Game emulation has existed on our phones for a while now, but it’s mainly been reserved for Game Boy games or early NES and SNES titles that don’t require that much computing power. Now, a new generation of phones, like the Samsung Galaxy S8, is hitting the market, and it turns out that the devices in our pockets are finally powerful enough to emulate games from consoles like the Nintendo GameCube, as demonstrated in the video below (via Kotaku).
The Dolphin emulator has actually been around for a while now, but mainly as a proof of concept, since most phones haven’t been powerful enough to run games in a playable way… until now. In the video, though, we see that Super Smash Bros. Melee, Super Mario Sunshine, and The Legend of Zelda: The Wind Waker all run pretty smoothly on the phone.
Controls have always been an issue with phone emulators, though, since due to limited screen space and physical inputs, they largely resort to laying touchscreen buttons on top of the screen, which is both visually distracting and not all that functional. However, getting a Bluetooth video game controller working with an Android phone isn’t that much of an ordeal, so if you’re really committed to playing GameCube on your current-gen Android device, it shouldn’t be a problem.
There are definitely easier ways to emulate your favorite games, but this is one of the most portable. If you get your hands on a Samsung Galaxy S8 when it’s released in a couple weeks, are you going to try this out for yourself? Let us know what you think in the comments!
Featured image: GuruAidTechSupport/YouTube
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