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Interesting, I've not heard of this one before. Most of the emulation community has settled on 'Winlator' as the main android windows emu of choice. Before this it was Exagear, but winlator is easier to get started with. Another route is using proof termux with a DE like xfce and connecting with X but not sure how good this setup is for pure gaming performance, but may be a good option for Dev work.
Winlator will still be the best option in the near future but the community has been really wanting alternatives since Winlator isn't fully open source. The lead dev develops outside of the repo and appears every few months with an update, but never released the source code for the newest version (8.0)
Now the community is split into multiple forks of version 7.1 in order to add new features & fixes, like Winlator Frost and coffincolors' fork. It's hampering progress and makes the scene very confusing to navigate, so we're rooting for a neater alternative, whether that's MiceWine or whatever else is coming up.
Mobox is actually probably still more performant than winlator but it's a pain to set it up. Winlator did make a huge jump in performance lately as well. Maybe the difference is not that much anymore.
This is great! There are so many fantastic Windows games from the pre-smartphone era, before ads, in-app purchases, etc. came along and ruined things.
BTW if you liked X-Com: UFO Defense and want a blast from the past, try out The X-Com Files[1]. It runs on the Android build of OpenXcom[2], and it's not terribly difficult to set it up to sync Savegames between Android and your desktop.
How does this work? Does it run the x86_64 version of Wine in Box64? My understanding of wine was that it just translates API calls, shouldn't it work on any ISA then? (Or is most of a program / game math and that stuff would fail?)
Box64 does the x64 to ARM translation (while keeping performance as high as possible by calling native ARM library code wherever possible). Throw Wine in there to implement the Windows APIs and you can run amd64 PE binaries on aarch64 with decent performance.
You can't run amd64 without something like Box64 because Wine is not an emulator, so it doesn't interpret or rewrite the instructions to aarch64.
You can use Box64 on other ISAs if you implement the necessary translation code. I believe this is what's being done to run games on RISC-V, but I'm not 100% sure. Good ol' qemu-static would also do the job if Box64 isn't compatible (yet), but that's running the entire application in a foreign architecture so the overhead would be a lot more significant.
Can wine do ARM64X resp. ARM64EC to mix native aarch64 code with emulated x86(-64) code in the same process for better efficiency?
Wine doesn't do any of that as far as I know. It loads a Windows PE file, it's (placeholder) DLL dependencies, and starts executing at the main entrypoint. Box64 does translation and has some specific placeholder DLLs that intercept API calls and call native code rather than emulating the entire process.
If what you describe is being done, it's being done by Box64. I don't know enough about aarch64 to know what ARM64X and ARM64EC do, though. I can find [a Github comment](https://github.com/ptitSeb/box64/pull/858#issuecomment-16057...) where one of the authors states that the goal is to implement ARM64EC, but I wouldn't know what the status is on that.
Wine does support ARM64EC and I'm pretty sure you can actually use an x86 emulator with it too (at the very least Hangover should support this, minimizing the amount of emulated code needed.)
It would be great if this was on F-Droid.
How is this different to winlator? It seems to depend on termux
Which winlator ? :) People are rightly very suspicious of windows emulators coming out every day. Wonder why we haven't seen this in emulator forums.
Not sure why this comment was dead? Vouched for it, it's the official website of Winlator. Repo: https://github.com/brunodev85/winlator
I was being a bit sarcastic when I asked "which winlator?" because there are sooo many variations of it. At this point none is more official than the other. Maybe people picked up on that and didn't value the url as much.
Ah thanks for the correction, only knew the "official" one!
Just an automated false positive probably.
Fresh account, comment is just a URL.
This is especially sweet for owners of high end android tablets, where if you have an android 16 tablet you can then run both windowws legacy apps and full linux desktop on the same device.
How good is the desktop experience?
Probably depends on the tablet. If it's like Samsung Dex I'd say it's on par or better than ChromeOS with gives and takes.
The app experience reminds me of early Android tablet days where some apps just don't know what to do with a different orientation or window size that isn't constrained by the screen.
If you have apps that work well on phone and tablet or web based apps you're probably golden.
It's asking for rootfs file when I run it and just showing a folder list. how do i select the proper file?
So, there's actually a chance I could play Populous: The Beginning on a tablet?
Odd choice of name, to my ear at least, given that Android devices rarely have mice...
Bluetooth mice work great with Android, despite not being a popular accessory for phones
In German there is "Mäusewein" which translates to mice wine. It's when you have bad microbes while fermenting wine and the product tastes a bit like mouse urine.
Not sure if that had anything to do with the origin of the emulator's name though.
I use my S21u on a Lenovo docking station (USB C) quite often. Typing drives me nuts on a phone so some of my android only apps are just more pleasant docked / desktop mode.
Dear GitHub: please consider providing a nudge for the owner to include a license when creating a public repo. Otherwise the fork button becomes kind of weird, right?
>Otherwise the fork button becomes kind of weird
Then the GitHub ToS applies: https://docs.github.com/en/site-policy/github-terms/github-t...
>By setting your repositories to be viewed publicly, you agree to allow others to view and "fork" your repositories
1. Off topic
2. GitHub already does this. https://i.imgur.com/yAfwWGs.png
Probably the default should not be None. There should be a mandatory license, either the Unlicense https://unlicense.org/ or something even simpler ("this is public domain".)
To expand on this a bit, in many places a software project without a license means that all rights are reserved by the author and that nobody else has any legal right to use it in any way.
I'm not sure if unlicense/public domain would be a better default though. At the very least, that Github prompt should explicitly state with a warning what it means when you select "None" as the license. I think most people don't realize or know what it means for others who want to look at or use the project.
Wasn't it MIT or something permissive long time ago? I felt prevalence of "it's marked as ___ but actually proprietary" might have influenced that
How does this work in practice once you run the application? The windows games are designed for a large screen and keyboard&mouse.
You can connect bluetooth keyboard and mouse. They work in just about every Android app. And mant phones support external displays via USB-C
Depending on the device you can plug an android into a USB hub that will do HDMI out and support devices.
Maybe my dream comes true... Playing WoW on my Fold with a Controller without streaming.
Tested it now. Turtle WoW runs without problems. Absolutely insane...
Another app that demands my dick pics (storage permission) and refuses to work without
On GrapheneOS (an android AOSP fork) there is a "storage scopes" feature such that one can give permission only to select directories or files. I recommend this if you care a lot about this.
One big plus I found when switching to Apple after using Android phones for 10+ year was essentially always scoping file/photo storage.
It seems like a pretty easy thing to do, and I don't know why its not common / not a thing on common Android phones.
Since 4-5 years it's also common on Android, but that does not stop malicious and/or incompetent app developers from requesting the READ_EXTERNAL_STORAGE permission when not needed.
This is a bit surprising in 2024 (well almost 2025). Android has a really nice API for reducing the need for this permission, and most of it has been around sicnce android 10.
https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=UnJ3amzJM94
Maybe the author is not aware of these? How about opening an issue?
> really nice API
Excuse me? SAF is awful and source of constant complaints from developers.
Mostly by folks that keep the mindset Android is GNU/Linux, instead of finally getting the point it is a managed OS that happens to use the Linux kernel as implementation detail.
If the non SAF API provides even 1% better performance, it makes sense to use it. Especially for open source emulating software.
Does it in this case?
Ironically Lemuroid doesn't work on Android 8 due to SAF.
oh man i hate when this happens. Same thing on ios, applications want photo access and refuse to use the system photo picker and leave me with a very uncomfortable dilemma. And it's not like only small apps from indie devs that don't know better, it's actually the opposite.
Even scanning metadata, exif tags can be valuable. So I'm not surprised that larger companies do this.
How would you do it without storage permission? Win applications generally have dozens to hundreds of files.
Android applications can use their own private data directories just fine, you don't need any permission for that. Termux, for instance, can run entire Linux distros without ever being granted storage permissions.
They can also request the user for a specific folder to get read/write permissions for (rather than the entire shared storage space).
Just requesting full access to the entire shared storage is a lot easier to implement, but it's also not great for privacy and security. Google is trying to crack down on these permissions in the Play Store for this reason.
Several apps have been caught extracting location history data from pictures stored in the camera directories already, so it's not a theoretical threat. Unfortunately, app developers have been reluctant to implement the (much better) specific file picker introduced in Android 4.4, but now they're being forced to if the want Google Play access in the future.
The scoped storage API has some downsides, though, such as reduced performance. Not really a problem if all you want to do is upload a picture or save a document, but when you're running executables from there you may run into a wall. This can be circumvented by copying the files to the app's private data directory, but people may want to use the selected folder to copy output back to Android, and a copy action obviously doubles the space required at least temporarily.
That being said, I believe applications shouldn't refuse to work entirely without full access to every file on the shared storage space. They can ask the user what they want to do if the storage permission is denied rather than refuse to work.
Extra unfortunate is that the new file picker Google introduced a few months ago for media selection is absolutely terrible in my opinion (no directory support, just a flat list of images), but some other phone brands offer file pickers of their own.
I think both you and I agree that Android's implementation is awful. I don't think it is fair to blame developers because Google is being bad OS steward.
I don't think invidual developers are to blame necessarily, but Android developers at large have been ignoring privacy-friendly storage APIs for a literal decade at this point.
While I have my problems with the current state of things in Android, I think the new mechanism is better as a whole than the old mechanism where every flashlight app could upload your nudes to the cloud without you knowing. Had the Android developer landscape jumped ship to these APIs earlier, I'm sure the kinks would've been worked out years ago.
The unfortunate lesson Google seems to have learned is that giving developers the option to use safer, privacy-friendly APIs that put the user in control doesn't work, and forcefully disabling old APIs and forcing developers to update their apps to comply does. Hardly a surprise, to be honest, given Android's ecosystem is still full of shovelware and third-party "ad libraries" filled with adware and stalkerware (often making use of an app's legitimate permissions for nefarious means). I'd like Google to crack down on these, at least on their store, but then I'm sure we'd see weeks of HN threads about how Google broke the latest and greatest app by altering the API.
I blame Android for not providing fake/empty storage to an app when permission is not granted.
You think that kind of solution is understandable for an average user, like an uncle who has little computer knowledge?
Should we target the lowest common denominator?
Should remove all books above a grade 10 reading level, since most people can barely read?
Sorry your analogy doesn't help anything here. If you want to answer the question, answer that specific question.
Comment was deleted :(
Average user would not care if their files are in an application specific folder.
This is asking for trouble when someone accidentally doesn't provide and fails to realize, or deliberately doesn't and have forgotten the choice later on when they may want to.
I believe most of the commercial Android phones already have a regular task that resets permissions for unused apps to serve people who gave permissions accidentally or forgotten about them after setting them deliberately.
There is something that resets permissions, but only those that were granted and only if the app hasn't been used for a while. I'd find it annoying if I intentionally selected "always" for some given permission in an app I regularly use, only to have it occasionally reset itself. I already find the battery optimization notifications for apps I want running in the background annoying enough.
Now someone needs to make it work the other way. Android apps on Windows!
It exists; but not for much longer:
Well, there is BlueStacks...
BlueStacks seems to work great for games. Compared to Nox anyway, and even that was so cool when I first found it. I've heard of LD Player as well but haven't used it.
Is it more difficult to get non-gaming apps working?
Last I tried, many non-gaming apps do not function anymore because google identifies the device as non-physical.
I think its opt-in by the app developer, Authy (shitty company, I'm aware) does not work on Bluestacks. That's a pain, because I've used Bluestacks to migrate auth codes before.
Crafted by Rajat
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