5 Best Emulators for Android 2023- FREE

okay a new age is upon us and a new age and a better way to play retro games from your better days or if you're a young Padawan learner AKA a young Jedi gamer I will show you the best way to play console games on your Android phone including Legendary game titles that you might never have played before gaming hits from the Dark Ages before the internet became publicly available and do you know why this is a good thing it means that all of the games in this video are not internet dependent and have no advertising banners or pop-ups like modern Android games do and this means if you're going off grid on a long-haul flight with no Wi-Fi or data these games will still run perfectly and the cherry on the cake is that all of these emulators are entirely free so here are my top 5 game emulators to try in 2023 on Android number five okay this emulator is in my top five for five good reasons one the Nintendo 64 was fantastic two this emulator does support gamepads and three the game sizes are tiny even the largest games are around 30 megabytes it's called the m64 plus FZ and the m64 plus FC can run games directly from zip files which makes those small games even smaller and do you realize what this means this means you can store a massive catalog of the best N64 titles on your device without having to worry about storage space and if you are worried about storage space then you could get one of these tiny USBC pen drives to store your games on and only plug it in when you need it there's an affiliate Link in the description if you want to pick one up and the fourth reason why the m64 plus FZ is in my top five is that at the time that the N64 was in its prime over 25 years ago it was competing against the far more graphically Superior PlayStation so Nintendo's solution to this was to focus on gameplay and not so much the graphics and what this means for you and I is that the m64 plus FZ emulator will not strain your device when it comes to Graphics you won't have to sacrifice graphics performance and more importantly you won't have to sacrifice any of the fun in fact the N64 Graphics rendering should be a walk it apart for most modern smartphones these days and the fifth and final reason why this is five in my top five is because it's so easy to set up you just download it directly from the Google Play Store and during the first launch of the app you'll be prompt to the point to the folder where your N64 game ROMs are and that's pretty much it and if you want to know how to get N64 ROMs onto your device Google is your friend just say hey Google how do I get N64 ROMs on my device ask and you shall be given and I've got a gold medal Emoji for anybody who knows where that quote comes from and something that I know a lot of you appreciate about Nintendo in general is how many Pokemon games are available on their consoles dating all the way back to 1999 and keep in mind the N64 was released in 1997 and it is a Pokemon game available on it in fact if you're an aspiring Pokemon Master if you use all of the emulators that I'm going to show you in this video including the last two you just might be able to finally catch them all like what I did there now going back to what I said about file sizes The Legend of Zelda Ocarina of Time on the N64 is around 30 megabytes and it does play beautifully here but let's say you want to play this same game but with much better graphics then you might want to try out number four on my list Citra is available on the Google Play store for free Citra is a dedicated Nintendo 3DS emulator and The Legend of Zelda Ocarina of Time was remastered for the 3DS and it looks much better graphically on 3DS however the file size is jump from 30 megabytes to 350 megabytes also the demand on your processor's resources are much higher than the m64 plus FZ emulator so just be mindful of those facts and be aware that some games do not run as smoothly as others and if you want to know which ones work the best you can check out citra's official website there'll be a link in the description now I like Citra for a few reasons I like the second screen functionality that the 3DS had and that touchscreen input works perfectly on the Android devices and that touchscreen element was a unique part of the DS setup and something else that stands out about this emulator is that if you really wanted to you could actually emulate the 3d effect with the stereoscopic 3D mode and if you want to try this out next time you go to the cinema to watch a 3D movie just make sure you bring home a pair of those 3D glasses now if Citra doesn't run smoothly for you the first time you try it just be patient as when you play games on Citrus City will start to build a two gigabyte shade of cache and once it's done this you should start to see performance improvements when it comes to emulations if it doesn't improve then maybe you should get the Citra enhanced MMJ app it is a superior and more up-to-date version of Citra and the reason I didn't mention it at the beginning is because it's not actually available on the Google Play Store and if you want the Citroen Hearts MMJ 2.2.0 or newer the first thing you need to do is scroll down just below this video and see that button where it says subscribe click that okay I'm joking you don't need to do that all you need to do is visit the website in the description you'll need to download and install from your web browser this means you'll be prompted to enable permissions to install from unknown sources and one detail that should be mentioned in videos like this that often isn't is that if you're going to give this permission to your web browser once you've downloaded and installed it what you should really do is go back to your web browser app go back to the permission settings and disable install from unknown sources just to be safe now if it's still running slow on the enhanced version of Citra here's a couple of little tricks that you can try to speed things up make sure you exit your game first go to the audio settings and disable audio stretching let's go back to your settings go to the graphics menu and enable new 3DS mode this was a mode that was designed specifically for newer 3DS games so if you've got some ROMs that didn't play before on the original Citra there's a chart they might actually play in this new 3DS mode and I don't know if it's just my imagination but when I switched on the new 3DS mode it did seem to improve the emulator's performance on my device it was either that or maybe the Shader cache finally kicked in after playing Luigi's Mansion for a little while anyway here's the last resort trick for you if it's not running smoothly yet if you go into settings go into graphics and turn on the texture load hack if you do this you'll sacrifice the quality of the graphics but it might actually help the games run more smoothly it really is the last resort though so don't use this if you don't need to and also something you should know Citra isn't the only way to emulate 3DS games on Android stick around if this doesn't work for you because there is a plan B okay let's go back three generations of PlayStations and revisit the PS2 this one is ever evolving and probably the best PS2 emulator out there is the Aether sx2 and I say revisit because I did make another emulator video that mentioned the Aether SX and I'll link that at the end so AE for sx2 quite recently had a significant bump in performance thanks to the official Dev team it is available on the Google Play Store and it's now smoother and more efficient than ever before and seeing how much better it's gotten since I last used it was surprising now to get this working you will need a bios file for a ether sx2 it will ask you for it the first time you boot it up and a simple Google search should do the trick if you're wondering how to get the BIOS file if you're really stuck I've got a few links on my website to some explainers if you need them and trust me don't stress out about this it's easier than you'd think it literally takes two minutes now once you've got that part of the puzzle out of the way then all you need to do is get your PS2 game ROM files you might be wondering how do I get PS2 ROM files once again Google is your friend and let me add a little disclaimer here you can backup games that you own you should not download games that you do not own and this applies to all the emulator roms mentioned in this video as well as TV series movies and music you get the idea okay now we've got that out of the way I've got one of the greatest PS2 games of all time running here at full speed whilst being upscaled 4X I should mention I am using the iq11 which is a brand new Qualcomm Snapdragon 8 Gen 2 smartphone and it's one of the most powerful phones you can get right now at the time this video so I've maxed out all of the graphic settings I've also set the Aether sx2 to use the Vulcan back end and if you have a newer Snapdragon chip I recommend you do the same and the emulation here is amazing it's so silky smooth even God of War 2 at its most chaotic moments still runs amazingly well it really is impressive now if you don't have the latest Snapdragon device do not fear it will still run well on most modern smartphones and if it is running slow I recommend not upscaling the graphics like I have keep it on the native settings and you should be good to go and there are various other settings that can speed up your emulation if you need them and there are plenty of videos that will walk you through this I'll link those in my blog post at work here.net and of course gamepads do work here so you could actually hook up an official PlayStation controller to your phone if you want that proper PlayStation experience so you really do have to try out the Aether sx2 one crucial thing that you need to know though is that the file sizes are enormous God of War 2 for example is over seven gigabytes but you know what if you're going off grid or on a long-haul flight the storage space is a small price to pay for hours upon hours of uninterrupted premium tier gameplay with no ads totally worth it in my opinion number two on my list is a double barreled Smoking Gun of an emulator it is the Dolphin Emulator and if you haven't guessed by now yes I am a Nintendo fan and if you are too this may be your favorite emulator of them all because it emulates one of Nintendo's most underrated consoles of all time the GameCube and also one of their best selling consoles of all time the Nintendo Wii so the GameCube games are around one gigabyte in size so that's far less devastating than the PS2 ROM file sizes so this means you can load your device up with quite a few without having to worry about it too much and the Dolphin Emulator does support controllers as well but setting up the buttons for this one is a little bit of a riddle so let me help you with that to do this go to the home screen go to settings then go to GameCube input then Gamecube Emulator controller one now tap the word emulated here is the menu to bind the keys to whatever controller you're using and you will need to do the same for the Wii controller inputs but mapping the Wii controller inputs is far more tricky as some games on the Wii did require the Wii Remote and nunchuck and you couldn't play it any other way games like Super Mario Galaxy for example will run perfectly on Dolphin they'll just be hard to play with a traditional Gamepad now when I was mapping the buttons I had to screenshot the original controllers and cross-reference the buttons to make sure I've got the right ones in the right places and I suggest you do the same unless you have a real one to hand and if you really do want to play Wii games on the Dolphin Emulator I'd recommend just playing the games that supported the classic controller and avoid the headache of the nunchuck and remote setups now let's talk about one emulator to rule them all one emulator to find them have one emulator to bring them all and in the darkness find them it's called limuru now the reason this is number one on my list is that it is different from the others it's not the most powerful that metal would probably go to the AE the sx2 it doesn't have the most beautiful interface maybe that would go to the Dolphin Emulator it is number one on this list because it's simply simple to set up and use and more importantly this one single emulator app can emulate 23 different retro games consoles now I do realize retro Arch can do this too interesting fact for you this is actually based upon retro Arch but it's been designed to be easier to use and something that's really impressed me about limeroid is its ability to play 3DS games smoothly and dare I say in some cases more smoothly than Citra although there aren't quite as many options available as Citroen Hearts when it comes to graphics and stuff like this but it does seem to work well without having to do much at all the more challenging stuff like PlayStation games it kind of struggles with a little bit so you may want to use the AE the sx2 if you really want to play those old metal gears or anything like that and it can also handle PSP games but if you really want the best PSP emulator make sure you check out the video that I link at the end of this one but listen here if you want to play all those Sega and Nintendo Classics or even go way way back to 1977 and the Atari 2600 you can do that with lemurd it is the most versatile of them all so if you want to become a Pokemon master and finally catch them all this one emulator might might be the best emulator for that and there's some great tutorials on YouTube on how to set this up properly again I'll link those on the blog post and of course it does support controller input and if you've been watching this video and thinking to yourself what controller is that that I'm using this is the game sir X2 Pro it is a beast for emulation and also for cloud gaming it's officially Xbox license so it's got all of the Xbox buttons and it's also got back pedals and the all-important and vital USBC power delivery pass report the reason this is vital is because emulation can be quite power hungry at times and with this port this means your phone can stay Tethered to a power supply let's say if you're on a plane or something like that so you can game for as long as you like if you want to pick one up there will be an affiliate link below this video click that and you will be supporting the channel now if you want to check out my other emulation video with the PSP and all that stuff that's on screen right now and if you don't want to emulate games and you just want to run native Android games offline there's another thumbnail on screen that I think you might like so feel free to check it out and if you enjoyed this one a little Thumbs Up And subscribe would be appreciated and if you just done that I'll see you in the next one don't be late [Music]

Channel: WhatGear

Views: 737,235

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Id: EwEqLVJL9WU

Length: 13min 24sec (804 seconds)

Published: Tue Jan 03 2023