You can play old games from floppies with your Android phone

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If you do not know that you can play games on your smartphone, you may not be using it properly, but for the advanced gamers there is an option that is not convenient but very cool: playing PC games from floppy disks. Sure, you can also just buy an NES Classic Mini and play retro games, or just use an emulator on your phone, but that’s too easy. Floppy’s. But how do you do that?

The video below explains, but the short version is this: take a USB floppy disk drive, an adapter to hang a USB device on your smartphone (apparently included as standard with the Samsung Note and a Windows ’98 If your smartphone can read the disks, you can use your PC to put a game on it (in this case Commander Keen was set up) and if you are sure that it works you can insert the disk and use an app (in this case Magic DOSBox for Android) to load the files on the disk.

Add another keyboard

Once you’ve done all that, you can set up the DOSBox and then you can even set up separate disks so that your phone recognizes the different disks and then the app simply recognizes the disk with that specific game on it. So you can even connect a disk drive to your smartphone.
Not that it is very practical to play by the way. If you do not have a Bluetooth controller for your phone you have to peel a little to control your game, but the fact that it works at all is pretty cool. YouTuber LGR goes even further by connecting an old-fashioned PS / 2 keyboard via a USB hub in combination with the disk drive to recover the real PC experience from years ago! Not convenient, but a nice project.

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