Retro Gaming Hacks

Play Games on a Smartphone or PDA

Get your retro gaming fix in the palm of your hand.

From game watches to programmable calculators, people have always found ways to play video games on the sly. The steady advance of technology has served to increase the sophistication of these covert gaming efforts. The latest generations of smartphones and PDAs are capable of running console emulators, granting users the ability to run thousands of classic games from the Atari, NES, and SNES eras. Now, tech-savvy office workers can play classic console games wherever they happen to be. Not at work, of course.

The Emulation Scene on Handhelds

While the novelty factor of running console games on a handheld is a reward in and of itself, emulating games on a handheld (whether PDA or Smartphone) can be an iffy prospect. Typically, the longer a handheld’s operating system has been able to support emulators, the more likely you’ll find software for it.

The development community for handhelds is not as large as desktop platforms, so most of the emulators are not nearly as developed, robust, or intuitive as their cousins on other operating systems. Even finding the programs can be difficult, as some are hosted on personal pages that come and go. With some persistence and a decent search engine though, these programs can usually be found somewhere. There are a growing number of repositories for handheld emulators. Here are a few:

Palm

Although it hadn’t been updated in over a year at the time of writing, PalmEmu ...