Things To Do On Vacation: Mobile Retrogaming

Week One: Things That Work In Airplane Mode

Okay, okay, okay. You want to game, but it's the holidays, and you're desperate for something that bangs on that ol' nostalgia button. Stuff you played as a kid. If that's what you're looking for then... step into this dark alley with me, and I've got a coat full of brand-new emulators for you. Fell off the back of a truck.

I kid -- emulators are not themselves contraband. It's actual case law, established by Sony suing someone over it and, amazingly, losing. ROMs might be illegal, but you're on your own for those. Although I will say, if you can't find what you want on the first page of your search results, congratulations on misspelling the name of your game in a way that even Google can't figure out.

Much as the Android people have been shafted by the past couple days of fancy mobile games, the iOS people are going to get shafted here. Apple curates their App Store very closely, whereas to get something on Google Play all you have to do is demonstrate that it's not blatantly illegal, won't set your phone on fire, and sometimes does something that might charitably be described as 'working'. There probably are emulators for iOS, but they would require a jailbroken device, and I don't know much about them.

Below are some of the emulators I've had good luck with. Judging from the fact that some of them will run on my phone, which is a smartphone only in the most technical sense of having an OS and a touchscreen, I suspect that any device too stupid to pretend to be a Game Boy would also be too stupid to boot the operating system. Note also that if you want a dedicated handheld emulator, an old smartphone without the SIM card is just a tiny WiFi tablet.

Consoles & Handhelds

Nostalgia.NES - Nintendo Entertainment System / Famicom
Free with ads | Paid without ads

SNES9x EX+ - Super Nintendo Entertainment System / Super Famicom.
Free without ads

My Boy! - Gameboy Advance
Free with ads | Paid without ads

My OldBoy! - Gameboy / Gameboy Color
Free with ads | Paid without ads

(Everything above here will run without complaint on my phone, which is an Alcatel OneTouch 5020T running Android 4.2/Jellybean.)

ePSXe - original Playstation (requires BIOS, search by PSX model number. Use SCPH-1000 for max flexibility).
Free without ads

(Everything above here runs in a 4:3 aspect ratio, or close to it. By default, all of these emulators provide on-screen controls, which on a widescreen 16:9 screen held in portrait orientation, will be below the picture entirely. In landscape, the controls will be almost, but not entirely, clear of the image. You can move and resize the controls in all of these, in the Settings menu somewhere.)

DraStic - Nintendo DS
Paid without ads

PPSSPP - Playstation Portable
Free without ads | Donation without ads

(In DraStic and PPSSPP, there is no way to configure on-screen controls such that they are clear of the active picture area. The DS uses dual screens, which are stacked in portrait and set side by side in landscape, and the PSP has a native 16:9 screen to begin with. DS games that exclusively use either the touchscreen or the buttons for control, such as visual novels and a lot of JRPGs ported from NES/SNES, work fine. For PSP games, you just have to put up with the transparent buttons being on the screen all the time. I got through the quick-time events in Danganronpa okay, but I would recommend getting a gamepad for anything twitchier than that.)

A lot of people swear by RetroArch, but for some reason that one crashed repeatedly and hard on the Kindle, and I got tired of trying to figure out why.

Computer Games

aFreeBox / DOSBox Turbo
Free with ads | Paid without ads

Plays old DOS-era computer games. While you can use a Bluetooth keyboard to play these, it works best with games that supported mouse use, and best best with games that coped gracefully with a laptop touchpad.  Works best with point-and-click adventure games, where you can essentially configure the entire touchscreen area as a giant touchpad. I recall the original Discworld game working well.

SCUMM VM
Free without ads

Plays adventure games that ran on the LucasArts SCUMM (Script Creation Utility for Maniac Mansion) engine. As the name suggests, it was invented for the game Maniac Mansion, but later expanded upon for the sequel Day of the Tentacle, and used for other games like Secret of/Curse of Monkey Island, Full Throttle, Sam & Max, and Loom.

ZMPP
Free without ads

The official Z-Machine interpreter of the Z-Machine Preservation Project.  Runs text adventures built on versions 1-5 of the Z-Machine, an invention of Infocom that saved them having to port Zork to eighty bajillion kinds of microcomputer. This includes basically anything published by classic Infocom, plus any of the Inform-based text adventures at the IF Archive. It is not physically possible for you to run out of text adventures to play, no matter how long your layover is. (There are probably a lot of these Z-interpreters around, but I picked this specific one because the developer was listed as "Box of Rats".)

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