Want to play vintage console games on your big screen TV, but don’t want vintage, bulky consoles in your living room? If you have an Android phone, you can now do so for merely $55. Here’s how.
First, you’ll need a $35 Chromecast, an HDMI device you plug into your TV which allows your TV screen to mirror your Android phone. This capability is limited to select phones but that should expand in the future. Unfortunately, my Moto G isn’t capable of mirroring via Chromecast, so I don’t know if there’s lag between what’s on the phone and on TV. For those of you who can test it, please leave a comment about your experience!
Next, download an emulator app like Super GNES ($4 for the pro version). We won’t talk about how you, uh, acquire ROMs (basically, Super Nintendo game software), but you can find them easily on the Internet and they are mostly free.
With just these two things you can already play games on your big screen. But as we all know, on-screen controls aren’t ideal.
Well for just $16 on Amazon, you can get a game controller like MOGA; or if you have a Wii controller lying around, that works as well. Now this is the complicated part — you’ll need to tinker around to map buttons on the emulator to your controller, but it’s not too difficult. Follow a “how to” guide here.
$35 Chromecast
$16 MOGA controller
$4 Super GNES app
$0 game ROMs
= $55 big screen TV SNES experience
There’s assembly required with this set-up, but I can see everything packaged in a seamless way and sold as a system (less the emulator if sold in an official capacity). Google Gaming anyone?
THE CORNERPLAY 
The device’s response time is impressive compared to most more expensive miracast boxes. Retroarch is almost enjoyable in most games and fine for RPGs. Not brilliant. However, I tested a few Android native games…no lag at all. Not even on the Sonic the Hedgehog games from Sega. Performance on native games is amazing-identical to using an HDMI cable. HDMI worked well for Retroarch but Chromecast less well. I have a theory it may be because Retroarch tends to be anal about perfect sync, since they say they will never implement frame skipping ever. I see their point and love their app, but going to see if other emulators work more like native games.
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