4mo ago

Goodbye, Ridiculous Fishing: How Android's 32-bit purge erased my favorite classic games

www.androidauthority.com

6 comments

Some users online have also recommended a virtual machine (VM) running an older version of Android to play 32-bit games. But this solution hasn’t worked for me, likely due to the intrinsic hardware limitations here.
I wonder if this refers to running the VM on a PC or on a smartphone. Are modern smartphone SoCs performant enough to run a 32 bit Android VM for some older games?
- I mean, Google just updated the newer Pixels to run a literal Debian VM, so... I don't see why not.
- Sure they are, I believe. The performance of of todays mobile processors should be a multiple of that of desktop processors 15 years ago. The performance of the game played might be shitty though, lol
You can sideload these games and some of them will still work. I know I played Ridiculous Fishing a couple months ago on my S23+ with Android 14. It had few glitches, but it was perfectly playable and enjoyable.
What I'm sure you can't play is Chaos Rings 1 and 2, and it's an absolute disgrace. I've even tried with VM and PPSSPP (as they were released on PSP too), but no luck. Only way is PC probably.
Thankfully, Chaos Rings 3 is still up on the Play Store and compatible. It is a masterpiece with an absurdly beautiful OST and excellent story. If you like JRPGs and you haven't played it, I urge you to do so before it's too late.
The sad part is about this is, Google Pixel 7 Pro still has hardware capable of using 32-bit as well, but they didn't ship with 32 bit instructions, you'd have to root your phone to restore them (and again, not sure if that'd work if standard android doesn't have 32 bit support)
I owned a few Palm devices when I was younger. PHEM is a Palm device emulator for Android, but unfortunately still a 32-bit app, so it isn't compatible with my Pixel 9 Pro XL.
Luckily though, I found Cloudpilot-emu, and now I can play Strategic Commander to my heart's content.

6 comments