Setting up an emulation station
Before booting up any games, I first needed to choose the right software. There’s a healthy selection of emulators for various consoles out there, but for a dedicated gaming device, I don’t want to have to dig through app icons and drawers to find what I want to play. An aggregator or combined front-end is what I need.
I’ve previously had success using RetroAssembly to host games on my NAS and share them with any device on my network. However, this is less ideal when using my phone outside my home, and it doesn’t support some of the more demanding emulators. RetroArch is the gold standard for supporting a wide range of emulators under one roof. Its UI isn’t the prettiest, but you can pair it up with front-ends like LaunchBox or Daijisho if that’s really a problem.
Daijisho’s UI paired with RetroArch’s power is a match made in emulation heaven.
How good (or bad) is performance on older phones
OK, so my phone now looks like a top-tier portable emulation station, but how does a three-year-old phone actually perform in 2026?
Well, obviously, archaic 2D titles perform really well. You can run Atari classics and SNES games on a potato these days. To test the Pixel 7 Pro’s hardware a little more, I booted up PlayStation, PlayStation 2, and GameCube games that are more likely to stress the aging Tensor G2 processor. For testing, I stuck with the emulator defaults, targeting the suggested 1920×1080 rendering resolution (typically slightly taller for 4:3 aspect-ratio games), and experimented with both OpenGL and Vulkan to find the best performance.
It’s interesting that OpenGL is by far the better pick here compared to other emulators, where Vulkan often offers a performance boost. Out of curiosity, I dropped Vulkan to 1x resolution, and it was still stuck below 45fps, with barely any improvement in the worst frames. Best to stick to OpenGL here, then.
Breathe some new life into older handsets
I never had particularly high hopes for my Pixel 7 Pro for really high-end emulation. The handset’s performance was modest for its time, well behind today’s flagship phones in emulation performance, and even outpaced by some modern mid-rangers.
The Pixel 7 Pro may be past its prime, but it still hits a sweet spot for emulating virtually everything up to the GameCube era — making it a surprisingly capable handheld in 2026. The phone would otherwise have remained sitting in my drawer for years to come, so I’m mostly just glad I’ve given an older phone a new lease of life as an Android gaming handheld.
Performance limitations aside, my old phone is now a great emulation handheld.
