It can be very easy to get lost in gaming while playing with your Nintendo DS. But you can now take it easy knowing you don’t have to carry around your DS to play your favorite games.

The point of this article is to compile a list of the best emulators for your Android so you can try them out and decide which ones you like using the best. Although all the emulators have the same purpose, they were made from different developers so the functions vary depending on app. To start out, I downloaded almost all the emulators for ds on the google play store that I could get my hands on. From there I tried them all and the best ones made this list. Although they all work almost the same, some worked smoother then others. Meanwhile, the features did vary a bit. Below I count down on my list of the emulators that I liked best for Android.

4. Drastic



Rated as one of the top emulators on Google Play. According to the developer “A lot of effort was put into optimizing it. CPU, 2D, 3D, and geometry emulation in particular were heavily optimized. It’s difficult to really describe exactly what this means because it means a lot of things, but it includes for example a lot of batching, caching, footprint reduction, special casing, handwritten assembly vectorization, aggressive binary translation”. Drastic supports thousands of preloaded cheats from their database. There is also 2x graphics rendering so your games should look even better then the originals. As well as support for physical controllers so if your not comfortable playing on your mobile device then you have the option to use a real controller. You even get the ability to increase emulation speed. The app does cost $5.99 but there is a demo version that you can try out for free. The demo is limited to only 30 minutes of play time and you cannot save or use cheats.

3. CoolNDS



CoolNDS is based off NDS4Droid. So if you want an updated version of NDS4Droid this may be optimal for you. Although it is an updated version of NDS4Droid at first glance you won’t really notice a difference. But according to the list on Google Play. CoolNDS supposedly has an updated GUI and controller overlay.

2.NDS4Droid



Another great option to play your favorite games. The NDS4Droid app is based off Desmume, an open source emulator for computers running either Windows and MAC. So if you are have used Desmume before and want a similar experience. This app may be favorable for you because many of the features are the same as the computer version.

1. Pretendo NDS Emulator



This was my favorite emulator to play Pokemon because the buttons are a decent size compared to the screen (5.5 inch) that I was playing on. It should be equally great on all other devices as well. Some great features that this app has is among the ability to modify your display. So you can edit your frame skip, screen filter, 3d rendering, and FPS. If you don’t know what any of these features are then I recommend just using the default settings it comes with.