Where should someone new to the Legend of Zelda franchise start?

I've never really paid much attention to the LoZ games beforehand, but after seeing the absolutely incredible new trailer for Breath of the Wild, I realized that I really wanted to dive into it. I know very little about the franchise, so I was wondering, which order should I play the games in? Is there any continuity between games? Would I be okay playing BotW without playing any of the others first? Which game is your favorite? Pretty much tell me anything I need to know about the games, please!

The only thing is that the only console I own is a Wii (lame, I know) but I also have a Gamecube memory card. I do have a second Wii that I plan to sell so I can buy the Nintendo Switch (which looks AMAZING btw!) However, I am also willing to install emulators on my PC to play (any advice about emulators would be helpful as well).

Thanks very much in advance!

To my knowledge, almost none of the Legend of Zelda games are related. They all have self contained stories which mostly tend to be a retelling of the same basic plot.

Personally I have played most of the 3D games in the series and I still consider the old N64 titles to be the best. That would be Ocarina of Time, and Majora's Mask. Then there are two Gamecube titles, Wind Waker and Twilight Princess, which are two very different games. I personally enjoyed both of them, but Twilight Princess is definitely a lot better in my opinion. However, this is a matter of taste and I have seen many people hold Wind Waker as the better of the two.

Twilight Princess is also available on the Wii, but I could never get into the motion controls, they ruin the game for me. This also brings me to Skyward Sword, which is only available on the Wii. I tried to play it, but the motion controls ruined it for me. It also plays very differently with different type of puzzles because of the focus on motion controls.

Those are the only titles I have played, and among these only Ocarina of Time and Majora's Mask are truly connected in plot, it is actually the same Link you play on those two games. All the other games are not directly related. I have very little experience with the 2D titles in the series, so I can't offer any opinions on those.

When it comes to emulators, there are some very good emulators available on Linux. For N64 titles you can use Mupen64Plus, but it does require a bit of time to configure. There is no graphical interface to it so you would need to spend a bit of time to edit the config file based of game preferences. Once you got that out of the way, games will play nicely, and I have played several N64 titles on this emulator.

Then there is a combined Gamecube and Wii emulator called Dolphin Emulator. This is a very feature complete emulator and I have a lot of good experience with it.

One thing to note about emulators, acquiring game ROM files is illegal so we will not be able to help with that here.

If you don't mind the very dated graphics for N64 titles, I really recommend starting with Ocarina of Time (what booman refers to as Zelda 64), it is a very good game. Majora's Mask is also a top notch game and it continues after Ocarina of Time.