How to Play Retro Games on Your Modern Phone or TV

One of my favorite ways to spend my free time is watching old movies. I love catching up on classics on my big OLED screen, and delving into the history of a medium I love. Unfortunately, it’s harder to do that with video games. While pulling up an old movie is usually as easy as finding it on streaming or renting it digitally, old video games are split across a number of different consoles, and you can’t always count on rereleases to make them accessible on modern systems.

Luckily, there are still options for those who go looking for them. You can hunt down a vintage system and hook it up to your modern screen using an adapter, yes, but you can also use the power of modern devices to “emulate” these games in virtual environments, often with improvements—and if you do it right, it's all perfectly legal.

What is video game emulation?

Emulation is a massive rabbit hole, and can get about as deep as you want it to be. I’ve been using it for decades, and I’m still learning new things. But there are some basics you should know that will help you get started, including how it works, its legal status, the drawbacks of not playing on real hardware, and the benefits it offers beyond simple convenience.

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Credit: Michelle Ehrhardt

Essentially, emulation uses the power of modern machines to brute force virtual environments that are close enough to real hardware that files designed for it think they’re running on the real deal, and will boot up like they are. Usually, this means emulators won’t come out until one or two generations after a console's official release, but there are now emulators for everything from the Nintendo Entertainment System to the Nintendo Switch (which runs on older hardware than you might think).

Granted, you might expect Nintendo’s not too happy about that, but the kicker is that there’s not a lot the company can do about it (aside from trying its best to scare emulator developers). A court case from way back in the day ruled that, so long as emulators don’t distribute copyrighted software, they’re allowed to write their own code that mimics official hardware all they want. That means you’ll need to provide your own games for your emulators, and in some cases BIOS (or operating system) files. To stay on the right side of the law, most emulator guides won’t tell you how to go about that, but there’s at least one method that’s totally fair game.

It turns out that U.S. law allows you to make your own backup copies of games you own, so long as you don’t distribute them. With that, there are plenty of legal devices that will help you rip your game files from your own cartridges and discs, some of which I cover here. Some emulators are even so advanced that they’ll play your real discs if you simply put them in your PC’s disc drive.

Still, even if everything’s above board, there are a few drawbacks to emulating rather than playing on real hardware. The biggest issue you’ll notice is with accuracy, as some games might have graphics or audio bugs. Input lag is also a common complaint, as emulators often need extra time to register your button presses, since they need to both read them and feed them through your software. Finally, some games might not even run on emulators at all, especially ones with unusual requirements. The original Xbox, for instance, is notoriously difficult to emulate.

On the flip side, though, there are benefits to emulating that real hardware can’t replicate, and they mostly come from the extra power of your modern device. Emulated games can often run smoother than on real hardware, hitting higher frame rates. You’re also usually able to render your games at higher resolutions than originally intended, basically playing them in HD. And most importantly for difficult games or flexible play sessions, you can use save states, which allow you to quickly save your current place in a game to a file, and reload it on demand. This, in turn, allows you to save your game whenever, outside of whatever save system is built into it. It’s perfect if you only have a few minutes to play, or if you’re about to fight a difficult boss in a punishing retro game and don’t want to replay the whole level if you mess up (no judgment here). Because save states essentially take your emulator back in time, they can introduce instability, so it’s advised to use them in addition to more traditional saves, rather than as a full-on replacement for them. Emulators for more modern, difficult-to-run HD systems also may not support save states.

Still, those are enough improvements that I often prefer playing retro games through emulation, even if I have real hardware available to me. And while some of those enhancements are available on official emulation—Nintendo Switch Online has save states, for instance—