Previously on Lemmy:
Past Discussions:
Now that our buying guide (or a first draft of it) is done, let’s get back to our usual discussions. This week’s topic is emulators, by request of u/AlmightySnoo. As emulators could not be loaded on iPhones without jumping through many hoops, Android remains the preferred OS for emulation on smartphones.
(Reminder, rule 2 is in effect, so please don’t give out links to ROM sites.)
Now, as we all know, the mobile gaming landscape in 2023 is not great exactly. Most of the games in twr Play Store are designed for frustration instead of fun, littered with microtransactions, timegating, and of course, ads. Even the good games have terrible monitization practices, and there are a lot more bad games than good.
But emulated games are a way to get away from that, and let us remember a time when games on the go are simply games that are fun and nothing else, the nights when you are sitting in the backseat of your parents car with only the glow of your GameBoy and the passing streetlight as you play Pokemon. Nostalgia from a time when we didn’t have grownup things to worry about.
But of course, many emulators didn’t only aim to “emulate” the original console, but to enhance them into the modern age: Save states, rewind, enhanced graphics, texture replacements, easy cheats, touchscreen and gamepads. Things we could only dream of as kids are now reality.
So, please share your experiences with emulation on Android and give out some cool tips and tricks here.
(A special shoutout to RetroArch for having the (dis)honor of staying as one of the most frustrating software that I have ever used.)
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Lemuroid https://github.com/Swordfish90/Lemuroid is by far my favourite console emulator on android and its free and open source. Its got quick saves and fast forwarding which is great for Pokemon. It also supports zipped ROMs so no need to unzip anything and it has worked with any ROM hack I’ve tried.
I mainly use it for GB, NDS and 3DS since I usually only play on my phone when I have some time to kill when I’m travelling, but it supports so many other consoles too.
- Atari 2600 (A26) - Atari 7800 (A78) - Atari Lynx (Lynx) - Nintendo (NES) - Super Nintendo (SNES) - Game Boy (GB) - Game Boy Color (GBC) - Game Boy Advance (GBA) - Sega Genesis (aka Megadrive) - Sega CD (aka Mega CD) - Sega Master System (SMS) - Sega Game Gear (GG) - Nintendo 64 (N64) - PlayStation (PSX) - PlayStation Portable (PSP) - FinalBurn Neo (Arcade) - Nintendo DS (NDS) - NEC PC Engine (PCE) - Neo Geo Pocket (NGP) - Neo Geo Pocket Color (NGC) - WonderSwan (WS) - WonderSwan Color (WSC) - Nintendo 3DS (3DS)I’ll have to check that out. Happy with what I’ve been using but always glad to support open source!
Out of curiosity, how does NDS emulation feel on Android? I have a 3DS with Kirby Canvas Curse (underrated game btw) and it’s hard for me to imagine how it would be playable without a stylus.
I’m big into the SBC gaming world, where increasingly more and more devices are launched with Android as opposed to Linux. My current device is the retroid pocket 3+ which runs android 11 and retails for 150ish. I’ve been using emulators for the past 15 years so I have a hearty collection of roms and along with the fact you can play play store games and stream with it, it’s pretty much the perfect device for me. Retroarch handles everything up until GameCube/PS2 era, then standalone emulators for the rest. 3ds is playable with vulkan and GameCube is too if you downscale. I literally can’t tell the difference between any resolution so it’s perfectly playable for me.
If you’re looking to get into either a dedicated handheld console for emulation or just connecting an Xbox controller to your phone, check out retro game corps on YouTube. He has detailed guides on how to set up every emulator, every handheld, everything you can think in relation to this. If you at all have nostalgia for this kind of stuff, I’d say invest like $100-$200 into one and just go crazy. They’re all seriously great little devices and being able to play all the games you did when you were a kid or just missed out on is awesome.
I’ve used the paid versions of My OldBoy!, My Boy!, and Drastic for years for GBC/GBA/DS emulation and been very happy with them. Citra for 3DS struggles on my Pixel 6 but is great on my PC
Have you tried Vulkan beta on Citra yet?
I found Citra performance to be pretty game dependent.
I haven’t. I’ve only really used Citra for Pokemon 3DS games. When it didn’t run well on my phone I just resolved to play on PC.
Retroarch on mobile is definitely not a fun experience. Luckily there’s no shortage of good emulators for each console. My experience emulating is pretty fun, I pushed my phone to the limit with Switch emulation via Skyline, but most high-end emulators need a Snapdragon chip to work best.
Speaking of emulation, some people that originally made Skyline are working on a Windows game emulator to release next year. I’m thinking emulation is going to be a huge selling point for android then.
Install F-droid and add the official repository. The UI is very rough. But it all works just as on the desktop.
Are you taking about Cassia? If so, got a link to the repo?
Again, thanks a lot Margot for the awesome community threads!
I’m pretty new myself to emulation on Android so I was pretty intrigued when I got introduced to PPSSPP, a FOSS PSP emulator that’s available for Android. I didn’t pay attention in the beginning and Obtainium was pulling an 8 years old version (as the author isn’t hosting Android builds on his GitHub anymore, they’re hosted elsewhere), but surprisingly it worked amazingly well on my Pixel 7a with Android 14 despite being based on the old OpenGL backend (while the new versions come by default with the Vulkan backend enabled). Installing it from the Play Store gets you the latest version.
What I like the most is how easy it is to combine different shaders and have a live preview of the result:
Right now I’m still (re)playing around with Crisis Core: FF VII and haven’t found a good combination of shaders and haven’t gotten much luck with upscaling shaders yet, but the CRT lines shader looks cool so far. Maybe someone more experienced with PPSSPP has some suggestions?
Also, I ended up buying the Gamesir X2 USB-C controller and it works perfectly with PPSSPP, those ugly on-screen controls are no more and the phone feels now like a real handheld console.
Dolphin (GameCube emulator) works really well on my Pixel 7a and for now it’s running Zelda: The Wind Waker without any issues or slowdowns. My Gamesir X2 (USB-C) gamepad is also automatically detected.
You should try some PS2 games on it too, it’s fairly new development, but it looks promising.
I bought a GamSir X2 Pro and decided to try emulators on my Pixel 7 Pro. Everyone says it’s shit because it’s not Snapdragon, yet I’ve successfully emulated up to the Wii without any issues?
I never tried the switch emulator.
Pixel 7a here 🖐️ Same for me, PPSSPP is running extremely smoothly with 4x rendering resolution.
Does anyone know how to play Android games that aren’t compatible with current versions of android on Android?
You can either try emulating Android on PC (see https://lemmy.world/post/2729293 if you’re on Linux) or running an Android emulator on… Android (one app is VMOS but it got mixed reviews).
Hopefully one day we’ll have a better solution
