Is Emulation the Best Feature of the Nvidia Shield?

PlayStation 1

The PlayStation1 has a huge library of games at its disposal, and it was also the console that started many great Sony franchises. It wasn’t an especially powerful console, and that’s a good thing for us today, because it means that it’s incredibly easy to emulate. The emulators I tried required little or no modifications to their settings to work and the controller layout matches the Nvidia Shield very well.  The only downside being that the game roms are .iso files and tend to take up a fair bit of space (around 700mb per disc) and you’ll soon fill up a memory card if you plan on storing a lot of them. Of the two emulators I used for PS1 games, I found some games worked on one, but not on the other, however it doesn’t take much trial and error testing to work out which is best for each game.

Emulators used

• RetroArch
• ClassicBoy

The Final Fantasy series saw some of its greatest ever titles land on the PlayStation 1, I tried all the ones in my collection, FFVII, FFVIII, FFIX and Tactics. All of them worked without a hitch and actually benefitted from swifter loading times since I was loading from microSD rather than an optical drive. There are a few filters in the emulators that you can apply to improve colours, scanlines and antialiasing, as well as image scaling to make the games fit a widescreen display; all of which help make the game look better than ever on the Shields HD display. Performance was flawless, no glitches, no slowdown what so ever.

The Spyro games are another prime example of the PlayStation 1 back catalogue, having tried out Spyro 1-3 on the Shield, I’m happy to say the game is perfectly playable, much like Final Fantasy I didn’t experience any issues what so ever with these games, the graphics and sound quality was fantastic.

Metal Gear Solid did prove a little troublesome to get running, switching emulators and tweaking a couple of settings eventually fixed it. Performance was a little off on some of the cutscenes, but certainly nothing to hamper your gaming experience. The game is really well suited to the small screen and controller of the Shield, leaving you to enjoy one of the greatest action games ever created.