15 best emulators for Android to play old favorites

Emulators are a portal into the past. It’s a great way to play old classics that you can’t play anymore. After all, most older games are out of print, and it’s very difficult to get your hands on an old but still functional console. That makes it surprisingly difficult to procure older games. Emulators fix that problem.

From the SNES to the original PlayStation, a lot of us hold dear memories of games we can no longer play. Some of those games, like Square Enix’s older Final Fantasy games, have mobile ports, and we highly recommend buying games when they’re available to support the developer. Here are the best emulators on Android to play old favorites if buying the game is no longer possible.

Please note that the list below is ordered by the console’s release date. The oldest consoles are at the top, and the newest are at the bottom. Also, we’d like go say goodbye to AetherSX2. The developer ceased development, and while it’ll still work for a while, we can’t recommend it anymore.

The best emulators on Android to play old favorites

RetroArch — best multi-console emulator

Price: Free

RetroArch is an excellent multi-console emulator. The app acts as a frontend. You download “cores” from the official website and each core acts as an emulator. There are dozens to choose from and even multiple options for a few different consoles. In terms of usability, it has the basics. You can save and load states, use hardware controllers, and more. It has a bit of a learning curve as you figure out how cores work, but after that, you can play almost anything.

Lemuroid (Google Play) works a lot like RetroArch with cores and is an excellent overall competitor. ClassicBoy Pro (Google Play) is another multi-console emulator with fewer options, but it’s easier to use.

NES.emu — NES emulator

Price: $3.99

NES.emu is an open-source NES emulator and one of the few left that gets consistent updates. You get the usual stuff like fast forward, save and load states, hardware controller support, and even gun controller support. There is also a cheat engine and VS UniSystem support. It goes above and beyond with excellent game support and plenty of settings to improve things.

You do have some options. John NESS (Google Play) does SNES and NES reasonably well. Nostalgia.NES Pro (Google Play) also works well. The only issue with those two is that they haven’t had an update in a couple of years.

MD.emu — Sega emulator

Price: $4.99

MD.emu is an open-source SEGA emulator for several of the company’s older systems. It supports Genesis, Mega Drive, Sega CD, and Master System/Mark III systems. That should cover everything Sega did in the late 1980s and early 1990s. It’s by the same developer as NES.emu and has most of the same features. They include hardware controller support, save and load states, SVP chip support for Virtua Racing, gun controller support, cheat codes, and more. It’s reasonably inexpensive and works well as an all-in-one solution.

MD.emu kind of stands alone at the top of the pack here. However, Sega is slowly re-releasing Sega Genesis games directly on mobile. We recommend checking out Sega Forever games (Google Play) to see if you even need an emulator for the game you want to play.

John GBAC — Game Boy emulator

Price: Free / $4.49

John GBAC is the best solution for early Game Boy fans. The emulator covers Game Boy, Game Boy Color, and Game Boy Advance games. John Emulators did a great job with this one. It has virtual and hardware controller support, cheat codes, save states, fast forward, slow motion, and more. You can even backup your game files to the cloud with a Dropbox plugin available separately.

This used to be a hotly contested emulator space, but most of the best competitors stopped updating their apps years ago. Still, My Boy (Google Play) and My NewBoy (Google Play) are good options if you have an older Android device. Pizza Boy GBC (Google Play) and Pizza Boy GBA (Google Play) are also excellent Game Boy emulators in this space.

Snes9x EX+ — SNES emulator

Price: Free

Snes9x EX+ is one of the most prominent SNES emulators on Android. It’s also open-source. You get your normal stuff like save and load states, fast forward, hardware controller support, and more. It also has excellent game compatibility, good performance, and cheat code support. There isn’t much else to say about it. It gets consistent updates, works well, and that’s about all you need.

There are some other options. John NESS (Google Play) does SNES and NES reasonably well. There used to be more options in this space, but most of the rest of the developers kind of fell off a cliff.

Yaba Sanshiro 2 — Sega Saturn emulator

Price: Free / $5.60

Yaba Sanshiro 2 is the only standalone Sega Saturn emulator on Android. Players require their own BIOS and ROM files, obviously, but after that, the emulator is easy enough to use. It features save and load states, controller support, and there are other settings to play with. The developer also has a list of supported games to make guesswork much easier when it comes to knowing if your favorite games are supported.

This emulator is far from perfect, but it does get consistent updates with improvements. RetroArch and Lemuroid have emulator cores for Sega Saturn, but they are Yaba Sanshiro cores anyway, so you’re getting the same experience no matter what you do.

DuckStation — PlayStation emulator

Price: Free

DuckStation is an excellent PlayStation emulator. It comes with all the usual stuff along with extras like texture correction, filters, and other methods to improve the graphics. It supports up to eight total controllers, 60FPS in some PAL games, high game compatibility, and more. There is even a retro achievement system for some games. You’ll need your own BIOS image, but otherwise, it seems to work really well.

Of course, the other two big players in this space are still great options. They include ePSXe (Google Play) and FPse (Google Play). You really can’t go wrong with any of the three options.

M64Plus FZ Emulator — Nintendo 64 emulator

Price: Free / $3.99

M64Plus FZ Emulator is one of the few competent Nintendo 64 emulators on mobile. You get the usual emulator stuff, so we won’t rehash all of that. The emulator also has some video plugins, local multiplayer support, and more. Nintendo 64 is one of the harder consoles to emulate on mobile, and so this one does have problems. Not every video plugin works on every device, and some devices have better support than others. Try the free version first before buying.

M64Plus FZ stands at the top of the Nintendo 64 pyramid, but we do have more options on our best Nintendo 64 emulators list here.

Redream — Dreamcast emulator

Price: Free / $5.99

Redream is a Sega Dreamcast emulator and a pretty good one. It has good game support, the usual emulator features, and more. Hardware controller support is particularly good and all the games we tested worked fine. Some devices may have some issues, but we didn’t have any on our Galaxy S22 Ultra tester.

Redream does have some pretty stiff competition with Reicast (Google Play). The two complement each other nicely. Usually, if it doesn’t work in Redream, it works in Reicast and vice versa. It’s really a matter of preference and which app better supports your device and the games you want to play.

Dolphin Emulator — GameCube and Wii emulator

Price: Free

Dolphin Emulator is, as far as we know, the only good option for GameCube and Wii emulation on Android. It features a clean UI, decent game support, configurable on-screen controls, hardware controller support, and more. The games that work seem to function quite well. We had minimal frame skips or stuttering on our tester device. Of course, some games will perform better than others.

There are no other emulators capable of doing what Dolphin does. In fact, multi-console emulators that use emulator cores have a Dolphin core. So, technically speaking, even if you use a core through RetroArch, it’s still the same people who develop Dolphin Emulator.

DraStic DS Emulator — Nintendo DS emulator

Price: $4.99

DraStic DS Emulator has long been the top dog in the Nintendo DS emulator space. It has excellent game compatibility, good on-screen controls, and all of the essential emulator features. The app can also increase the resolution of some games, add cheats, and more. It hasn’t had an update since 2020, and that’s a bit of a shame. With Google’s recent push to hide older apps, we hope the developers give this one an update sooner rather than later.

Some honorable mentions include melonDS (Google Play) and SuperNDS (Google Play). Both are okay solutions, but neither are as good as DraStic.

PPSSPP — PS Vita emulator

Price: Free / $4.99

PPSSPP is the best PlayStation Portable (PSP) emulator on Android. In fact, the open-source code from this app is what most of its competitors use. The app includes your basics like save and load states. You can also fast forward and use hardware controllers. It works rather well, and we played the entirety of Final Fantasy IV: The After Years on two different devices with no trouble. However, those with lower-end phones may experience some performance hiccups.

Rocket PSP (Google Play) is also pretty good. Some folks report that Rocket PSP works on their devices better than PPSSPP on occasion, but we would still try PPSSPP first.

Citra Emulator — Nintendo 3DS emulator

Price: Free / $4.99

Citra Emulator is a Nintendo 3DS emulator. It is also only one of two that we’re aware of. This one is the better option by a fairly wide margin. It supports hardware controllers along with the usual stuff like save and load states. There are also options to improve the graphics by scaling the resolution and using texture filters. The premium version adds some additional texture filters as well. The game compatibility seems good as well.

The only other Nintendo 3DS emulator worth mentioning is MegaZ 3DS (Google Play). We’re pretty sure it uses Citra’s open-source code, so the differences are likely minimal.

Skyline – Nintendo Switch emulator

Price: Free

Skyline is a bit of an experiment app, but we’re putting it here anyway. It emulates the Nintendo Switch on Android devices. It works okay. The app includes the same functions as most, including saves, loads, and the ability to back up data. There is also controller support. Nintendo Switch emulation is still very much a work in progress, so we believe the emulator will continue to improve over the next couple of years, and we think offshoots will likely use Skyline or Yuzu as a base.

There is another emulator, Egg NS, but let’s just say that it’s not the best. It requires a specific and very expensive gamepad, beefy phone specs, and a subscription service to use. We recommend avoiding that one until they clean it up.

Other, more niche emulators

There are emulators for a metric ton of other things on Android. We’ll go through a short list of emulators for older or less popular consoles here.

We’d also like to give an honorable mention to Autosync by MetaCtrl (Google Play). It basically lets you take any folder on your phone and back it up to the cloud. This is an amazing app that lets you backup all of your save states, emulator files, etc, and then restore them on another device. It takes a minute to set up and learn how to use, but every emulator user should have it as it basically adds cloud-saving support to every emulator. Just take your time when setting it up.

• 2600.emu (Atari 2600) — A reasonably good Atari 2600 emulator for playing classics like Pac-Man. It’s sleek, refined, and works well with every game we tried.
• C64.emu (Commodore 64) — C64.emu is the only consistently updated Commodore 64 emulator and comes with plenty of features. It also works well.
• EmuBox (multi-console emulator) — EmuBox is an okay multi-console emulator with support for a few different consoles. It’s still in active development, and it’s quite buggy, but it could get better over time.
• MAME Neo Arcade Emulator (NeoGeo) — The ads with this game aren’t great, but compatibility is good, and it’s one of the few competent NeoGeo emulators.
• NGP.emu (NeoGeo Pocket) — A NeoGeo Pocket emulator that works well. It supports multiple file formats, game language switch support, and hardware controller support.
• Win 98 Simulator (Windows 98) — Yes, this is real. It lets you play old Windows games like Minesweeper, Solitaire, Spider Solitaire, and FreeCell. It’s a simulator, not an emulator, so you can’t install stuff, but at least this comes with games.

If we missed any big video compression apps, tell us about them in the comments. You can also click here to check out our latest Android app and game lists.