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.

You can find the GitHub page for the new WPR emulator right here, and you can even snag the APK here. The emulator can run Windows Phone 7 and 8 XNA apps. Of course, sideloading any unknown APK can be dangerous, and even though GitHub is generally trusted, I've gone ahead and installed the APK to see how things are shaping up, so you don't have to. Having installed the APK on my trusty Redmagic 7S Pro, the app itself does boot, and since I was able to track down a few XNA files that the emulator supposedly supports (sorry, you'll have to find these on your own), I tested them. Sadly I can't seem to get a single game to actually boot. I am able to add supported games to the app (where unsupported titles fail upon installation), but they all crash the emulator for some reason when trying to boot them. Perhaps the XNA files I have aren't quite what's needed, or maybe it's just early days, and things are buggy depending on the device you use.

Still, even though I couldn't get any of the XNA Windows Phone files to boot, there's no doubt many Android users would appreciate a fully-functional Windows Phone emulator, especially when local achievements for Xbox Live games are in the mix with WPR. This way, everyone will be free to go back and revisit some of their Windows Phone favorites like Wordament and Skulls of the Shogun. Sure, there's a way to go, clearly, for polish and support, but it's definitely exciting to see a fresh emu pop up, especially one for Windows Phone, so here's hoping work on WPR will continue.