It’s been a stormy weekend here, so it’s a good thing the tablet‘s been charged up, just in case the lights go out and we get bored. (We’ve got four nervous cats and two nervous dogs in the house – what are the odds of boredom there?) I tried out a couple of Anrdoid emulators on my tablet, and here’s what I found out.
Basically, if you’re going to try to emulate physical controls – especially any control schemes that are more than just single-joystick action – it’s gonna suck, and suck hard.
PSX4droid is a Playstation emulator for Android, and its biggest folly is immediately apparent the moment you can actually get a game to successfully boot up. This emulator runs off of BIN disc images. I hit the newsgroups to download a few images of games I already own. Now, this isn’t me trying to force some token anti-piracy message down anyone’s throat: I really did just download games I already own, because that way I’d know if they were being emulated accurately. I tried volumes 1 and 2 of Namco Museum, and Dune 2000. Out of all of them, only Dune 2000 worked! Any BIN images which are broken up into “tracks” are a lost cause with this emulator, from what I can tell. The moment the emulator goes to load a different track – where you’d usually see an embarrassingly lengthy “LOADING” screen on a real PS1 – it just reboots the BIN file you started out with. I could never get Namco Museum to play a single game. (A damn shame, because the emulator can be set to ignore screen re-orientation, which means the rotated mode for vertical display arcade games in Namco Museum would’ve been a hoot.)
Dune 2000 loaded and played, and this is where PSX4droid’s weakness – at least on my tablet – was readily apparent: all controls are on-screen. All 14 buttons on a Playstation controller were represented as a sort of transparent heads-up overlay over the game graphics. Since my tablet really works best with a stylus, this rules out any quick reaction to… well… anything. Also, I switched off audio output: it slowed the game down tremendously and was choppy at best. Even without audio, the game action “stuttered” a lot – the spice didn’t flow very smoothly, I’ll put it that way. Perhaps this works better with a phone that has physical buttons, but as everyone tries to hump the iPhone’s leg, physical buttons on smartphones are fast becoming a thing of the past. I’ll see if I can plug in my USB keyboard and map controls to keys on that, but I didn’t see an option for this on the menu (maybe they won’t appear unless I have it plugged in).
AtarDroid is an Atari 2600 emulator for Android, and it suffers from just about all of the same problems as PSX4droid. Again, the controls are on screen, but this time you’re just dealing with four directions and an action “button”; if this can be mapped to physical keys on my keyboard, then this oughtta be awesome. Surprisingly, sound is an issue here as well: leaving it on results in choppy, stuttery video, and worse, a high-pitched noise that doesn’t go away starts at random. I couldn’t go anything about that sound except exit the emulator.
It’s entirely possible that some of these issues are less noticeable on an Android smartphone with more “brains” than my relatively cheap tablet, and I didn’t get a chance to try hooking up the external keyboard to see if it would help matters any. My first experiences with emulation for Android weren’t exactly glowing. I’d love to be able to play Dune 2000 on my tablet, but it’s a headache when you have to screw around with on-screen controls instead of just tapping stuff like, well, frankly, the rest of the machine’s interfaces. I have a feeling this is why I don’t hear a lot of conspicuous rave reviews of emulation on other tablet devices. All it’s really good for is showing your buddies, “Woo, look! A PS1 game on my tablet!”… and then going back to something the machine can actually do well, like watching videos or surfing the web.
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