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

howtogeek.com:

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:

Hardware

Processor and Clock Speed

RAM Available

Super Nintendo Entertainment System (SNES)

Custom 65C816 @ 3.58 MHz

128 Kb

Sega Dreamcast

RISC CPU @ 200MHz

16MB

Sony PSP

PSP