I have this old phone (circa 2013) which is actually quite capable, it can run up to PSP full speed at 2X IR (depending on the title) but I mostly focus on arcade, 16-bit and PS1 games. I even tested DOSBox Pure and it does a valiant effort, Duke Nukem 3D runs surprisingly well, albeit not as smooth on the PC, it’s totally playable.
Depending on the core it can use Preemptive Frames between 1 to 3 or more without eating frames/crackling sound. And while Saturn is a no-go, it probably can be somewhat compared to a Raspberry, but remember this is an old phone that can be used as a GPS, music player, eBook player, whatever else, so that’s a plus. It can also natively output to HDMI at 720p using a simple MHL (USB adapter) and with a PS4 or any bluetooth controller, it’s a neat little device.
After tinkering with what I can do with it and making this simple collection, when I reached Amiga things complicated, the games were not running well and I tried UAE4arm from the Store and it resembles it’s PC counterpart, down to its interface and convoluted setup. Since I just wanted to play a few Amiga games and the tutorials for UAE4arm felt like a chore I didn’t think it was worth the effort I came back to RA and tried PUAE 2021 this time and messed a bit with its Core Options, to my surprise most of the games I tried were running smoothly now and it came to me how much easier Retroarch makes these systems to play.
I understand the appeal of setting up DOS Box or Amiga systems for enthusiasts and for nostalgic purposes, but when it comes to just choose a single file game, be it zipped or lha (amiga) like a console does, there’s no contest, this is not counting the many benefits the frontend offers we are familiarized now, and it’s always nice to have all those saves and configs enclosed in one centralized application, too.
With all that, it’s certainly not the best option for these less processing capable devices when it comes to many systems, PSP, Saturn, NDS and others really require a beefier hardware, specially comparing their Retroarch core counterparts, but otherwise, I’m glad it exists.
While using the PC you can obviously go way beyond the above, this old phone is the only other device I wanted to make available as an option. It just won’t run Crysis.