vNESLight a free NES emulator for Windows Phone

vNESLight Windows Phone

vNESLight is a free NES emulator for Windows Phone which used to exist as a homebrew app but with Microsoft easing the restrictions on the allowed content on the marketplace and allowing emulators , the developer has decided to put this up on the marketplace. Unlike certain individual who puts up pirated games for purchase ( its odd that they still exist on the Marketplace ) this emulator comes for FREE .

To get an idea of what to expect from the controls there are 2 demo ROMS that are pre-loaded on the vNESLight emulator : Battle Kid 2 and Super Bat Puncher and you do have the ability to add more custom ROMS that you can download off the internet. The controls come in the form of a virtual keypad with 4 directional buttons , start, select, A, B in short everything you need for a NES games. But you can add your own ROMs just as easily by providing a link to the ROM file ( .nes or .zip format ). There are a lot of sites out there that put up many ROMs for download and you can easily download them and put it on to your public folder on dropbox and get the public url and put that in to the app and bam .. you have that game on your phone. We wont be sharing any specific links to download these but googling for it is a good place to start.

When you go in to setting you do have the option to use the best setting for 1st or 2nd gen devices, toggle fullscreen mode , toggle sounds and music in the game ( it works but at times I feel the games can lag a bit with sounds enabled ) and enable / disable FPS count on the screen. You also have an advance section where you have the option to explore a bit more adventurous options like a 60FPS mode, a speed hack and frames skip option ( I did not fiddle around with these a lot because I was quite happy with the results I got from the default settings ).

From the games list clicking on a game will launch that game in all its 8-bit glory ( if you have too many ROMs in there you can pin the ones you frequently play to your home screen ) , and you can see all the keypad buttons on the bottom section of the screen. When you are in the game you can click on the hardware button and you get the option to save / load a game ( it worked for me most of the times but at times it can give you some issues ).

We reached out to the developer and have learned that a new version ( 0.5.0.0 ) is coming out soon : which brings some improvement over the current version ( we have a beta version which I will be testing soon and will have a video up for it ) but even in its current beta state the emulator works quite well to bring the classic NES titles to you Windows Phone. Rating this is going to be odd because there is no real gameplay to judge because this is an emulator and will play any supported game you throw at it. In terms of value this app allows me to re-live some of the classics that I enjoyed as a child and that in my books deserves nothing less that a 5/5 and I highly recommend you download the app quickly as Microsoft has been pulling some of the legit emulators while the ones that allegedly rip-off the opensource emulator and comes bundled with pirated games are allowed to exist.

vNESLight Gameplay Video

vNESLight Screenshots

Version Under Review : 0.4.0.0

vNESLight is a FREE NES emulator for Windows Phone

Our Rating for vNESLight

Scan this QRcode with Bing vision ( Hit the hardware Search button and click on the small icon that looks like an eye ) on your Phone to download the App to your phone.

Price : Free