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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:
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:
Processor and Clock Speed
Custom 65C816 @ 3.58 MHz
RISC CPU @ 200MHz
16MB
PSP CPU @ 333 MHz
32MB
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.
Processors and Clock Speeds
iPhone 14
6GB
Samsung S22
1x3.00 GHz Cortex-X2 & 3x2.50 GHz Cortex-A710 & 4x1.80 GHz Cortex-A510
8GB
OnePlus Nord 3
1x3.05 GHz Cortex-X2 & 3x2.85 GHz Cortex-A710 & 4x1.80 GHz Cortex-A510
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 emulatorsand 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:
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:
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.
