Mobile Game emulators: Do they exist?

[Jeckidy]

Back before Android, iOS or BlackBerry were mainstream, I've seen screenshots of mobile games that must have undoubtedly come from emulators. I'm not asking for the ROMs, but what were the most widely used mobile phone platforms and what are the quintessential emulators for them?

[Blades]

Back in the day, I had a Pocket PC with Windows Mobile 2003. That was the first time you could run a video game emulator on something that fit into your pocket. IIRC, it could run Game Boy games, NES games, and BARELY Genesis games at full speed. The screen was great (3.5" 320x240 for mine) and sound was in stereo. The biggest problem was the input lag on my model made them almost unplayable.

However with the optional keyboard and mouse...I could run a Flight Simulator! Kind of defeated the purpose though of a pocket PC.

Unless they were Windows CE-based, mobile phones didn't even support user-loaded software, much less emulators before the App Store rolled around.

[Kamahl]

I think Blades misunderstood the question. Jeckidy is asking about emulating the mobile platform itself. I'm not sure about emulating the phones themselves, but KEmulator should be able to handle Java Mobile Edition games (which most of those games were). You could also try to get your hands on the Nokia SDK which included an emulator for its old operating systems.

[Blades]

Oh snap.

[Thief]

Yes. I've emulated a Gradius game (Neo, I think) for a phone on my PC once. Don't think the emulation was perfect enough then, but should be now for whatever that was emulating (think Android?). Think it was really hard to find too. Might of been Gradius forum that linked me to it, and then it was found on some dude's blog or something who was also behind the emulator.