Console emulators for your mobile and smartphone

Mobile games for the current mobile phones are becoming somewhat better. But still the games supplied with the phones or the ones you download often feel like cheap ripoffs of real classics, or badly executed new ideas to sell you the phone.

Combining gaming with mobile phones has been tried (see Nokia N-gage), but never really succeeded. So how about looking back to some of the older consoles and use the older technology, but great classic gameplay, for your mobile? There’s nothing like a bit of classic Super Mario on your mobile phone.

Since the coming of the Smartphone, the marriage of the mobile phone and the PDA, there are a lot of new apps coming out including console emulators. Retrogaming is becoming more and more appealing for the Smartphones. Firstly because the gameplay of the old games is often just amazing and secondly the limited specs of the Smartphone still make it possible to run these games pretty well.

You might want to consider trying out one of the free available emulators below. I’ve also added some non-console emulators. They do require some adjusting to your phone and some are work in progress, but you can find all the info you need on these webpages. On the pages you should be able to check if your phone can run it. I’ll keep this list updated, and if you have any additions just let me know. Also let me know if any of the linked developers started charging.

Armstrad CPC
S60-CPC: http://kokak.free.fr/s60cpc.htm

Commodore 64
E32Frodo: http://e32frodo.sourceforge.net/

LucasArts Adventures
ScummVM SymbianOS: http://www.scummvm.org/downloads.php

Nintendo Gameboy & Gameboy Color
Gnuboy: http://www.surrealservices.dsl.pipex.com/gnuboy.html
Goboy: http://goboy.en.softonic.com/ie/24802 

Nintendo NES (Nintendo Entertainment System)
PocketNesterPlus: http://www.modaco.com/PocketNesterPlus-06-t237915.html
Vnes: http://vnes.en.softonic.com/ie/36935

Nintendo SNES (Super Nintendo Entertainment System)
PocketSNES: http://www.surrealservices.dsl.pipex.com/pocketsnes.html
Snes9x UIQ: http://notaz.atspace.com/snes9x_uiq.html

Sega Mastersystem & GameGear
SMS Plus S60: http://ngage.dcemu.co.uk/smspluss60.shtml 

Sega Megadrive
Picodrive: http://www.finalburn.com/mobile/pico.html

Just to see how it performs and how it looks, you can check out these Youtube examples of the performance of the emulators. Of course this differs per phone, just give it a try on your own.

Picodrive (Sega Megadrive) on Motorola Q

PocketNesterPlus (Nintendo NES) on Motorola Q

Vnes (Nintendo NES) on Nokia 6260