Emulators are a valuable part of Android’s past. Emulators allowed gamers to play their favorite retro titles on mobile. It provided hours of entertainment for not that much money. Thankfully, there are a decent number of really good SNES emulators available to replay those classics like Chrono Trigger, Super Mario World, and Legend of Zelda: A Link to the Past. Super Nintendo emulators have plateaued a bit. These are not only good, but extremely stable. Here are the best SNES emulators for Android! Don’t forget to pair it with one of the best Bluetooth controllers as well! Or double up on the nostalgia with a Bluetooth controller that looks like the old SNES controllers.
The best SNES emulators for Android
ClassicBoy Pro
Price: Free / $3.99
ClassicBoy is one of the great old emulators. It hasn’t seen an update since 2014 so we don’t recommend this one unless the other ones on the list don’t work for you. This one is a combo emulator with PlayStation, N64, Game Boy Advance, SNES, and a few others. The SNES support is quite good and everything seemed to work well in our testing. This one underwent a pretty serious redesign and the developer is still working out some of the bugs, but it’s otherwise pretty solid.
John NESS is an SNES and NES emulator from John Emulators. This replaces the very popular John SNES and John NES apps. The good news is that it works amazingly well for both systems. You get cheats, good rendering quality, high compatibility, save states, customizable digital controls, turbo buttons, fast forward and slow down, and even hardware controller support along with cloud storage support. However, those who already purchased John SNES or John NES (or both) have to purchase the app a second time and that’s making some people upset. In any case, this is the current champion of the best SNES emulators for Android list. Thankfully, the app is also free with ads if you want to go that route.
Retroarch Plus is a unique all-in-one emulator. It has support for a wide range of systems via Liberto cores. The SNES is one of them. You simply download and install the core you want and you’re off to the races. It includes most of the usual stuff like save and load states, customizable controls, and cheat codes. It also played every game we tested without any issues. The only downside is the learning curve. This one has a rather steep one. However, once you learn how it works, you can use RetroArch for a number of game consoles along with the SNES so you only have to learn it once. There are two versions in the Play Store. We recommend the Plus variant since it supports more cores and supports newer devices.
Lemuroid (Google Play link) is a direct competitor to RetroArch if you want to try something else instead.
Snes9x EX+ has been around for a long time. It’s been among the best SNES emulators pretty much since its release. It’s open source and has the basic features you’ll find in most SNES emulators. That includes save/load states, on-screen controls, support for .smc, .sfc, and zip files, and support for gamepads. It looks a little old school but works well on pretty much every device. It’s also completely free with no in-app purchases. That makes this a gem considering how great this developer’s other emulators are.
SuperRetro16 has gone by many names. However, it’s always been one of the most popular SNES emulators. This one boasts cloud storage support, support for multiple types of controllers, and the usual fair like save/load states, fast forward, and more. It also includes a variety of visual enhancements that tries to make the games look a little smoother. Finally, you can create backups of your saves and game files on Google Drive so you have them available just in case.
The only issue we had was with Super Mario RPG where we had an audio stutter on Super Mario RPG. SuperRetro16 was removed from Google Play in mid-2019 for some sort of violation. It’s back now, but some people are angry that they have to pay for it a second time. The outrage is understandable, but the app does otherwise work fine.
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