TheVille

So last night I had a family come in for dinner. They had a young boy with them. At first he was watching (what I noticed later) Power Ranges on the tablet. Later when I was refreshing their drinks he was playing minecraft, shooting water onto tree tops, that made me smile. When I served them dinner he was now playing pokemon on the tablet, in the corner it had the nintedo DS logo. So was he playing an emulator or is their a tablet that can do this? I am not very familiar with tablets so I can't say what it was or anything but I know it wasn't a nintendo DS.

Emulator most likely.

Nintendo DS emulators for computers have been available for a few years where you would be able to have touch input by using your mouse. I haven't followed the emulation scene for awhile but I don't think it would be too hard for the programmers to have tablet touch input included as well. So my assumption is the kid had a windows tablet and someone/he installed an emulator and downloaded some roms.

This was the popular emulator back in my day.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/NO$GBA

Yes there are multiple emulators, many for phones as well

I don't know if it's gotten much better over the years, but I always believed that DS emulation was difficult to the point where you'd likely never get a truely stable, functioning emulator. I'm willing to bet someone's loaded up DS roms on a tablet or phone, but don't expect it to be perfect.

As for 3DS emulation, yeah right. 3DS has a fair amount of hardware limitations that would make that absurdly difficult to emualte on anything, notably the 3D feature and the gyro controls. While Gyro would work well on a tablet, the 3D wouldn't, and neither would work on modern PCs. Even if you had some kind of gyro-enabled controller, it would be hell using it along with your mouse for touch-screen functionallity.