Samsung's new phone is powerful enough to run Nintendo GameCube games

The newest version of Samsung's best smartphone, the Galaxy S8, is quite a powerful little device.

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 (Samsung)

Beyond what Samsung's telling us about the phone's internals, we've got an even better example of just how much horsepower the S8 is packing: One intrepid YouTuber managed to get the Nintendo GameCube running on the phone.

And yes, so we're clear, we're talking about Nintendo's fourth major game console — the little box known as GameCube:

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The Nintendo GameCube launched in 2001. 16 years later and the entire console can be emulated smoothly on a smartphone.

 (Evan Amos, Wikimedia)

The GameCube is home to some of Nintendo's biggest games: "The Legend of Zelda: The Wind Waker," "Super Smash Bros. Melee," "Mario Kart: Double Dash," and many more. It was Nintendo's response to the PlayStation 2 from Sony and the original Xbox from Microsoft, and it's a beloved console among millions.

And Samsung's new phone, the Galaxy S8, is capable of re-creating the entire experience — "emulating" the console and its games. That's no easy task; it's tremendously taxing on processors to re-create an entire piece of hardware, even though said piece of hardware is over a decade old.

Even more impressively, the S8 does it smoothly — see for yourself:

The S8 isn't available to buy just yet; it's up for sale as of April 21, and costs around $700. When it does arrive, you can download the GameCube emulator (known as "Dolphin") and test out this stuff for yourself. One note of caution: emulation is a legal gray area.

Notably, Nintendo's new Switch console doesn't offer access to Nintendo GameCube games — not yet, anyway. Nintendo's said it will have more to share on that front later in 2017.

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