(13/12/2015 04:24 PM)S7* Wrote:  I was a web-oriented guy years ago but mostly lost interest - but now I'm trying to get into Java with the outlook of developing Android apps, eventually.

With all the rage about HTML5 these days, the two may be closer than you think (web and app development that is).
A number of tools exist to, in fact, turn a web app into a "native" app.

(14/12/2015 08:59 AM)Joom Wrote:  I'm gonna need to learn C++. I'm wanting to get into low level emulation development so that I can better understand how emulators work and improve upon them.

If you're looking to understand how emulators work, you're better off starting with system/hardware design (i.e. CPU/GPU architectures etc).  Emulators ultimately are software implementations of the hardware (modern console emulators less so, due to low level emulation being very slow).  Whilst you could try to interpret emulator code to understand how the console works, it makes a lot more sense to just learn the console hardware itself directly.
If, on the other hand, you're looking to contribute, C++ knowledge is fine, but you probably won't be contributing to the core unless you understand how the console works.