I’d like to get into android gaming if there is anything good out there. I am open for any genre but I have a few requirements

Has to be either free or have a free way to get it

Has to not be riddled with spyware (hard ask I know lol)

No mandatory accounts

Offline if possible

Preferably controller support out of the box

Is this too much to ask? Any recommendations?

Should I just look at what other old console games I can get?

        •  DdCno1   ( @DdCno1@beehaw.org ) 
          1•2 months ago

          I’m assuming you’re referring to black bars left and right? Many PS2 games were 4:3, although over the course of the system’s lifespan, more and more did support 16:9 natively and the system could be set to widescreen from the start.

          You can set the aspect ratio of the PS2 emulator on this system to widescreen in the options. This should cover most if not all games, including those that never officially did support widescreen.

            •  DdCno1   ( @DdCno1@beehaw.org ) 
              1•2 months ago

              Huh, that’s odd. I haven’t seen this in videos of the system emulating PS2. This might be done for performance reasons (1x PS2 resolution, no upscaling - something like that), but even if that’s the case, you should be able to set the emulator to fill the entire screen, with an upscaled image if necessary. Experiment with settings, but keep in mind that different PS2 games have vastly different hardware requirements in an emulator. Shadow of the Colossus will always run far worse than e.g. a simple licensed game like Ratatouille, so on limited hardware like yours, there’s no way around per-game settings for at least some titles.

                •  DdCno1   ( @DdCno1@beehaw.org ) 
                  1•2 months ago

                  Back in 2010, I tried my luck with PS2 emulation for the first time. Shadow of the Colossus ran so poorly on my PC at the time that I bought one of the last brand new PS2s (for 100 bucks, I believe), almost entirely for this game (and then I paid full price for the game, because it sold so poorly that even used copies went for 60 bucks). This game pushed the little console to its absolute limits, running at single digit frame rates in the most intense screens and forcing the fan to spin at its highest speed, so it’s not just the fault of your little handheld emulation system - it wasn’t very fluent on original hardware either, although still far better than on my PC. Most people played the original’s faithful remaster on PS3 (different from the PS4 remake), which runs far better.

                  The first time I tried the system, I was shocked by the terrible image quality of the Composite cable that came with its, so I spent a rather substantial amount of money on a Component cable, which did make a noticeable difference.

                  Back to your emulation console: You should be able to upscale native resolution to the full screen size at least. Might look a bit blurry, but there’s no performance penalty (since the same number of pixels are being rendered - they are just stretched, which even the weakest modern GPUs can do with ease) and your eyes will thank you.

                  By the way, there are a few Monster Hunter games for PSP, which are very easy to emulate. I’ve played Monster Hunter Freedom Unite both on original hardware and in PPSSPP. It looks astonishingly good and plays very well. There’s also Monster Hunter Freedom, the predecessor, which I haven’t played and didn’t review as well. Japan got an exclusive Monster Hunter Portable 3rd, of which there’s a fan-made translation, including the PS3 enhancements, that runs in PPSSPP. No idea if the enhancements work on your system, so try both the standard fan translation and the fan translation that includes PS3 assets. There’s a further texture enhancement mod for the latter, but this might be pushing it (doesn’t hurt to try though): https://github.com/David-vz/MonsterHunterPortable3rdHDRemake