The Mobile Gamer

Emulation is process of playing games from different platforms on your phone (or basically any other device but this is a mobile gaming site). Let’s say my favourite game was for example Tony Hawk’s Underground for the Nintendo Gamecube when I was a kid. Now I can download gamecube emulator and play my favourite game on the go, anywhere and anytime. Sounds good, right? Here are some basic details.

EMULATABLE PLATFORMS

1) on any device

• playstation 1
• nintendo 64
• (super) nintendo entertainment system (nes/snes)
• nintendo gameboy/color/advance
• nintendo ds
• sega dreamcast
• sega mega drive
• sega game gear
• arcade games

2) need at least average device

• nintendo gamecube
• nintendo wii
• playstation portable

3) powerful devices only

• playstation 2
• playstation vita
• nintendo 3ds
• nintendo switch

Emulators for every platform on the list should be available on google play, for most platforms there are multiple, both free and paid so choose the one that suits you best. Some emulators are shady, for example there are around 100 reasons why damonps2 sucks and shouldn’t be used, one of them being having a trojan.

Having a good file manager can be very useful for emulation, my app of choice is zarchiver, it’s free and has many functions. Another good tip is try using a gamepad if you have any, it’s much better to play emulated games with one as it’s sometimes hard to use shoulder buttons (L2/LT/R2/RT/L1/LB/R1/RB/Z) on touchscreen.

Now when all set, how to get games? If you still have your old discs/cartriges you can dump the files from them, if not you can buy new or search around internet for archives that have the game you want, although that could be considered piracy so I can’t talk about much details here, but it can be discussed on reddit and other social media.

When you have your emulator of choice and your desired game you just need to locate the folder with the game through the emulator and play. More demanding platform emulators might need some aditional settings tweaked to run as intended, but that varies with device so you need to experiment a bit.

If you need any help you can visit the r/emulationonandroid community on reddit, if you want help from me specificaly you will find me there under nametag GokiPotato.