Best Android DS Emulator

While we know that emulating Nintendo consoles can be a bit of a risky business, but the further you get from the current gen, the more comparatively safe it is. So, as we reach back into the DS era, you get a few pretty sturdy choices. To help you, we’ve made this guide on the best Android DS Emulator.

If you also want to play Nintendo 3DS games, you’ll also need the best Android 3DS emulator. Of course, we have you covered there as well.

Best Android DS Emulator

Here we’ll detail our pick for the best emulator, and give a few honorable mentions, too!

melonDS – The Best DS Emulator

The current wearer of the crown is none other than melonDS. It’s free, it’s open source, and it’s regularly updated with new features and performance enhancements.

The emulator comes with a host of options to make your experience your own. melonDS has solid controller support, customizable to your liking. There are different themes to suit light mode fans, and dark mode enjoyers. You can scale up the resolution of titles with resolution settings and find your happy place between performance and visual fidelity.

It comes with built-in support for Action Replay too, so it’s never been easier to cheat a little.

Keep in mind the Google Play version is an unofficial port, though it is linked from the GitHub, so it seems to have the developers’ full blessing. The GitHub version is the most up-to-date.

Emulator DS-PSX2 by EmuBox – Most Versatile

EmuBox is free to download, and funded by ad revenue. This does mean that ads display while it’s in use. This also means that the emulator can only be used on a device that is online, with is a bit of a downer.

While there are some negatives, there is a big positive to EmuBox stuff. While this appears to have split off the PS2 and DS emulation from the main emulator it is still a multipurpose emulator, and isn’t restricted to only DS ROMs. You can run ROMs from several different consoles, including the DS, PS1 and PS2. A lot of players also aren’t overly impressed with the amount of ads you need to trawl through in order to actually play the original app, and we suspect it won’t we wildly different. This is also relatively new compared to the original Emubox.