowledge/time myself to be working on newer system emulators, I can hardly hold the lack of progress against anyone else. I currently have a big queue of PS1/PS2 games to get through, so my emulation usage has been down lately, but I still do uncover and play through the odd independent translation or dive back into music archives.
One thing that I think has always helped is that as a Mac gaming/emulation crowd, none of us have likely grown up with an expectation of free games on demand, so the folks who do stick around are generally more interested in the "science" of the stuff than on a quick fix like you might find on a more PC-sourced gaming site. And that anchor of serious users has let us clearly see and respond to jokers before the posting environment shifts too much (although we have had a few endearing village idiots over the years...
).
