JoiPlay Setup Guide

What is this?

Today, we’re going to talk about how you can play popular Pokemon fangames on your Android handheld.

Now, when I say fangames, I don’t mean romhacks. I mean the fangames that are PC based like Pokemon Reunion, Insurgence, Uranium, Reborn, Rejuvenation and more. 

Maybe you’ve heard of some of these, maybe you haven’t. 

Now, going to disclaimer this as well. Out of all the guides I’ve ever done on my site, this is the one with the highest probability of things going wrong. The fact that any of these even run, let alone work, is magic, and it’s really held together by hopes and dreams.

That means, if you run into any issues, or have problems, I really am not the best person to ask, or to help you. I won’t know the answer. I’ll share how to get these games running and all of that today, and I can at least confirm they run on the AYN Odin 2, but I can’t confirm they work on your other device or anything else. I also can’t confirm they won’t crash every hour or anything like that, but they seem to mostly be fine. 

Setup Start

But back to the games, and we’re going to need to use a program called JoiPlay on Android to play these games for us. It’s not an emulator, but you can think of it like one. 

It’s available for free through a Patreon post, no money required. Download the latest JoiPlay public version from Patreon.

Then, you want to download the latest RPG Maker Plugin. It might be in that same post, or in another.

Lastly, you need to download the JoiPlay Mapping Generator, which you can get here. It’s the last option in the post. We need this to do controller mapping.

Those three APK’s are all you need. 

Open and install each APK, but start with the JoiPlay one first. Then you can do the other two afterwards. 

Go ahead and open JoiPlay. Keep hitting next, then accept the terms and privacy policy, and then allow every permission that it asks for. There’s a bunch.

Getting Games

Finally, we’re at the home screen of JoiPlay. Now we need to get a game or games to continue on. I would suggest downloading them through your device’s browser, that would be the easiest, but you can also do it on the PC, then move them to the device. Either way works, but if you download them to your device directly without a PC, use the file manager called Solid Explorer File Manager, as it has the ability to extract the zips and it’s just an awesome file manager.

I’m going to rapid fire through how to get the files for them. It’s very simple, you want to head to the games website, and grab their full zip, not their installer. We need all of the files and thankfully, each of the games do provide the full zips for exactly this reason. So let’s quickly go through how to get the files for the games I talked about earlier, and if you want, you can just pick one of these games for now if that’s easier for you, you don’t need them all.

Pokemon Reunion

For Pokemon Reunion, head to their website, and the Download tab. It’ll open a MEGA link, go ahead and right click the full version, download, standard download. Keep in mind this game is 2.21GB. Go ahead and extract that zip file, it’ll take a while. 

Pokemon Insurgence

For Pokemon Insurgence, head to their website, and the Download button. You want to select the Full Download option and the Download button under it. This game is 691MB, most of these are large, just keep that in mind. Go ahead and extract that zip file. 

Pokemon Uranium

For Pokemon Uranium, head to their website and the Play button. It’ll take you to reddit, download the Zip version. It’ll take your to MEGA, download it. Extract that zip file. 

Pokemon Reborn

For Pokemon Reborn, head to their website and scroll down to the Download button. Scroll down again and grab the Windows 7 or earlier version, do not grab the Windows 8 or later one. Extract that zip file. 

Pokemon Rejuvenation

For Pokemon Rejuvenation, head to their website and scroll down to the Download button.  Scroll down again and grab the latest Windows version. It’ll take you to MEGA, download it and then extract that zip file.

Now, if you’re crazy like I am and you grabbed them all on the PC instead, fair warning that it would take hours to transfer them all to your device at once if you extract on the PC first – and if you’re familiar with Android, your screen needs to be on during the transfer for it to not disconnected, so you would sit there tapping the screen every 20 or so minutes to avoid the 30 minute timeout.

So I suggest that you transfer them over as zips to your device, and put them in a folder, I call mine Pokemon Fangames and it’s on the SD card in my ROMs folder, but you can put it anywhere you want. Then extract on the actual device using Solid File Explorer Manager. You can do it by just push and holding on the zip, clicking the three dots and extract. 

You can now remove the original zip files if you want after extracting, we don’t need them,

Installing Games

Let’s jump back to the device and we can open JoiPlay again.

Click the Plus sign top right, and navigate to one of the games folders. Mine are on the external storage, and in my ROMs folder and Pokemon Fangames subfolder. I’m going to start with Pokemon Insurgence, and then you want to select the exe file, so in this case and most cases, it’s called Game.exe. You can now give the game a name, a version, and a thumbnail if you want, but I’ll be skipping those. It’s going to ask if you want to extract the game files, click yes and let it do it’s thing.

Now we can do the same thing for the other games. With Uranium, it’s the same steps, except the exe is called Uranium.exe. Reunion, Reborn and Rejuvenation are all the same steps as well. 

If you try to run a game, you’ll likely get a popup like mine and we need to download RTP and in this case, it says for RPG Maker XP. Thankfully, there’s a Download button right there, so click it. On this website, scroll down and select the RPG Maker XP tab, since that’s what we need for this game and download bottom right. Head back to JoiPlay, and click the game again and this time select Choose, and navigate to the file we just downloaded and select it. It’ll extract. 

Try clicking the game again, and you’ll likely be asked for a whole bunch of permissions this time, allow them all. 

This time, we’ll actually load up the game, and if you’re using touch screen, you’re all set. But for those of us using a controller or handheld, we need to fix some things. Select the tab at the top and the X button to close and head back to JoiPlays main screen. 

Controller Mapping

Head to Settings top right, scroll down to P. Essentials Settings and enable Input Overrides. Open the game, and select the tab at the top, then Settings cog on the right, scroll down to Gamepad Mapping. You might have things here already, personally I removed them and then started pushing buttons on my controller for them to show up, but either way works. It might not have every button on your controller showing as default.

Sometimes pushing a button on my controller made me exit this screen, just come back in and you want to basically delete any items that aren’t a button or dpad, so things like Back and so on.

Now here comes the hard part, we have to map the controls on our device to the controls of the game. For Insurgence, what I did was head into the games main screen, controls section using the on-screen touch controls. And if you scroll through here, you can see all the actions and the right controls. So for example, the Action button is C in this game, cancel is X. So if we head to Gamepad Mapping again, I want to use Button A on my controller and map it to C, so now that’s my Action button. Then you can map the dpad buttons and it matches a keyboards WASD, so W is up, A is left, S is down, D is right. Then you can map other buttons to whichever buttons you’d like. I sort of just mapped Action and Cancel right now, and as you play the game, you might find you need another button, so just map it. Remember, to get a button to show here, you have to push it on your controller first, and I would set any buttons you’re not using to 0 to avoid them being used. 

Hiding Touchscreen Controls

I would also suggest not hiding the on-screen buttons, just in case, and just minimizing them by clicking the tabs. But if you prefer to hide the buttons after getting everything correctly mapped, in JoiPlay’s main screen, go to Settings, Gamepad Settings, and enable Hide Virtual Gamepad. 

More Controller Mapping

Now, you have to map controls for each individual game, it doesn’t save across games, so follow the same steps again for each game. 

Pokemon Uranium

For Pokemon Uranium, I had to swap controls. Click the rotating circle icon bottom right and you’ll see your controls have swapped. Use C to select, and head to Options, then Set Controls. You can now map your controls, and I’ll do mine quickly on screen. I’m going to 0 out all of the buttons we don’t use, then set Button A to C for Action, Button B to X for cancel, and then we have to add the dpad, so push your dpad buttons to get them to show, then map WASD to them. Now it all works and you can navigate around. Once again, I didn’t map everything, there was a Run option and other things, and I’ll leave that to you to add if you want.

Pokemon Reunion

Then we come to Project Reunion, and this one doesn’t have a show controls option. But, if you’ve been following along, you know that it’s very likely that C is Action, and X is Cancel. And we can test it using the rotating circle and I can confirm that yep, both are correct. So let’s map as usual, and add our dpad buttons, and we’re all set once again.

Pokemon Reborn

Then we come to Pokemon Reborn, and no button works to get into Controls. So let’s try the same thing as before, setting Action to C and Cancel to X and setting our dpads. Then, I’m curious so I’m going to go New Game and maybe when we can control our character, we can see a settings screen with controls. And I was right, but it happened before. You get an option to view controls for the game, and so now you can remap to your hearts content for all these new options that we have. Pretty handy. 

Pokemon Rejuvenation

Since Pokemon Rejuvenation is made by the same people, the controls screen is basically the same as well, so you can use the same for both games. 

So it’s pretty easy, for any game you add, just follow these same steps. You could safely try Action as C and Cancel as X and I think for most games, that will just work, and will let you get into the games controls section to see what other buttons do for you to map.

I can’t confirm that all of these steps work the same on every handheld or controller, but I can confirm they at least work on the AYN Odin 2 that I’m using in this video. 

Wonky Textures Fix

One last tip before I send you on your merry way to play some games. If you run into a scenario where you start playing the game, or are playing the game, and suddenly the tiles are all messed up, the game looks weird and it’s not right. Push and hold on the game on the Joiplay screen, scroll down to Optimize maps, then click Enter to start the process. This usually fixes any games with tile map issues, I know Pokemon Infinite Fusion is one of those games, but there’s probably more. 

I think you can optimize maps on every game anyway without issue, but I didn’t test it. Up to you. 

Otherwise, you’re done here. Play some games and have fun.