While a Snapdragon X Elite-equipped laptop might be able to run Crysis (just about), can it emulate classic console games too? That’s a tougher question than it first seems because most emulation software is written to convert classic console code to run on Intel and AMD processors. In other words, you’ll have to emulate an emulator to run it on an Arm chip like the Snapdragon X Elite. As you might have guessed, emulating emulators will likely cause a few issues, but it’s also a pretty good test for finding the limits of Microsoft’s Prism emulator.
I started out with RetroArch, the popular choice for booting up vintage games from a wide range of deprecated consoles. I grew up on the classic Nintendo platforms, but unfortunately, Muppen-Next repeatedly crashed after every loading screen. ParaLLEI seemed to boot up the few N64 games I tried, and they ran as smooth as butter, as did BSNES and SNES9x for those 80s kid classics. So it looks like things work OK here, if not entirely pain-free. But that’s not surprising when you can run games of this vintage on something like a Raspberry Pi. To really test the Snapdragon X, I turned to the latest emulators targeting much more powerful consoles from the late 00s.