Android TV is an operating system specially designed to run TV applications, all the apps available for Android TV will run great on a big screen and they are designed to work with simple remote controllers without the need of using a pointer device. Many devices promote themselves as being Android TV devices but strictly speaking they are not. RetroX for Android started in 2014 and at that date there were plenty of devices capable of running up to Playstation without issues, being the Minix Neo X5 and the Minix Neo X7 good examples of that. This release is very old nowadays, but there are still older devices that can run up to Playstation 1 very well, so keep that in mind if you are looking for cheap alternatives. Things are getting better with the introduction of the Vulkan API for 3D acceleration, but that is still in its beginnings. Also PC devices use a full OpenGL implementation that is critical for emulators that handle 3D graphics, whilst Android devices use a subset called OpenGL ES. Note that Android devices are 99% ARM based devices, so you can’t compare emulation on PC (x86) with Android (ARM). Having 1GB of RAM will be enough to run RetroX, but if you plan to use more apps at the same time, consider a device with at least 2GB of RAM.

Some emulators like PSP and Saturn will run only on high performance devices like the Nvidia Shield (more on this later).

Basic hardware requirementsĮmulation requires raw CPU Power, and most emulators will only use one or two cores, anything beyond that will not improve emulation performance.Įmulators for 16 and 8 bit systems will run fine on any device, then 32 bit systems and beyond will require at least a 1.6Ghz processor. This hardware guide for RetroX is based on our own experience with Android devices, take this information as a starting point and always make your own research if needed.

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