What Android phones do you use for emulation?

[WiiUBricker]

Emulators on Android phones are superior to the ones for hacked gaming handhelds, but nowadays they come with HD or Full-HD resolution which I guess makes them not so much suited for retro emulation. But I could be wrong though because of the small screen sizes that may make up for it in addition to the various FX options of emulators. I only have 480x800 devices for testing and so far the image quality seems to be ok. What phones do you use for retro emulation and how is the image quality?

 

[dario14]

I really enjoy the Nexus 5 because of the Bluetooth sixaxis support and the ability to connect it to HDMI via a slimport adapter. The resolution wasn't really a problem to me personally. Also mupen64plus as can use hires textures which take advantage of HD resolution.

 

[WiiUBricker]

Nexus 5 has a Full-HD screen. Aren't the games a blurry mess?

 

[Joe88]

All you do is maintain aspect ratio and upscale, it looks perfectly fine

 

[WiiUBricker]

By upscaling do you mean a higher internal res output or streching the original resolution and applying a smoothness filter?

 

[endoverend]

I stick to tablets for emulation, except for maybe GBA. In that case, my HTC One M8 works beautifully.

 

[Jayro]

I also use my Samsung Galaxy S4 (jfltexx) to play GBA ROMs using John GBA.

 

[Jayro]

Come to think of it, I haven't found any hiccups with the VBA GX emulator on my Wii, it emulates GBA nearly flawlessly from the games I've tested on it. Super Mario Advanced 4 still gives me the stupid "screen shake of death", but no other ROMs give me any guff.

 

[Drink the Bleach]

Upscaled native resolutions look more than fine, but if you can't handle a stretched image, then you shouldn't be using your phone as an emulator in the 1st place, we stopped living in the 4:3 era a decade ago, get over it.

 

[raulpica]

Nexus 5 with Moga Pro for the effin' win.

I just disable filtering and have square pixels upscale. I also force the correct aspect ratio for all the emus I have.

 

[Foxi4]

I used to emulate a lot on my old Mio A701, but these days I don't use emulators on my phones at all. Perhaps if I had a controller I'd fiddle a bit with it, but as it is I don't feel like going through the trouble of syncing one of my DS3's to the phone and holding it awkwardly to play.

 

[Rockhoundhigh]

I use an Optimus G and generally follow raulpica's advice. The upscaling can sometimes distort low-res text but it's nothing unreadable. Besides disabling the awful bilinear (blur) filters these emus always have on by default makes the picture so crisp!

 

[Mario92]

By upscaling do you mean a higher internal res output or streching the original resolution and applying a smoothness filter?

I'm not so much into android emulation myself but with PC emulators you can easily simply upscale with nearest neighbor and maintain aspect ratio and it looks as fine as with native resolution. Because resolution is so much higher than native thing there shouldn't be any problems, like with 3DS where resolution is under double from native DS one so 1px is upscaled to ~1.5px. That's why I was asking why you want exactly 800x480 resolution screen when upscaling is much better with higher resolution, even if that extra resolution is pretty much useless on small screen.
Like Drink the Bleach said:

Upscaled native resolutions look more than fine, but if you can't handle a stretched image, then you shouldn't be using your phone as an emulator in the 1st place, we stopped living in the 4:3 era a decade ago, get over it.

Of course you are able to also use filters but I also prefer pixel perfect style.

This is of course when talking about 2D console emulation where you can't increase internal resolution. With 3D consoles increasing internal resolution is only good thing as long as mobile phone can keep up.

 

[Drink the Bleach]

I'm not so much into android emulation myself but with PC emulators you can easily simply upscale with nearest neighbor and maintain aspect ratio and it looks as fine as with native resolution. Because resolution is so much higher than native thing there shouldn't be any problems, like with 3DS where resolution is under double from native DS one so 1px is upscaled to ~1.5px. That's why I was asking why you want exactly 800x480 resolution screen when upscaling is much better with higher resolution, even if that extra resolution is pretty much useless on small screen.
Like Drink the Bleach said:

Of course you are able to also use filters but I also prefer pixel perfect style.

This is of course when talking about 2D console emulation where you can't increase internal resolution. With 3D consoles increasing internal resolution is only good thing as long as mobile phone can keep up.

I was annoyed by the "not suited for emulation" comment because the picture of 1:1 native resolution on a screen with a higher pixel density than like a gameboy or something. It implies an insufferable idea of "I can't play this because non-native doesn't look normal" as being the reason an elegant and poweful device isn't "suited" for emulation, when in fact high-class phones have never been more suited for portable emulation as they broaden capabilities and options.

 

[goober]

I find any phone at a Galaxy S3 level or higher to be great for emulation up to the PS1 and most of the PSP level. If you use an emulator with shader support be sure to give the CRT filters a try. They're the best at actually mimicking an actual TV screen because it's more than just simple scanlines in reality and it truly brings back the nostalgia feels.

 

[Satangel]

I find any phone at a Galaxy S3 level or higher to be great for emulation up to the PS1 and most of the PSP level. If you use an emulator with shader support be sure to give the CRT filters a try. They're the best at actually mimicking an actual TV screen because it's more than just simple scanlines in reality and it truly brings back the nostalgia feels.

I'm planning to buy an S3 very soon, so this is great news. I've got a PSP though so no real need to emulate that much, but good to know.
It'll just be such a bother with on-screen buttons, hate those things

 

[WiiUBricker]

Anyone has a Sony Xperia Z1 Compact?

 

[endoverend]

Don't buy an S3. It's cool when you get it, but after a year you'll be wishing you had another phone. It's cheap plastic, a cheap screen, and a terrible battery rolled together and called "the next big thing".

 

[yuyuyup]

I played Mario & Luigi Superstar Saga for 29 hours on an Alcatel Fierce you can get it for $80-100

 

[matpower]

Galaxy Tab 3 here, using RetroArch, most stuff runs fine besides a few GBA games when I got stuff on the background, I would recommend using it with a Custom Android, since Samsung stuff is filled with bloatware running on the background :/ (I would love some recommendations on Custom Android )