How to use a NES, Game Boy and PSP emulator with the Gear VR

While there are lots of games around specifically built for VR and the Gear VR, many of us still want to play our retro games using the system. As always, where there is a will there is a way. If you have a PC with an Nvidia GPU you can use emulators and Nvidia SHIELD to stream directly to your headset. This enables you to use a NES, Game Boy and PSP emulator with the Gear VR.

You will need Retroarch Emulator, SideloadVR and Stream Theater to get this working. You will also obviously need some game ROMs to play. Read my tutorial on ‘How to play PC games with your Samsung Gear VR’ to learn how to set up SideloadVR and Stream Theater.

Use a NES, Game Boy and PSP emulator with the Gear VR
To get everything working you need to install Retroarch onto your PC and SideloadVR and Stream Theater onto your handset. Set everything up as per my tutorial above. Then:

1. Open Retroarch and select Online Updater.
This will take you to a screen with a long list of cores. These are the emulators.

2. Select Core Updater and scroll to find Mupen64Plus for NES and PPSSPP for PSP.
You should see a quick flash in the bottom left of the screen to tell you they have loaded.

3. Select Load Core and select Mupen64Plus or PPSSPP.

4. Select Load Content and Select File. Navigate to your ROM and select the game you want to play.
You will see a Windows Explorer-like navigation setup here. Scroll to the folder containing your
ROMs and select the game file. You should see the screen shade a loading message.

5. Select Cancel or Back to load the game.
This isn’t the best instruction ever but you need to cancel out of the screen to load the game.

This allows the game to run on your PC, but we want it to run on Gear VR. Refer back to ‘How to play PC games with your Samsung Gear VR’ for that’.