I bought my first Android phone in late 2010. Its 600 MHz single-core CPU just barely ran a GBA emulator at playable speeds. The screen wasn’t multitouch and a bug in the operating system (fixed about a year or two later by the manufacturer) meant that any time the screen was being touched, CPU load would shoot up to 100% and everything slowed down to a crawl, which meant I could only play turn-based titles. That’s how I discovered Advance Wars.
On a related note I was recently incredibly impressed to see how well Dolphin Emulator runs GameCube and Wii games on Android, though even fully working touch controls aren’t really viable for anything other than glorious turn-based combat!
PS2 emulation is my recent surprise. If you have a powerful enough device, then AetherSX2 will run games extremely well on it. Less powerful devices can still run PSP games using the remarkable PPSSPP emulator.
Then there’s the whole business of emulating Windows PCs. There’s a number of impressive apps that can be used to play even fairly new titles. I believe Winlator is the latest.
I’ve only used it with older games so far, but it works really well already. If you don’t mind a bit of fiddling with the configuration, I highly recommend trying it out.
Edit: ETA Prime’s video on the emulator is a few months old already, but it’s a good starting point:
I bought my first Android phone in late 2010. Its 600 MHz single-core CPU just barely ran a GBA emulator at playable speeds. The screen wasn’t multitouch and a bug in the operating system (fixed about a year or two later by the manufacturer) meant that any time the screen was being touched, CPU load would shoot up to 100% and everything slowed down to a crawl, which meant I could only play turn-based titles. That’s how I discovered Advance Wars.
On a related note I was recently incredibly impressed to see how well Dolphin Emulator runs GameCube and Wii games on Android, though even fully working touch controls aren’t really viable for anything other than glorious turn-based combat!
PS2 emulation is my recent surprise. If you have a powerful enough device, then AetherSX2 will run games extremely well on it. Less powerful devices can still run PSP games using the remarkable PPSSPP emulator.
Then there’s the whole business of emulating Windows PCs. There’s a number of impressive apps that can be used to play even fairly new titles. I believe Winlator is the latest.
Yeah x86 emulation is actually huge, is winlator in a usable state yet?
I’ve only used it with older games so far, but it works really well already. If you don’t mind a bit of fiddling with the configuration, I highly recommend trying it out.
Edit: ETA Prime’s video on the emulator is a few months old already, but it’s a good starting point:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Rd30iUUkJ1A
Amazing, I’m saving that!