It brings me no pleasure to admit it, but I have to: the standalone emulators I’ve tried on android are just…not as good as Retroarch. Like, a lot of them aren’t bad at all, but there are a number of minor issues ranging from frustrating to infuriating.
Redream? It’s actually pretty nice, and notably supports per-pixel transparency with solid performance. But it doesn’t support haptic feedback, and it only uses one of the controller slots – so rather than using both slots for memory cards as you’d expect, they only have the one, and they’re shared by all games (and to the best I could find, there’s no way to change that setting).
Super Game Boy? I don’t know of any standalone emulator that implements this properly. Mesen in Retroarch supports loading Super Game Boy games as easy any anything.
And heaven help you if an emulator supports multiple consoles at once. Sure, some of them like the Pizza series (which seem to be the best of the bunch of standalone emulators) support multiple folders for ROM sources, but that only covers like 5 different consoles; the .emu series doesn’t, appears to be slightly less accurate from a cursory glance at more rigorous tests, and also doesn’t always support relevant control options (seriously? no 3D pad support in saturn.emu?).
I feel like the android emulator ecosystem should be better than it is, but it isn’t, and in these cases it’s hard not to turn to Retroarch for the fact that, as is the case with a lot of consoles, it doesn’t take a lot of configuring to get it to work.
It’s not all bad, though. DuckStation, AetherSX2, PPSSPP, and Vita3K are all great. Flycast does have a standalone version that I should probably try using again just to see how it compares to the Retroarch version. NES.emu seems to be pretty accurate and easy to use. Dolphin remains, as ever, a revelation.
It’s a shame there’s nothing like Mesen-S that’s standalone, though, and it seems like I need PicoDrive for my irregular 32X cravings.