How to Play Nintendo DS Games on Android

Did you know that your Android device can play Nintendo DS games? With the help of an emulator app, it can. A few apps can run NDS games on your phone, including NDS4Droid, a free, open-source DS emulator available on Google Play.

NDS4Droid includes save states and Open GL rendering, but is still in its initial stages. Be aware that DS emulation, even on high-end phones, is slow, and some games like Pokemon are nearly unplayable. The good news is that the app is regularly updated with performance enhancement fixes.

In this guide, I will show you how to play Nintendo DS games on your Android device using this emulator.

NDS4Droid Emulates a Mario Game (Check Frame Rate)

Step 1:

Download the NDS4Droid emulator from Google Play. The application is free and can be downloaded directly on your phone without any problems.

You can also download the application's .apk file to your desktop computer, from a trusted site, and transfer it to your phone. To transfer it, connect your device to your PC via the USB cable. Navigate to My Computer and search for the phone’s SD card icon. Copy the .apk file from your PC desktop to the SD card. To install the emulator on your phone, use a third-party app like Andro Zip.

Step 2:

You will need a BIOS file. Now you won’t get this bundled with the app. Most developers are aware of the legal hassles involved with such files and so won’t include it with their app. Without it, you won’t be able to play any games on your emulator.

Step 3:

Besides installing the BIOS file, you will also need a ROM file of of your favorite game. (Make sure you have a genuine copy of the game.)

The file should have a “.nds” extension. The emulator supports .nds ROM format, but also has the ability to extract compressed archives such as .rar and .7z files.

Step 4:

You can move ROMs to a separate folder created on your SD card icon. You can use the phone's USB mass storage option to transfer game files.

Name your folder “NDS Games” to ensure ease in navigation. Next, open your emulator and navigate to the folder, find the ROM, and double-tap on it to play. You can control in-game characters via the virtual buttons.

Note: On your phone, most games emulated by NDS4Droid will run slow. This is not the app’s fault. It’s your phone's CPU. While newer high-end phones boast powerful CPUs, they still won’t run your favorite games at full speed. Even on a desktop, one needs 3 GHz Core 2 Duo CPU to run them at full speed.

Top Emulators for Playing NDS Games on an Android Device

Besides NDS4Droid, there are other apps that can play Nintendo DS games on your Android phone. All are in beta phase and are being constantly updated with fixes and enhancements to improve emulation. Here’s a rundown of some of the top NDS emulators available on Google Play:

1. DSDroid: This app was first developed as a plug-in to make games runs faster on entry-level Android phones. Now it has been converted into a full-fledged emulator. The app can run games like Pokemon, but with frame rates at 5-7 per second. The free emulator runs games in full-screen.

2. AndsEmu: Another great app, AndsEmu runs your favorite games. It has simple settings, including key graphical settings such as V-sync, ensuring smoother gameplay. The emulator is actually a modification of the NDS4Droid app and is pretty good performance-wise. You can play NDS games on both tablet PCs and phones using this application.

AndsEmu NDS Emulator

3. DSoid: This paid app comes with dynamic recompilation. The best part is that it can play games like Pokemon Diamond pretty well, although speed is still an issue. DSoid provides good performance when compared to free apps like DS Droid and AndsEmu. In future, the developer might add a microphone feature, to enable gamers to play games using voice commands.

Play GBA Games on your Android Device

How To: Play GBA Games on your Android Device

Did you know as long as you have an Android device, whether it’s a smartphone or tablet, you have access to just about every Game Boy Advance game ever made? Best of all, you can get these games for free, just by downloading an emulator from the Google Play Store. It’s really easy to set up, and if you aren’t sure how to go about doing it, just follow this simple guide and you’ll be playing your favorite GBA titles on your Android device in no time.

Step # 1 – Download the Emulator

This is the easiest part, simply go to the Play Store like you would if you wanted to download any application, then search for My Boy! Free. Download the app with a blue background and a white GBA icon, it’s completely free, but there is also a paid version available that has a few more features (like the ability to save state at any point in the game). There’s a few other emulator options: John GBA Lite, Retro Game Boy and Advance, and Gameboy Color A.D. just to name a few.

John GBA Lite is definitely a solid choice as is My Boy!, Retro Game Boy and Advance offers not only GBA games but original Gameboy games as well. Gameboy Color A.D. is only compatible with Gameboy Color games, which won’t help you with GBA titles, but I figured I’d mention it if anyone is interested.

Step # 2 – Download the ROMs

So you’ve picked out an emulator, now it’s time to download the games so you can load them into the emulator and play! My personal favorite site to get ROMs from, is Cool Rom, they’ve been around for a very long time and have always had the best selection of games for tons of different platforms — GBA included. In your phone browser, go to m.coolrom.com.au/roms/gba and you’ll be able to search for games by letter, genre, popularity, and rating. Once you’ve narrowed down the search category, just tap the game you’d like to play, scroll down and tap “Download Now”. (Note: Make sure you don’t click the “Download” link above it, it’s spam, check the image below to make sure you’re tapping the right link.

By default, your downloads should just go to your “Download” folder, but if you happened to have changed this it won’t be different.

Step # 3 – Loading the ROM

Now, go to your apps and load up My Boy! or whichever emulator you decided to download. If you’re using My Boy! it will automatically pull up the root directory of your device, and from there you should be able to just tap “Download”, or navigate to wherever your default download directory is set. Once you’re in the folder, find the game you downloaded, tap it, and it should automatically load into the emulator. After you’ve downloaded a game, it will remain in that folder until you move or delete it, so you can easily build a large game collection.

As stated above, you can’t do a save state at any point in the game unless you get the full version of My Boy!, but using in-game save features will work just fine. The saves will be saved to the ROM, so make sure you don’t delete the ROM without backing it up so you                                                                                            don’t lose your save data.

Step # 4 – Playing the ROM

You can hold your phone either way, if you hold it on it’s side the game screen will stretch bigger and the controls will be on-screen, if you hold it upright the controls will be off of the game screen but the window will be much smaller. Ultimately it’s up to you which way you prefer, there are also settings that can be accessed by tapping the menu button on your phone, from there you can stretch the game screen to fill out your phone window when it is on it’s side.

There’s other options for input devices and key mapping, as well as custom layouts. Feel free to mess around with these features, there’s nothing that will impact your game-play too much, unless you start getting into the cheats (you can’t fully utilize cheats with the free version).