There’s no shortage of modern games at the Play store, but did you know there are also easy ways to play classic and retro games on your phone? Pretty nifty, huh? In fact, smartphones have become so powerful they can efficiently emulate most gaming consoles from the old days, and even a few from the modern days.
To emulate a classic game on Android, all you need is the right emulator app for your chosen console, and ROM images of the games you want to emulate.
In case you’re not familiar with the concept, this article will point out the best available emulators, including all you need to get started right away.
All You Need to Emulate Retro Games on Android
An emulator is essentially an app that mimics the hardware of another (less powerful) machine. For example – when you load up a Game Boy emulator on your Android, you can execute Game Boy game images as though you were using the real thing. Sometimes an emulator will even try to build up on the original experience by improving on the game’s native resolution, employing graphic shaders, and/or allowing cheat codes and real time saving and loading, anytime during game play.
Game images for emulators are often referred to as ROM files (for cartridge based media), or ISO files (for disk-based media). These files carry the exact information as the original media, except they’ve been converted to digital format. From a legal standpoint, ROM files can be equated to piracy though – unless you happen to own an original copy of the same game.
In any case, a quick Google search for a “game name +ROM” will easily locate game images that you can easily load up in any emulator.
Choosing the right emulator for Android
In the following sections, we’ll point out the best emulators currently available at the Play Store for some of the most popular game consoles of the past. There will often be alternative apps available, but here we will stick to those that consistently performed well for us – in terms of game compatibly as well as emulation accuracy. Also, most of the following emulator apps are either free or have a free demo version available.
GBA emulator
MyBoy: a fully realized emulator that supports most Game Boy Advance games at perfect speed – even on mid to low range phones. It lets you save and load gamestates on the fly, and even includes some handy extra functions like the ability to fast forward through the boring parts of a game.
Sega Genesis Emulator
GenPlusDroid: another great looking and breezy emulator that faithfully recreates the experience of playing on a Sega Genesis. In fact, the experience could be a little better than you remember, since this one uses modern graphic shaders to improving on the game’s image quality.
N64 Emulator
Super N64: who’d have thought that one day it would be possible to play N64 games on a phone? Using an emulator like this one, it’s super easy – and everything looks just as nice and fluid as you remember… especially if you own a quad core phone.
PS1 Emulator
ePSXe: running nearly all of the PS1 games in existence, this emulator will take you back to the early days of 3D gaming. It will take a higher end phone to run this at full speed, and PSX game ISO’s can eat up a lot up room on your Android… but come on, there’s just something magical about being able to play these games on your phone!
DS emulator
Drastic: This is where the Android emulators’ scene has reached its most impressive feat. Up until recently, available DS emulators for Android were very slow and featured low compatibility… until Drastic came up. This jewel of an emulator supports most DS games and even lets you set up different layouts for the double screens. For some games it actually seems to work better than the original console, especially since it allows both screens to merge seamlessly into a big vertical screen.
Other emulators
The emulators we pointed out above only represent the tip of the iceberg. There are many other emulators available at the Play Store, covering pretty much every game console and home computer older than the ones we mentioned. Anything from the Atari 2600 to the ZX Spectrum, C-64 and Amiga, and even old school PC and classic arcade games can be currently emulated on Android.
We hope this article inspired you to dive deep into the world of emulation for Android! Take this opportunity to revisit some of the games you played while growing up, in case you’re up for some nostalgic sessions.