bit_user :
No, what I was saying is that the people buying those things (and playing these games) are the same people who played them the first time around.
Even if there was a more ideal era, your current options are: A) Release now or B) Don't release now. There's still plenty of room for them to make money.
bit_user :
Well, old games tend to look pretty awful on big, HDTVs. So, I think a small screen is probably a plus for most of them. How small, I can't really say. I do think 1080p is wasted on a 5" screen, so 4" sounds pretty good.
As for the control scheme, that would be the benefit of these guys having the actual source code - perhaps they could tweak it to be more phone-friendly.
I wasn't talking about how they would look as much (although at smaller sizes in-game dialogue would be hard to read). Even on relatively large modern displays there are ways to make them bearable (scanline emulation and/or really good filters). But I digress. I have used genesis emulators on smartphones, and without a large display and/or a non-touch interface, they were bad. On sub-4" devices, after adding virtual touch buttons you were basically out of screen real estate and your fingers obstructed your view. Even at 4" or so it's not very good. Also touch controls emulating a d-pad are just very dissatisfying to use, particularly on small displays. Of course some devices had physical keys such as a slide out keyboard, which was OK. BT controller was still far better.
Even for titles where they have the source code... 16-bit and earlier era games still would largely have to be emulated. They were written to the metal, very specific to the 68K, VDP, Z80, YM2612, 76489 chips. They would at best make minor tweaks and customize the touch control layout on a per-game basis. With a large enough screen, I would recommend they limit the actual game window size and have the touch controls on the resulting unused screen real estate. Fighting games would still be a no-go without a controller, IMO.
If they had decided to do this a decade or so ago, I'd have suggested they require a physical controller to be present for the game to function. I would be happy with that be it has drawbacks and limits their audience, for sure.