How to Play Retro Console Games on Android
Want to rediscover retro classics from PlayStation 1, PlayStation Portable, Nintendo DS, Game Boy, GameCube, and more? This guide covers everything you need to download and play old-school console games on your Android phone or tablet.
Step 1. Choose an Emulator App
To start, you’ll need to install the right emulator app for the console of your choice. An emulator allows Android to emulate the hardware of console platforms.
Multi-system emulators like ClassicBoy and RetroArch can emulate a range of gaming consoles, but they’re tricky to set up and use. Beginners can easily get lost in their complicated configurations and UIs. Instead, a single-system emulator is the simplest way to get started.
A standalone emulator is an Android app dedicated to a single platform. It’s designed and optimized for just one gaming console. That makes such emulators far more user-friendly.
You can find dozens of emulators dedicated to every popular platform on the Play Store, both paid and free. Some options work better than others—fewer or no ads, smoother performance, better support, and so on.
To save you the hassle of finding the right emulator for the console of your choice, I tested multiple apps for all major platforms. You’ll find my top picks for each platform, along with handy instructions for using them, at the end of this article.
Step 2. Download and Run Games on the Emulator
In addition to the emulator of your choice, you also need the game file for whichever game you want to play.
Game files, also called game ROMs, are digital copies of console cartridges and disks. They come in a variety of file formats (commonly ISO images and ZIP archives). You “load” a compatible ROM on the emulator, and it’s added to the library, ready to play.
Game publishers don’t sell game ROMs for emulation and downloading them from any online source may constitute piracy. Nevertheless, ROMs for almost every game and platform are widely available on the internet for free; you just need to
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