The mobile gaming industry has grown so much now that you can play any of the old NES games on your Android via Emulator. In this article, we are going to showcase a complete guide on how to download and play NES games on Android. All you need are an Android smartphone and an Internet connection.

Table of Contents

1 - Set up an Android Emulator

Firstly, you would need to download an NES emulator on the Internet. There are plenty of them available on the Google Play Store. Overall, you can pick between all-in-one apps that can run multiple systems, or specific system apps that can only run one. It is best to check out the user reviews at the bottom of the page before downloading.

The classic NES games
The classic NES games on Android - super familiar to gamers in the 90s.

Below is a list of notable apps that you might want to check out:

All-in-one apps

Overall, ClassicBoy is probably the best NES emulator for Android. It is free and comes with built-in controller support. This means you can just buy a controller for your phone and use that to play your games instead of relying on the on-screen touch controls.

Furthermore, the ClassicBoy can be used to emulate a wide variety of games from different consoles. If you want to try out SNES or Nintendo DS games, this emulator got your back.

RetroArch and Lemuroid are about the same in function, but they are not nearly as easy to use as ClassicBoy.

Contra
The sidescrolling shooter Contra, one of the most famous games on older consoles.

Specific app for NES

While all three are great, NES.emu is also the only emu outside of RetroArch to provide palette selection and scanlines which are essential for an immersive NES experience. Nostalgia.NES is decent, but its on-screen control is somewhat wonky with some games.

2 - How to get ROMs of NES games on Android

The emulator is just the software to run the game. To actually play NES games on Android, you need to download ROMs a.k.a the equivalent of a game cassette. You can find plenty of them on the internet by Google. However, the two best pages with download links are emulatorgames.net and romsgames.net.

NES game ROMs
The classic NES game ROMs are on the page: from super Mario to Contra and Zelda.

If you are going to search manually, just remember to add the NES ROM suffix after the game's name to search. For example Contra NES ROM, Megaman NES ROM, Mario NES ROM... etc. While download these games are technically illegal, they are old games and no one really cares enough to enforce the rules.

3 - How to play NES games on Android using an Emulator

While there are a lot of emulators to pick from, starting an NES game is fairly straightforward.

After installing the emulator, just run it and tap Allow to provide access to files on your device. Then, navigate to the option to load a game and browse for the ROMs you download in the file explorer screen that appears.

Select your ROM and run it - afterward, a Play option would appear so that you can run the game.

multiple systems
You might have to select the correct system if your Emulator has the ability to run multiple systems.

Afterward, can connect your controller and begin to play as normal.

Most emulators have the ability to save the game state if you want to save your progress and quit. As both the emulator and the games are super light, you don't really have to worry about system requirements or anything. Most phones should be able to run NES games for Android unless they are super old.

Tekken 3
Tekken 3 emulated on ClassicBoy

4 - How to play Classic NES games on PC

It is actually really straightforward to play NES games on PC. While you can also install an emulator and do all the above steps, it is best to just visit an Emulator Online website like emulator.online/nes and play the NES games straight from your browser. These games are so light that pretty much all of them are available on the internet. You might need to install Adobe Flash Player to run them.

Emulator for NES games
Emulator for NES games works the same way on PC.

Interested in more of our articles related to Android games? Please check out this post to find out more about the Top 10 Android Action Games Offline For Players Without Internet.