Soon, it will also run Android 5. Andy provides the full Android 4. You can basically do anything in Andy that you could on an Android tablet or phone, including adding widgets to your home screen, backing up your virtual device to Google and receiving app notifications. The latter comes in handy, because instead of leaving a browser tab open for Facebook or Gmail or needing your phone for messaging apps like Snapchat, you can just get the notifications in Andy.
The program offers many ways for Android to interact with your PC with either x86 processors or ARM processors and even your phone. You can use your Android phone as a controller for Andy on your desktop helpful when playing games that require tilting or tapping, if your computer doesn't support these.
Android apps can be launched from your Windows desktop, and you can copy files between Android and Windows through a shared folder. Andy is also attractively percent free, although its parent company is an alleged adware distributor a fact that might give some people pause. The program also ran disturbingly slow on my two-year-old laptop, so a newer computer with at least 4GB of RAM, if not more, is recommended if you want to run Android apps with Andy. You may have some success pulling files off an optical disc with your PC, and if you're really lucky you may have access to cartridge dumping hardware , but most of us are going to look online for games.
Search by console name and a keyword like "ROM" or "collection" and you are going to find a lot of hits. Keep digging around, and you might just hit the mother lode. Just make sure you do the honest thing and only download ROM files for games you actually own.
And if you're pulling a lot of Archive bandwidth, think about making a donation. The Internet Archive: what isn't it good for? With older systems, this tends to be all you need to get up and running, but others will require some additional system files — often a BIOS dump — in order for the emulator to operate. Thankfully, the Archive is awash with these too, so your biggest headache here will probably just be figuring out where on your phone each emulator expects you to place these files.
By now you're all set up to be emulating some of your favorite games, but there's still one step to go before we're actually playing them: input. While games built from the ground up to work on smartphones do their best to work within the limitations of touchscreen control, a year-old NES game is going to be operating at a disadvantage. All of these emulators attempt to make do with on-screen virtual controls. With enough practice, maybe you could learn to operate them without being constantly annoyed, but there's no mincing words here: they suck.
If you want to run emulators on your smartphone and not end up hating your life, you've got to pick up a dedicated controller. The perfect controller for Android emulation action may already be in your living room.
The good news is that you've got tons of options, and might not even need to go shopping for anything new. If you've got a system like a PlayStation 4 or Xbox One, you can probably just pair your existing controllers over Bluetooth with your Android phone.
Failing that, there's no shortage of affordable wireless controllers available, like the 8Bitdo model you see peeking out all the way up top. And if you're really looking to score some retro cred, you could even hook up a wired USB controller. But no matter what, pick one, just so you're not stuck rubbing your screen like an idiot.
Download an emulator. Get game ROMs. Game ROMs are game save files created by other gamers that you can use with your emulators.
You can get game ROMs by searching the net. Launch your device browser and search for the ROMs of the games you want to play on your emulator.
Games will be listed in the website you selected. Scroll down the list and tap the game you want to download. Download ROMs are usually stored in the Downloads folder. Get an emulator BIOS. Emulator BIOS will allow your games to run properly on the emulator of your choice. Most of the time, several types of BIOS will appear in the website you selected, just scroll down the list until you find the emulator BIOS you need and tap on it.
Part 2. Launch the emulator. Locate the emulator app icon on your home screen or app drawer, and tap on it. Search for the BIOS. At this point, the emulator will ask for a BIOS. To edit the name and description of the selected snapshot, click the edit button at the bottom of the window. To manually delete a snapshot, open the emulator's Extended controls window, select the Snapshots category, select the snapshot, and click the delete button at the bottom of the window.
You can also specify whether you would like the emulator to automatically delete snapshots when they become invalid, such as when the AVD settings or emulator version change. By default, the emulator will ask you if you'd like for it to delete invalid snapshots. You can change this setting with the Delete invalid snapshots menu in the Settings tab of the Snapshots pane.
To load a snapshot at any time, open the emulator's Extended controls window, select the Snapshots category, choose a snapshot, and click the load button at the bottom of the window. In Android Studio 3. Use your computer mouse pointer to mimic your finger on the touchscreen; select menu items and input fields; and click buttons and controls. Use your computer keyboard to type characters and enter emulator shortcuts. To perform common actions with the emulator, use the panel on the right side, as described in table 2.
You can use keyboard shortcuts to perform many common actions in the emulator. To pan in zoom mode, hold Control Command on Mac while pressing the arrow keys on the keyboard. The screen recording controls are in the Screen record tab of the Extended Controls window. To begin screen recording, click the Start recording button in the Screen record tab. To stop recording, click Stop recording. Controls for playing and saving the recorded video are at the bottom of the Screen record tab. You can also record and save a screen recording from the emulator using the following command on the command line:.
To take a screenshot of the virtual device, click the Take screenshot button. By default, the screenshot is saved on your computer desktop. To change the location to which screenshots are saved, use the Screenshot save location control in the Settings category in the emulator's Extended controls window. The emulator supports the use of basic camera functionality on your virtual device for earlier Android versions. Android 11 and higher supports the following additional Android Emulator camera capabilities:.
You can use the virtual scene camera in a virtual environment to experiment with augmented reality AR apps made with ARCore. For information on using the virtual scene camera in the emulator, see Run AR apps in Android Emulator. This feature can be used to import custom images such as QR codes for use with any camera-based app.
For more information, see Add Augmented Images to the scene. You can greatly reduce the time it takes to test common AR actions by using the preset macros in the emulator. For example, you can use a macro to reset all the device's sensors to their default state.
Before using macros, follow the steps in Run AR apps in Android Emulator to set up the virtual scene camera for your app, run your app on the emulator, and update ARCore.
Then, follow these steps to use emulator macros:. Use the extended controls to send data, change device properties, control apps, and more. To open the Extended controls window, click More in the emulator panel. You can use keyboard shortcuts to perform many of these tasks. The emulator lets you simulate "my location" information: the location where the emulated device is currently located.
For example, if you click My Location in Google Maps and then send a location, the map shows it. Controls for the device's location information are organized under two tabs: Single points and Routes. In the Single points tab, you can use the Google Maps webview to search for points of interest, just as you would when using Google Maps on a phone or in a browser.
When you search for or click on a location in the map, you can save the location by selecting Save point near the bottom of the map. All of your saved locations are listed on the right side of the Extended controls window. To set the emulators location to the location you have selected on the map, click the Set location button near the bottom right of the Extended controls window. Similar to the Single points tab, the Routes tab provides a Google Maps webview that you can use to create a route between two or more locations.
To create and save a route, do the following:. To simulate the emulator following the route you saved, select the route from the list of Saved routes and click Play route near the bottom right of the Extended controls window. To stop the simulation, click Stop route. To continuously simulate the emulator following the specified route, enable the switch next to Repeat playback. To change how quickly the emulator follows the specified route, select an option from the Playback speed dropdown.
The speed defaults to the Delay value Speed 1X. You can increase the speed by double Speed 2X , triple Speed 3X , and so on. The emulator allows you to deploy your app to multiple displays, which support customizable dimensions and can help you test apps that support multi- window and multi- display.
While a virtual device is running, you can add up to two additional displays as follows:. The emulator lets you simulate various network conditions. You can approximate the network speed for different network protocols, or you can specify Full , which transfers data as quickly as your computer allows.
Specifying a network protocol is always slower than Full. You can also specify the voice and data network status, such as roaming. The defaults are set in the AVD. You can simulate the battery properties of a device to see how your app performs under different conditions.
To select a Charge level , use the slider control. If the AVD has the directional pad enabled in the hardware profile, you can use the directional pad controls with the emulator. However, not all devices can support the directional pad; for example, an Android watch. The buttons simulate the following actions:. This control can simulate 10 different fingerprint scans. You can use it to test fingerprint integration in your app.
This feature is disabled for Android 5. This control lets you test your app against changes in device position, orientation, or both. For example, you can simulate gestures such as tilt and rotation. The accelerometer doesn't track the absolute position of the device: it just detects when a change is occurring. The control simulates the way accelerometer and magnetometer sensors would respond when you move or rotate a real device.
You must enable the accelerometer sensor in your AVD to use this control. These values include gravity. For example, if the device is suspended in outer space, it would experience zero acceleration all of x, y, and z will be 0.
When the device is on Earth and laying screen-up on top of a table, the acceleration is 0, 0, and 9.
0コメント