Although every review or video that mentions it can run ps2 and gamecube. It can't. Also aethersx2 has been abandoned and is closed source. Also android sucks.
But so far its a really nice ps1 portable device. Usually I'd use my vita but I'm always worried about damaging it and they're not exactly in production so I wanted something more disposable with L2 and R2 buttons. Now i can play Abe's Odyssey/Exodus on the train :D
Yeah you need a Snapdragon 845 at minimum to emulate PS2 with Aethersx2. And I'd recommend looking at a Snapdragon 865 or above, so you can play at higher resolutions and framerates, or with better rendering accuracy. At unisoc tiger processor with two average big cores, combined with six poorly performing little cores and a Mali GPU (the processor in the retriod pocket 3+) is never going to emulate a PS2. Mali GPUs have pretty poor performance in the PS2 and GameCube emulation space as well, basically forcing you to use Snapdragon processors with Adreno GPUs.
With Aethersx2, it's basically a port of PCSX2 to Android, done by guy that made Duckstation. All the translation layers seem to be closed source, yeah. Also I'd recommend downloading one of the apks before they decided to abandon development due to harrassment, I think apkmirror may be helpful there.
Didn't realise it was the duckstation guy. Didn't he join the main pcsx2 team recently for the 1.7 release that has the duckstation UI?
Guess it tracks since the aethersx2 and duckstation android have identical interfaces
Yeah he did Aethersx2 under a pseudonym, but people figured out it was them due to the UI and some PCSX2 forum posts I think. After that there was some major fallout regarding death threats towards them, discord drama, entitled tech illiterate users, and a whole bunch of other stuff. Which is why development of aether is abandoned.