I love retro games and this is the only Nintendo DS emulator for Android I recommend

The Nintendo DS played a huge part in my teen years, providing much more complex games and experiences than its predecessor, the Game Boy Advance. However, I’ve since moved to a different continent, leaving behind my DS and games.

For years, the state of Nintendo DS emulators meant revisiting the handheld console on other platforms was pretty hit or miss, but I’m happy to say that there’s at least one very, very good Nintendo DS emulator on Android. However, you’d better download it fast because it might not last for long.

DraStic DS Emulator is still the best

Yes, I’m talking about DraStic DS Emulator. It’s been the best Nintendo DS emulator on Android for close to a decade now, achieving performance levels that its competitors couldn’t even dream of.

It’s insane how well this works, even on aging or weak hardware. These days I do most of my emulation on a Galaxy S24 (Exynos 2400 version), but I’ve been using this emulator for years and little has changed, so you can expect great performance on just about any modern device, even cheap ones.

And that’s really the biggest downside of this emulator — it’s no longer under active development. The development team behind it has had a bumpy road, to say the least, with the main person responsible for the Android port going AWOL in 2017. Still, at that point most of the rough edges had been smoothed out.

Every game I’ve tested worked great, although there are a few missing quality-of-life features that more modern DS emulators have added. For example, you can’t load ROMs from an SD card natively, and the cloud save options are pretty dated. It does have all of the basic features you’d expect, like controller support, cheats, savestates, and more, so ultimately, I didn’t miss much.

In bittersweet news, the app is now completely free to download. This comes in the wake of Nintendo shutting down Yuzu and a few emulation sites. The developer has teased making DraStic open-source for years, but as of this writing, it still hasn’t happened.

In other words, download this while you still can because it could disappear anytime.

Other Nintendo DS emulators on Android

Of course, it’s been years since DraStic DS Emulator has been actively under development, and other options have steadily gotten better. None of them are as good, but at the very least, if DraStic is suddenly pulled off the Play Store, retro gamers won’t be left entirely in the lurch.

The first decent alternative is MelonDS. It’s an unofficial port of the open-source PC emulator, but it has a few features that other emulators (including DraStic) don’t have, starting with DSi support. It also supports RetroAchievements, which is great news for more hardcore retro gamers.

It’s still in beta, but my early testing shows a lot of promise. Games run just as well on MelonDS as on DraStic, at least on more powerful devices. It’s also more likely to see updates than any other Nintendo DS emulator on Android, although the last update was nearly a year ago. Unfortunately, that’s pretty recent as far as Android DS emulators go.

You can also use an all-in-one emulation platform like RetroArch, Lemuroid, or EmuBox. These use Libretro cores for emulation, so you can choose from MelonDS or DeSmuME. DeSmuME has been around for years and has lots of added features, but I still prefer MelonDS. Just be aware that the Libretro core might lag behind the standalone emulator for a while.

There’s one final Nintendo DS emulator on Android that I’ll tentatively recommend, and that’s SuperNDS Emulator. One plus is that it has a free version to see how it works on your device, but the free version is riddled with ads. I couldn’t even access my list of ROMs on startup without a lengthy, unskippable ad.

The good news is that there’s a pro version to eliminate those ads, and it’s just three bucks. That’s three bucks more than DraStic and MelonDS though, both of which are ad-free and offer better performance. Paying might encourage the developer to update the app more frequently, but for my money (or no money), I’d stick with DraStic.