Can you run Dolphin and Citra?

In the world of console emulation on Android phones and tablets, few emulators tax the system more than Dolphin (GameCube / Wii) and Citra (Nintendo 3DS). Since the Samsung Galaxy S20 Ultra is one of the most powerful phones on the market today, I wanted to know how it would handle emulation of the GameCube and Nintendo 3DS.

Inside the Galaxy S20 Ultra is the Qualcomm Snapdragon 865 processor paired with the Adreno 650 GPU and an absurd amount of RAM. Theoretically, you shouldn’t be able to get faster gaming performance on an Android phone other than these components.

So can the most powerful Android phone to date run the two most demanding retro gaming emulators for Android without any issues? Let’s find out!

Related: 15 best emulators for Android to play old favorites

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My settings for emulation of GameCube and Nintendo 3DS

Before getting the Samsung Galaxy S20 Ultra, I did all my emulation on my OnePlus 7 Pro. For this article, I installed all my games on the Samsung Galaxy S20 Ultra and also updated all my emulators to the latest versions. In this way, you could play a game on the OnePlus 7 Pro and then the same game on the Galaxy S20 Ultra and have a decent idea of ​​how much better the Galaxy S20 Ultra is in comparison.

For the sake of disclosure, this is what that specifically means:

• Samsung Galaxy S20 Ultra and OnePlus 7 Pro
  • Citra (Nintendo 3DS emulation)
    • Version: aac77142b, obtained from here
    • There are no adjusted settings other than the physical controller setting and the FPS counter power on
  • Dolphin (GameCube emulation)
    • Version: 5.0-11824, obtained from here
    • There are no adjusted settings other than the physical controller setting and the FPS counter power on

Obviously, it is very likely that you can get better performance from both systems by modifying many settings, even modifying the settings of each game. However, the purpose of this is to see if the Galaxy S20 Ultra hardware is really much better than that of the OnePlus 7 Pro (or any other sub-Snapdragon 865 device), so I didn’t add any tweaks to keep things fair, Al least at first.

I used an Xbox One wireless controller connected to a mobile phone holder clip on both systems as I cannot support the on-screen controls. Since the controller was the same for both system tests, it is not a variable.

As a final note, I thought of throwing it out there that I use the amazing OneSync app to sync all of my ROMs, emulators, and save files to all of my systems via OneDrive. This allows me, for example, to play a GameCube game on my phone, save it, and then collect the same file saved on my PC or Steam Link. I’m really happy with this (and it was incredibly helpful for this article), so give it a try if you’re interested!

With all of that out of the way, let’s move on to testing and my experience with the two emulators.

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GameCube emulation: Galaxy S20 Ultra wins, but not by much

There are some GameCube games that are difficult for Dolphin to render well, even when you’re running the PC version of the emulator on a high-end system. Okay, if you have a $ 6,000 gaming platform, you’re not going to face too much trouble playing almost any GameCube game, but your system will still have to work harder for some games compared to others.

For this test, I started playing The Legend of Zelda: Four Swords Adventures on each phone. This is a relatively simple game to emulate – it has a five-star compatibility rating on the Dolphin Wiki, indicating that it can be played from start to finish without any problem. Both the OnePlus 7 Pro and the Samsung Galaxy S20 Ultra had constant speeds of 60fps throughout the game for this title, indicating that each phone had no problem.

Then I moved on to a more demanding game: Metroid Prime. This game has a four-star compatibility rating, but is known to be a difficult game to emulate on low-level PC or even some mid-level PC. The OnePlus 7 Pro performed well, but there were definitely noticeable drops in frame rate, as well as some audio distortions, especially when moving from room to room in the first five minutes of the game. This also happened with Super Smash Bros. Melee, another difficult game to emulate.

Even in some difficult to emulate GameCube games, both phones worked very well.

Meanwhile, the Samsung Galaxy S20 Ultra made Metroid and Smash a bit smoother. There were still some lags and framerate drops in Smash going from the title screen to the actual fight, for example, but it wasn’t as failed as the OnePlus 7 Pro.

Finally, I ran a notoriously complicated game to emulate: The Simpsons: Hit and Run. Oddly, my OnePlus 7 Pro wouldn’t even start this game. The welcome screen appeared when I first started it and then Dolphin immediately turned it off. However, the S20 Ultra performed well on the game, albeit with some sizzling audio and some noticeable frame drops per second as you go from the title screens to the game. Still, it could actually to play gaming without much trouble on the S20 Ultra, which you definitely couldn’t do with the OnePlus 7 Pro.

Finally, there was no GameCube game I tried and I couldn’t play and I had a minimum of “good enough” experience with the Galaxy S20 Ultra, while the OnePlus 7 Pro struggled with just a few.

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Nintendo 3DS emulation: S20 Ultra is better, but far from perfect

For the Nintendo 3DS emulation, things get murkier. Even the highest-level gaming platform faces issues with the PC version of Citra when playing certain games, so you couldn’t expect smooth gaming for either the OnePlus 7 Pro or the Galaxy S20 Ultra.

However, that doesn’t mean there aren’t any noticeable differences. For example, Super Mario 3D Land boots on the OnePlus 7 Pro but it has a frame rate stuck in the 1920s. This makes the game essentially impossible to play, as pressing the jump button Mario raises it very slowly hundreds of milliseconds later .

The Galaxy S20 Ultra, by comparison, ran the game much more smoothly, but was still not playable properly. I could move Mario in a comfortable way at certain points, but then the frame rate would drop and everything would stutter. Then it would get going again and be playable again.

Even the mighty Galaxy S20 Ultra couldn’t play some high-profile 3DS games.

In other words, there was no way it could complete the game in the state it was on any of the devices, even if the Galaxy S20 Ultra did a better job. I saw the same with Captain Toad: Treasure Tracker, in the sense that the OnePlus 7 Pro was completely impossible to play while the Galaxy S20 Ultra was better, but still bad.

By contrast, The Legend of Zelda: A Link Between Worlds and Poochy & Yoshi’s Woolly World played very well on both systems. In fact, it would be difficult to say that the S20 Ultra was better since they seemed to play almost the same.

The bottom line here is that Nintendo 3DS emulation will be better on the Galaxy S20 Ultra than any system without that Snapdragon 865 processor, and perhaps even better than other phones with the same chipset. However, ultimately, it won’t be the perfect 3DS emulation machine.

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Two final experiments with Nintendo 3DS emulation

It is clear that Nintendo 3DS emulation is where the two systems had the most problems. I decided to run two more tests to see how the phones fared in a different test state. The first test was how each system would play The Legend of Zelda: A Link Between Worlds with maximized settings. The second test would be to see how each phone plays Super Mario 3D Land with adjusted settings to optimize performance.

Zelda’s test would test whether or not the Galaxy S20 Ultra could handle the improved Nintendo 3DS emulation better than the OnePlus 7 Pro in a game that can both work well with ready-to-use settings. Mario’s test would see if it is possible to adjust enough settings for a game that cannot be played to work on any of the phones.

Zelda’s test

I’ve already established that both the Galaxy S20 Ultra and OnePlus 7 Pro can play The Legend of Zelda: A Link Between Worlds well enough. However, the Citra Android emulator has some configuration tweaks that could make playing a higher quality experience. What happens when I do that?

To be specific, these are the configuration changes I made on both phones:

• He turned on the FMV Hack.
• Enable the Skip slow drawing setting.
• Turned on the Texture Loading Hack.
• Resolution increased to maximum setting (4x).

On the Samsung Galaxy S20 Ultra, those settings caused so many dropped frames and so much slowdown that the game became completely impossible to play. The graphics looked incredibly sharp, but that doesn’t mean anything if you can’t play the game.

Related: The best exclusive games for Nintendo Switch

I lowered the resolution to 3x and that made things a lot better, but it all slowed down if there were too many things in the game at the same time (being near water was particularly bad). Then I brought it down to 2x and things went back to normal, and the game played like a dream.

In OnePlus 7 Pro, I saw even worse results with 4x resolution. It was horrible. Dropping things down to 2x gave me playable results, but being close to the water caused a painful level of slowdown. Only when I lowered the resolution to 1x did things work fine.

Again, this proves that the Galaxy S20 Ultra can work better with Nintendo 3DS emulation than the OnePlus 7 Pro, but that a $ 1,400 phone still can’t handle things when it’s pushed to the max.

Mario’s test

Unfortunately, I discovered that Super Mario 3D Land was not playable with out-of-the-box settings on both the OnePlus 7 Pro and Galaxy S20 Ultra. However, with some tweaking, could you make the Nintendo 3DS emulation run faster and get the title back?

For this test, I made these configuration settings:

• He turned on the FMV Hack.
• Enable the Skip slow drawing setting.
• Turned on the Texture Loading Hack.
• He left the resolution at just 1x.

Fortunately, on the Galaxy S20 Ultra, these configuration changes made the game playable. It still wasn’t great as there were a lot of choppy graphics and audio glitches, and Mario’s actions would slow down considerably at certain points. But I was able to at least complete the first and second levels without much frustration.

Unfortunately, on the third level, things got so slow that they couldn’t be played again, probably due to the amount of moving images and obstacles present on that level. Oh good!

On the OnePlus 7 Pro, all of those configuration tweaks produced no change – the game was still not playable even at levels you had comfortably completed on the S20 Ultra.

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Final verdict: we still have a long way to go

All of these tests I’ve performed prove that if you spend a ton of cash on your Android smartphone, you can get the best experience possible when it comes to system-taxing actions like Nintendo 3DS emulation. However, even a $1,400 phone with the very best SoC can’t give you a flawless experience.

When it comes to GameCube emulation, though, you don’t need to spend those big bucks. The OnePlus 7 Pro or likely many other phones with the Snapdragon 855 (or especially the Snapdragon 855 Plus with its boosted GPU) will play most games very well.

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Also keep in mind that emulating older systems (Nintendo 64, PlayStation, Super Nintendo, Sega CD, etc.) works flawlessly on even older flagships or phones with 700- or 600-series processors. In other words, you don’t need to buy a top-tier flagship to be able to indulge most of your retro gaming desires. You just need one if you want to play the most modern of consoles, and even then it’s still a mixed bag.

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