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The golden age of Nintendo emulators on Android is over
Nintendo emulators need to tread cautiously from now on
I have always been a big emulation aficionado, and that interest has been indulged with the great emulation apps available on the Play Store, a wonderful selection of nostalgia for your trusty Android phone. While the majority of these apps are attractive, Nintendo console emulators are definitely the most notable, given the company's colossal library of beloved classics that people are champing at the bit to relive. However, recent litigious incidents between Nintendo and certain big names on the emulator scene have cast a worrisome shadow over the future of Nintendo emulation apps on the Google Play Store.
Android loses its emulator edge as Apple trims the hedge on its walled garden in this week's news
This week in Android: Big Tech goes on a killing spree, and the grass IS greener on the other side of the pond
With some of the biggest companies in the world constantly competing for market- and mindshare, there's never a dull week in Android news. This week, a few big names outside the usual Google-Samsung two-step came to dance, as EU regulators and corporate lawyers alike laid down the litigation. Of course, Google itself still made headlines, but not all of them were good. If you haven't been following the space as closely as you'd like, we've got you covered with a rundown of this week's top five headlines below.
Best Android emulators for Windows and Mac
Turn any laptop or desktop computer into an Android device!
How often have you wished you could use your preferred Android app on your laptop or desktop computer (one that isn't a Chromebook)? There are multiple options available today, but for our purposes, we'll focus on desktop Android emulators.
This Windows Phone emulator for Android wants to revive some of your favorite games
It's an early build, but the emu has been tested with 15 WP titles
One of Android's strengths is that you can easily load up emulators, ranging from console emulators to OS emulators; there's no shortage out there. Well, seeing that emulators are so popular on Android, it's no surprise to see that an enterprising developer has created a Windows Phone emulator (with this news recently shared on Reddit). The emulator is in the early stages of development, so it is very much a work in progress, but the developer has already tested 15 XNA games, and they are supposedly working with Vulkan, which certainly sounds promising.
How game emulators learned to teach old smartphone GPUs new tricks
The developers behind Skyline, a Nintendo Switch emulator, came up with a clever idea to get the tools they needed
Android's dirty F-word, "fragmentation," may not get as many irate headlines or clicks as it once did, but it remains an issue in a thousand tiny ways. As pointed out by Esper.io's Mishaal Rahman in a recent (and exquisite) newsletter, one of those issues is GPU drivers, simply because of how Android works.
Dolphin Emulator gains in-game config tweaking and support for disc compression
Making a great Wii and GameCube emulator even better
Dolphin is one of the best emulators when you want to take your old GameCube and Wii games with you, and over the summer, the emulator has only gotten better. It now has a revamped config system that can be tweaked while you're gaming, and it's possible to do disc compression and conversion actions right on your phone.
Nintendo 3DS emulator Citra now supports save states on Android (APK download)
Save your progress even if the game you're playing won't let you
Citra first added save state support to its desktop build back in April this year, just a month before bringing over the emulator to Android. Since save states are very intense on storage and prone to breakage, it took the team a while to port over experimental save state support to Android, but the wait is over. Citra has announced that save states are now available on the latest Android build just as the app reached the milestone of half a million downloads.
This shady new emulator turns your Android phone into a Nintendo Switch
Animal Crossing isn't worth getting involved with this mess
Did you know your Android device can play old school Gameboy games? It's one of the reasons why Android is such a unique platform. Installing emulator apps that make Pokemon Blue accessible 24/7 from your front pocket is super cool. Now a new emulator has popped up online that purports to unlock Nintendo Switch gaming capabilities on Android devices — but it pays to look before you leap.
Android Studio Emulator updated with enhanced support for foldables
There are also new performance enhancements
Android Studio is the main SDK for developing Android applications and games, and it has a built-in device emulator for testing projects across a wide range of hardware setups. Google just released a massive update for the Android Emulator with improved support for foldable devices, performance enhancements, and a few bug fixes.
Emulation is key to preserving the history of video games and making them more accessible, so it's always exciting to see emulators make their way to Android. Citra, an emulator for the Nintendo 3DS, has been available on desktop platforms for years, and now the Citra team has finally released an official Android port.
Dolphin is an incredibly popular emulator for the Nintendo Wii and GameCube, and the Android version has been improving more and more lately. The app recently gained dark mode support, and now more features from the desktop emulator are coming to mobile.
Dolphin is an incredibly popular emulator for the Nintendo GameCube and Wii, allowing you to play thousands of great console games on Windows, Mac, Linux, and even Android. The Android port has received plenty of great updates over the past year, like Wii remote emulation, and now it even has a dark mode.
Together with the Android Q Beta 2 release today, Google is pushing out a bleeding-edge preview of Android Studio Canary. The emulator included in version 3.5 includes support for foldable devices, allowing developers to get started porting apps to the form factor now.
Collabora is a software development and consulting company based in the United Kingdom. In a blog post, the company described its new "experimental containerized Android environment," which allows Android apps to run in floating windows alongside native applications on desktop Linux.
Dolphin, the much-loved Nintendo GameCube and Wii emulator, has been making strides in Android support over the past few months. It returned to the Play Store in August 2018, and a few months later, rumble emulation and other improvements were added. The latest update to the Android port has even more improvements in store, like Wii remote emulation and fixes for Android 9 Pie.First, this month's Dolphin update drastically improves visuals in some games when using the OpenGL rendering option. Games like Super Paper Mario: The Thousand Year Door used to look completely broken (and frequently crashed) on OpenGL, thanks to the games using a rendering effect called 'Bounding Box.' Dolphin couldn't emulate this effect properly on OpenGL due to a minor bug, which has now been fixed.
Wine, the popular cross-platform Windows compatibility layer, has been officially available for Android since early 2018. However, it only translates API calls; there's no built-in emulator to convert x86 instructions for ARM processors. ExaGear is a paid emulator for Android that attempts to solve this problem, by adding an x86 emulator to a modified version of Wine.
If you're not familiar with it, Dolphin is a cross-platform emulator for the Nintendo GameCube and Wii. The Android port came out in 2013, and the Dolphin community has continued to develop it since. The project's July 2018 progress report highlights several improvements to the Android version, including Android TV channels support and better Vulkan compatibility.
Android Studio's device emulator used to be incredibly slow, even on capable hardware. Google has drastically improved the performance over the past two years, but a few issues remain. The Windows version of the Android Emulator uses HAXM, which only works on Intel processors. That means AMD-powered computers can only use non-accelerated ARM images.
In October of last year, the first evidence appeared that Google was working on a Chrome OS emulator for Android Studio. It would allow developers to test their Android apps on a Chromebook, without going out and buying one. At long last, Google has finally added Chrome OS emulator images to Android Studio.
For the past few years, the primary way to build Android applications has been through Google's Android Studio. The first stable release arrived in 2014, with version 2.0 appearing last year. The third major update was announced at Google I/O 2017, and now it is finally ready for prime time.