I had this dumb, terrible, garbage idea: I want to see if I can play my GOG games on my phone. I know it's possible, and I know it's been asked before, but I wanted some consensus on the best way to play in 2023, especially with Xbox controller support. I was looking up a video and there was this one app that can do it, with customizable controls. I want to play those good ol' FPS games, like Blood or Dark Forces or Heretic, but I know it'd be awkward with a phone screen, so I'd be playing with an Xbox controller. I mean, I'll load up something like X-COM that's more touch screen appropriate, and maybe some games that can be played like it was on a Game Boy.

I just wanted to make sure anything suggested is good and legit and not sketchy before I dive in. Some questions would be what app do I download, what's the best way to transfer my GOG copies onto my phone and load them in the app (like, do I just dump the entire folder onto a drive and install them directly or what?), and perhaps what games would work best on a small touch screen.

1. Try searching for "Magic DosBox" on the Google Play Store (there's a 'Lite' Edition)

2. Yes you just copy the folder across then add the game's location via DOSBox (as you would for ScummVM for Android games). You may need to add SD card write permissions to save games (or put the files on internal memory if its blocked).

3. You add the controller to DOSBox then remap each game as you want with the equivalent of DOSBox's CTRL-F1 on the PC.

You need to expect that some genres will "translate" to mobile phone + controller / touch screen better than others, and speaking from experience FPS's and RTS's via "mobile DOS" aren't great. The games that worked the best were simple platformers (Crystal Caves, Jazz Jackrabbit, etc) and point & click adventures for which ScummVM lacked support (eg, DragonSphere). Simply using a controller to mimic keys that are fed into an FPS doesn't play well, ie, Doom 1-2 play an order of magnitude better in GZDoom than they do on a controller fed into DOSBox trying to mimic keypresses.

Even if you get the controller -> keypresses right, many people forget that a lot of what makes new FPS's playable via a controller on PC's / consoles is all the "under the hood" assistance code like controller auto-aim, snap to target, enlarged enemy hitboxes, game auto slows down / pauses during weapon wheel selection, etc. Take all that away and just be simulating "raw" mouse input for games that never originally had controller support, and many games are rough going for which the novelty wears off pretty quickly. In the end I tested a couple of dozen games on there including Doom 1-2, Heretic, Dune, Cannon Fodders, Elite Plus, Lemmings, etc, and ended up taking everything off except the simple platformers.

You'll need an OTG (On-The-Go) cable that's compatible with your phone (Micro-USB or USB-C) to attach a standard USB devices (e.g. XBox controller, printer, mouse etc), if you don't already have one...

This was a neat experiment, but unfortunately it seems like none of the contents are willing to transfer over. Mayhaps I'm just doing it wrong, but I did learn a few new things at least which is always good. Maybe some other time.