Android finally gets a Nintendo DS emulator with DraStic

When it comes to emulators, large-screen Android smartphones seem perfect for DS games. However, DS emulators have been quite puzzlingly absent for the OS so far. Enter Exophase with its new app, dubbed DraStic. The app is quite an advanced emulator that lets you play Nintendo DS games on your Android device. It has quite a hefty price tag at Rs 486.

DraStic comes with many features, including the ability to customise placement and size of the DS screens for both portrait and landscape modes, support for add-on controllers as well as physical controllers like Nvidia's Shield and Sony's Xperia Play, and Google Drive integration that lets you sync your save files with the cloud.

DraStic lets you play any DS game you want

There are a couple of legal loopholes one has to jump through to get the emulator to work. For example, the emulator requires the BIOS file of a Nintendo DS. The DS BIOS files are copyrighted code and therefore can't be freely distributed. It's recommended that you obtain them from a real Nintendo DS using a flashcart and the utility that can be found here. The emulator also requires ROMs to play games, which can only be legally obtained if you own an actual cart of the game you want to play.

To run the emulator properly, your phone needs to have an ARMv7a processor with NEON support. This includes any Cortex-A8, Cortex-A9 except for Tegra 2, Cortex-A15, Scorpion, or Krait processors. Tegra 2, ARM11, Intel Atom and MIPS processors are sadly not compatible with the emulator. As for RAM, at least 256MB is required, with more than 128MB free. A display with a resolution of at least 320 x 480 is recommended, and the Android version needs to be Gingerbread 2.3.3 or higher.