Gaming in Bed with Emulation and Streaming
Tags: #gaming, #personal | 2026-05-13
I love playing video games, and I also love my bed. Sitting at an uncomfortable, non-ergonomic chair (because in my home, I just use a chair I yoinked from my family's kitchen) for hours on end is not a great experience per se. Naturally, I tend to take breaks whenever I feel the need to. On those breaks, I just doomscroll on my phone, which is something I HATE and want to STOP doing. So, I thought, why don't I just play games while I lie in bed? Genius idea, eh? But I don't own a handheld gaming console like a Steam Deck, Nintendo DS, Switch, PSP, etc., which sucks; however, I have a phone! And that's how my adventure with game streaming and emulation started.
painful start to streaming
Now, first of all, I own a pretty okay gaming laptop. So, I thought, maybe I can just stream games from my laptop to my phone. I tried GeForce Now, which is a cloud gaming service that allows you to stream games from their servers. Well, it worked, but the queue times and input lag were pretty bad. So, I decided to try something else, and that's when I remembered that one of my friends suggested using Apollo and Artemis. Apollo is "a self-hosted desktop stream host for Artemis, offering low latency blabla", and Artemis is the Android client that connects to Apollo. So, I set them up, and after tweaking some settings (mainly lowering the bitrate and resolution), the experience was... okay. It worked but still had some input lag, and the quality was not great. So, I shelved that idea for a while.
eureka moment
One day, a thought struck my mind. When I tried streaming, I was using my home Wi-Fi. An old router with a 2.4GHz band and all that other stuff. What if I just open up a hotspot on my laptop and connect my phone to it? That way, the connection would be better, right? So, I tried it, and it was... way better than I anticipated! The input lag was significantly reduced, and, with a higher bitrate, the quality was much better. So, I was pretty happy with that setup. So much so that I finished Master Detective Archives: Rain Code almost entirely by streaming it to my phone. It was a great experience, and I enjoyed playing the game while lying in bed. However, I yearned for more. More, I said. Thus, I started looking into more ways to consume video games.
yearning for more
Streaming is great and all, but I can't always be near my laptop. For example, I can't play any games while I'm in the tube because I don't have my laptop with me, nor do I have an internet connection. So, I thought, why don't I just emulate games on my phone? I mean, I know that there are a lot of emulators available for Android, and even though my phone is not a powerhouse, it should be able to handle some games, right? So, I started doing some research on which emulators are good and which games run well on them.
the research phase
Thanks to this excellent Reddit thread, I quickly found out about a lot of emulators with their pros and cons. And I also realised that I should decide which games and/or consoles I want to emulate before choosing an emulator. So, I started to make a list of games that I wanted to play and the consoles they were on. However, I quickly realised that I had a lot of games that I wanted to play, and they were on different consoles. So, I had to narrow it down to a few games that I really wanted to play and leave the rest for later. So, here's the list of emulators that I ended up trying out with some of the games that I tried on them:
melonds, drastic and noods - ds emulation
I started with Nintendo DS emulation because I figured that it wouldn't be too demanding for my phone. There were 2 emulators that I was already familiar with, MelonDS and DraStic. So, I tried both of them out. Let's start with melonDS. It is really good. As far as I know, it emulates the Nintendo DS more accurately than DraStic, which might be an important factor for some people (but not for me tbh). The UI is clean and easy to navigate, the save states work well, it has video filtering options (albeit a bit limited), etc. So, overall, I was pretty happy with it except for one thing: performance. It ran most of the games that I wanted to play without any issues, but some games, mainly Animal Crossing: Wild World, ran pretty poorly. It was still an OK experience since, ya know, it's a pretty chill game. That's where DraStic came in to play. It is a more performance-orientated emulator, and it runs most games pretty well. Animal Crossing: Wild World ran much better on DraStic, and I was pretty happy with that. Moreover, it is also a pretty competent emulator with a lot of features. My only petty issue with it is that the UI is a bit ugly, but that's not a big deal. So, overall, I was pretty happy with both emulators, and I ended up using both of them depending on the game I wanted to play. For example, I played Ace Attorney on MelonDS and Animal Crossing: Wild World on DraStic. Recently, I also tried out NooDS, which is a new emulator that is still in development. It is, like DraStic, a performance-orientated emulator. The main selling point of NooDS for me was that it allowed me to bump up the internal resolution of the games, which made games like Mario Kart DS look much better whilst still maintaining good performance.
aetherSX2, nethersx2, nethersx2-classic, and ARMSX2 - playstation 2 emulation
After trying out Nintendo DS emulation, I wanted to try out PlayStation 2 emulation. Turns out, choosing an emulator for PS2 is a bit more complicated than choosing one for Nintendo DS. Based on what I've found, AetherSX2 was the go-to choice for a long time. However, due to some reasons, the sole developer of it stopped working on it. Somehow, some community-led forks of AetherSX2 popped up. Anyway, the current go-to choice seemed to be NetherSX2. But it doesn't end there. There are 2 versions of NetherSX2: the regular one and the "classic" one. I guess the classic one is based on an older version of AetherSX2 and offers better performance on some devices, while the regular one is based on a newer version of AetherSX2. I tried both of them out but didn't notice any significant difference in performance. So, I just stuck with the regular one. Now, the first game that I tried out was Persona 3 FES. It ran with no apparent issues, the performance was okay, and I was pretty happy with it. Then, I tried out Silent Hill 2, and it ran pretty poorly. I was pretty disappointed with that. Moreover, I also tried out Devil May Cry, Resident Evil 4, and Need for Speed: Underground 2, and they all ran pretty poorly. So, I was pretty disappointed with the performance of NetherSX2. I mean, it is still an amazing achievement to be able to emulate PS2 games on a phone, but I was hoping for better performance. So, I started looking into other emulators, and that's when I found out about ARMSX2. It is a new emulator that is still in development, but it promises better performance than NetherSX2. I tried it out, and it was... umm, broken. I couldn't get it to run any games, and it kept crashing, lol. So, I guess I'll just have to wait for it to be more stable before trying it out again. Overall, I ditched PS2 emulation for now, but I might come back to it in the future when the emulators are more stable and offer better performance (or when I get a better phone).
eden - nintendo Swwitch emulation
Okay, let's get straight to the point. I just wanted to play Tomodachi Life Living the Dream. Looked at r/EmulationOnAndroid, saw Eden, and installed it, but I couldn't get it to run any games. To be honest, I didn't try too hard since I just figured that Switch emulation on Android is still in its early stages. So, the same ending as PS2 emulation; I'll just wait for it to be more stable before trying it out again.
mandarine-neo - nintendo 3DS emulation
Finally, I also tried out Nintendo 3DS emulation. Whilst I couldn't play Tomodachi Life Living the Dream, I hoped that I could at least play the OG Tomodachi Life. So, in the same way, I looked at r/EmulationOnAndroid and saw Azahar and Lime3DS. Both of them derived from Citra. However, I don't remember why or how. I also found out about Citra-Enhanced. I am still not sure why, but instead of the aforementioned emulators, I ended up trying out Citra-Enhanced, which changed its name to Mandarine, but it is now called Mandarine-Neo. Or are they different emulators? I don't know, but I just went with Mandarine-Neo since it was the most recent one. Welp, downloaded it, installed it, and I was in. Tomodachi Life ran pretty well, and I was pretty happy with it. The performance was good, and the quality was also good. So, overall, I was pretty happy with Mandarine-Neo. I haven't tried out any other games on it yet or tinkered with it much, but I am pretty happy with it so far. I might try out some other games on it in the future, but for now, I am just happy to be able to play Tomodachi Life on my phone.
conclusion
And that's pretty much it for now. I am pretty happy with the setup that I have right now. I can game whatever I want whenever I want. Some stuff could be better in the emulation department, but I am all talk and no action with helping out with development and all that, so I shouldn't really complain. Anyway, I hope that this post was helpful for anyone who is looking to get into emulation and/or streaming.