3 Generations, 3 Handhelds, 3 Emulators

It is no secret that i love handhelds. They are portable, cool and make me feel like a child again. I also love emulating different systems on my handhelds, be it a console, another handheld or even an arcade machine. I want to share my favourite emulators on my favourite handhelds with you. Hope you share the fun.

1) BlargSNES on 3DS

BlargSNES is a SNES emulator for 3DS. It is without a doubt the best homebrew on the 3DS scene. Right now it doesn’t support games with special chips and has graphical glitches on many games. But the games it runs, it runs them great. You can have an idea about compatibility here. So far, SNES emulation on a handheld is really hard. I am not counting tablets, smartphones etc. Even though SNES emulation on PSP has a high compatibility, it still suffers from slowdowns which is very distracting for some games. DSTWO has a SNES emulator for Nintendo DS, but it is worse than the PSP emulators. BlargSNES gives us hope that near perfect SNES emulation might be possible with this generation handhelds. It is now at version 1.3 and with each revision, it gets better and better. Without further adue, here is the video.

2) MVSPSP on PSP

MVSPSP is a MVS/AES emulator for PSP. I used to love Neo-Geo back at the arcades. King of Fighters, Metal Slug, the incredibly underrated Street Hoop and numerous gems that i can go on and on. I wasn’t aware of a console named AES back then. Well, even if i did, i wouldn’t buy it with that price tag anyways. MVSPSP gives you back this Neo-Geo experience everywhere you go. Emulation quality is great. Even though i should accept there are some slowdowns here and there that isn’t on original hardware or psn neo-geo station releases, it is still very close to the arcade experience you get back then. I love to change the hardware from MVS to AES to stop myself from mindlessly increasing credits. It also helps me to imagine how it would be to have an AES back then. You can also change CPU speed and audio emulation quality to save battery/give your game a boost. You can get it from the downloads section here at Wololo. Here is a glimpse of the emulator running on a PSP Go.

3) Goomba Color on Gameboy Advance

Goomba Color is a Gameboy/Gameboy Color emulator for Gameboy Advance. I can already hear you saying GBA already supports GB/GBC games. Yup, it does. But GB/GBC compatibility has been abandoned for GBA Micro. Also Goomba Color has many options which aren’t available with hardware emulation. Just to name a few, it can enable Super Gameboy borders for supporting games, it has savestates, there are a lot of pallette options you can choose from (you can even change them on-the-fly which is not possible with hardware emulator). Also it is super convenient to have your own GB/GBC compilations. Game compatibility is really high and most games work fine at full speed. It is only one or two times i encountered a fps drop, but it is nothing major. From a technical standpoint, it is astonishing to emulate a system with a 8 mhz CPU on a system with a 16 mhz CPU with such accuracy. Even though i have other GBA models which natively supports GB/GBC games, i always find myself using Goomba Color on my favourite GBA model, GBA Micro. The author still works on this emulator and it got an update on December 12, 2014. If you want to see it in action on my black GBA Micro, here you go.

Like emulators? Check our huge list of emulators for your PSP/Vita!

Check out our huge emulators database for your Vita and your PSP!