Running Emulators on the OUYA

Seeing that a lot of people are taking their first steps into the world of Android with the low end gaming console OUYA, i thought that a rough guide to emulation on the Android OS is in order. Since the OUYA does not have access to the Google Play store you will need to sideload the emulators and game ROMS. Sideloading is directly installing .apk files, where .apk files is the installation files of a game or application in the Android OS. Like a .exe file on Windows. To sideload you need to first acquire the .apk file and place it on a memory stick or card. In case of the OUYA you will need to place the files on a USB memory stick.


What follows is a short list of links to the most popular emulators:
Note that there are usually more than one emulator for a platform. Try them out to see what works best for you. There is also some emulators for Android in the OUYA store.

Nintendo 64:

N64Droid

N64Oid 2.7

Games


Playstation 1:

psx4droid[3.0.5]

FPse [0.10.45]

Games

Super Nintendo Entertainment System (SNES):

Snesoid 2.2.4

SnesDroid 1.0

Games

SEGA Genesis / SEGA Megadrive:

Gensoid 2.4.3

Games

Gameboy Advance:

GBAOid 2.4.7

Games

The files is in Zip and RAR format and needs to be unpacked on your PC first. Then transfer the .apk files to your USB memory. For the games. All the Emulators i have tried out works just fine with Zip files, so in most cases you will not need to unpack the games themselves. 

Unzip the file browser .apk and transfer it to your USB storage. 

(For ease of future transfers you could also include this "Airdroid" .apk that will let you connect to your OUYA wirelessly from your PC browser)

By now you should have your emulators in .apk format and your games on your USB storage device, Plug it into the back of your OUYA. 

Now thanks to OUYA coming down with the walled garden Apple fever, accessing your own files is all of the sudden a bit tricky. On your OUYA. Go to the main menu, then navigate to the "make"section, then "software"  And then open the "browser". Now this is basically just a web browser with OUYA's own page set as a start page. That is your way out of the walled garden OUYA has set up.

When you are in the browser. Press "Y" on your controller. And enter the following URL:

http://bit.ly/13SJxOB

i have used bit.ly because the "real" URL is: http://gdown.baidu.com/data/wisegame/86f47585c4eed74f/ESFileExplorer.apk

Which will give you a bad day trying to enter with a controller.

Your OUYA will then download the ES File Explorer application to the internal memory.

Once finished. Navigate back to the main menu. Go to "Manage", "System", "Advanced"

This will bring you to the standard Android menu.

Scroll down to "Storage" then select "Downloads"

Up comes a list of the files you have downloaded. On that list should be the ES File Explorer .apk file.

Select it and press the "O" button. And choose install.

Once finished you will now have access to not only your own files but also the content of your USB storage from the ES File Explorer application.

Navigate back to the main menu. Then "Make" and in the "Software section" next to the browser. You should now have a icon for the ES File Manager.

Now i will not be doing a tutorial in how to use the ES File Manager or setup each of the emulators to work with the OUYA controller. But it does work and both using ES File Explorer to copy your game ROMS over to the internal memory of the OUYA, and setting up the emulators is pretty self explanatory and straight forward. 

First press "O" on the different Emulator .apk files to install them.

Next, copy over your game ROM files to the OUYA's internal memory. Note: Keep the game ROMs separated in a folder for each gaming system you want to emulate.

You can either create a folder on your OUYA or just copy the game ROMs to the "Downloads" folder. in each of the Emulators you will use its internal file explorer to navigate to the ROM directory and it will save where you have pointed it to.

Next go into the settings of your emulator and keymap the different buttons to your liking on your OUYA controller.

Thats it. your $99 US ARM device can now play 20+ year old games.

Update: Seems that some emulators is not able to be installed and will present a "parsing" error.