You Can Keep Your Retro Gaming Devices—I Love Smartphone Emulators

It's no surprise that I—like many others—love retro games. Lots of hardware companies have capitalized on the newfound love of emulated games and emulation for this very reason. However, there are some software emulation that works right on your smartphone, without requiring you to buy more hardware. It's great.

Reasons I Prefer Smartphone Emulation

I know a lot of people out there would demand to know why I prefer using my smartphone to play retro games, and the reasoning is simple. I'll break it down:

• Convenient: I already have my smartphone in my pocket at all times. All it takes to run a game is to load it onto the emulator and play it while I'm waiting in line at the DMV or on public transport.
• Accessible: Everyone has a smartphone, and running retro games on it doesn't require you to buy new hardware. You can just use your phone as it is.
• Cost-Effective: Buying a dedicated hardware emulator for portable gaming can be quite pricey, and some of these hardware emulators cost as much as or more than a new smartphone.

If I'm trying to emulate something from more-than-20-year-old hardware like a Nintendo 64, I don't need all the bells and whistles that these new hardware emulators come with. All I need is a halfway-decent processor and a piece of software that does the emulation for me.

Modern Smartphones Are Powerful Enough to Run Emulators

Anyone familiar with emulators knows that they typically need to be several times more powerful than the hardware they're trying to emulate. These emulators take instructions from the original hardware and translate them into instructions that the current hardware can execute, requiring more overhead for processing. Luckily, modern smartphones are far more powerful than most of the hardware they're emulating. For example:

Even the more powerful retro gaming hardware had specs that were limited by today's smartphone standards. For comparison, here are a few specs for current-generation smartphones on the market.

These are current mid-range or last-release phones, making them equivalent to what most people already have access to. It's already obvious that these phones surpass the things they're emulating several times over. Phones won't have a problem emulating the hardware for these retro games in the least.

The Software: Getting It All To Run

Since this is about software emulation, the most important thing is getting the games to run. PC emulators and smartphone emulators both need a core to run the games and the games themselves. Luckily, there are several options for smartphone users who want to emulate their favorite games:

• RetroArch (Android | iPhone): I use this one myself. It offers a wide range of emulated devices covering manufacturers from Sony to NeoGeo. It's also pretty straightforward to set up on a PC as well.
• MyBoy! (Android): This is a great, lightweight emulator for those who are only concerned about Gameboy and Gameboy Advance games.
• Delta (iPhone): Delta is a great Nintendo DS emulator that emulates the dual-touchscreen element of the original hardware well.
• EmuBox (Android): Another multi-system emulator that covers a lot of systems, not limited to the SNES, Gameboy, GBA, and most recently, PSX/PS1.

Each of these apps has its nuances. RetroArch is one of the best free options, as it emulates anything I could want and minimizes the annoyances of a free app.

The Downsides of Smartphone Retro Gaming on Emulators

I love my smartphone emulators to play retro games on, but I'll also be the first to admit that there are some significant downsides to running these on a smartphone and not on dedicated hardware. Among the annoyances I've come across when undertaking smartphone emulation are:

• Battery Drain: Generally, my battery is efficient enough to last for an entire day without needing a recharge. When gaming, however, I usually need to take a power bank with me to recharge since the emulator uses a lot of battery power.
• Overheating: This has only really happened to me once, but it took me about half an hour to get my phone back to room temperature. With phones that have a lot of background processes going on, overheating could result, and this could permanently damage your smartphone.
• Control Issues: While this might not bother some people (like me), I've had friends complain about the touch controls. Retro games offered better tactile controls using their D-Pad and buttons, and you don't get the same feeling using touch-overlay controls.
• Space: Most retro games are small, but larger ROMs like PSPs or Dreamcasts can quickly eat away at internal storage space. For phones without an SD card expansion slot, this could be an issue. I actually upgraded to a phone that could take an SD card, so I don't have this concern.

I agree that hardware emulators have phones beaten in some cases, but I still find gaming on my phone more convenient.

Is A Smartphone A Better Option for Retro Gaming?

Objectively, hardware emulation beats smartphone emulation in some cases. They're much better with battery efficiency, offer updates to the controls of the era, and usually don't overheat when the processing gets too heavy. The thing I can't reconcile myself with is having an entirely different device to game with than my phone, which I'm already taking everywhere.

Using my phone for gaming does drain the battery, but in this day and age, getting a power bank isn't too expensive. Seeing notifications pop up while you're gaming is worth the hassle since you won't miss any messages. Also, since being engrossed in a phone is the norm these days, you won't get any weird looks about your choice of hardware. All of these things combine to make me think that smartphone retro gaming with an emulator is a worthwhile pursuit.

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