Linux games on Mobile? - Android Q&A, Help & Troubleshooting

So this might night be possible, but....
Gaming was basically dominantly windows. Now, with windows 8, which is less focused on gaming, is probably going to be the end of windows gaming and the start of linux gaming. Even Gabe Newell, head of the company Valve, started focusing on ditching windows, porting games to linux, and encouraging developers to dev for linux. They've also found that games run better on OpenGL than DirectX.
So then that made me think... Android is based off of linux, right? So would it be possible for a dev to make something like Wine that would allow linux programs to run on Android?
It sounds very possible since the games would use OpenGL instead of the windows-only closed source DirectX. And preformance probably won't be an issue if you keep the settings low since we have such advanced mobile GPUs and processors.
This would open a whole new gaming window for Android - We'd be able to play any linux game. That means Mass Effect, Half Life, Assassin's Creed, and all the other top games on our devices.
So is this possible? Could a future update add the ability to use linux programs on android? Is this not plausible because of ARM processors? Would it be too slow?

http://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/OpenGL_ES
Who needs to port anything?
Sent from my SGH-I777 using xda premium

There is the whole x86 vs ARM issue. If the game is open source it could be compiled for ARM android, but a closed source x86 Linux game is useless on ARM.

yousefak said:
So this might night be possible, but....
Gaming was basically dominantly windows. Now, with windows 8, which is less focused on gaming, is probably going to be the end of windows gaming and the start of linux gaming. Even Gabe Newell, head of the company Valve, started focusing on ditching windows, porting games to linux, and encouraging developers to dev for linux. They've also found that games run better on OpenGL than DirectX.
So then that made me think... Android is based off of linux, right? So would it be possible for a dev to make something like Wine that would allow linux programs to run on Android?
It sounds very possible since the games would use OpenGL instead of the windows-only closed source DirectX. And preformance probably won't be an issue if you keep the settings low since we have such advanced mobile GPUs and processors.
This would open a whole new gaming window for Android - We'd be able to play any linux game. That means Mass Effect, Half Life, Assassin's Creed, and all the other top games on our devices.
So is this possible? Could a future update add the ability to use linux programs on android? Is this not plausible because of ARM processors? Would it be too slow?
Click to expand...
Click to collapse
A few misconceptions here in need of clarification.
Android is a Linux system.
Android runs OpenGL.
The games to Android are Android/Linux OpenGL games.
A program compiled for the standard PC x86 platform can not run on the Android ARM CPU because the CPUs are not compatible.
The standard Android device does not have enough processor/memory/gpu capacity for PC Crysis 2 etc, even if it was compiled for the ARM CPU.
The Android device definitely isn't fast enough to emulate the x86 CPU with the speed needed for game performance.
Wine emulates the OS API, but the processor architecture must be the same.
So yes, you can run Half Life on Android, but only if Valve makes a port to Android of it first.

Related

Windows NT on Ameo

Since Windows NT supports RISC CPU's, and the PPC CPU's are based on RISC, I was wondering if it is possible to somehow install Windows NT on an Pocket Pc.
What do you guy's think ?
Not snowball's chance in hell. NT was only ever built for x86, SPARC, MIPS and ALPHA (I think there may have been a couple of others) - never for any ARM cores. Same goes for Win 9x/ME/2k/XP/Vista/Whatever.
-- The only alternative OSes you are ever likely to see are *nix/BSD derivatives. --
yes, but what i meant is that nt supports risc cpu architecture. so thats why my question came up
fek NT - get ubuntu
so could i install ubuntu?
they got a new ubuntu-mobile edition comming up
would that work?
soothomas said:
yes, but what i meant is that nt supports risc cpu architecture. so thats why my question came up
Click to expand...
Click to collapse
RISC Architecture is not a "standard" like x86, it's more a theory of processor archiecture design. Windows NT supported some RISC architecture processor families as it supported some CISC processors. One might argue that since it supported CISC, it should run on Motorola 680x0 or Natsemi 32016. Clearly it doesn't
You specificially said NT so this probably doesnt help, but there are tutorials and guides out there to help you get Win95/98 emulated and away on your PPC. Runs sub-par though, but if I recall this was done back in 2005, PPCs and emulating software might have come a long way since then..

League Of Legends/Ubuntu?

Just a quick question from someone who is new to this kinda scene, just curious if anyone knows if its possible to run LoL on my eee pad prime (not using a remote rdc though) if i installed linux and used wine would this work? (or are there any other possibilities)
Looking at the minimum system requirements:
Minimum System Requirements
2 GHz processor
1 GB RAM (Windows Vista and 7 users will want 2 GB of RAM or more)
750 MB available hard disk space
Shader version 2.0 capable video card
Support for DirectX v9.0c or better
Windows XP, Windows Vista, or Windows 7 (Mac OS is currently not supported)
Click to expand...
Click to collapse
I really don't see being able to play this game on the Prime, especially via Wine.
Only processor speed will be questionable. We do have quad core though. Once we overclock even higher, 2ghz will be easily obtained, it will be possible. That will be dependent of how well a dual boot of Ubuntu will be. Right now it runs alongside android so it shares CPU power etc...Once we dual boot, then ubuntu will have full access to whatever CPU/gpu power it needs. Then it'll just be a manner of getting LoL to load/install on it. Those other specs prime already has or better. PRIME is a beast. Alot more powerful than people may realize. Especially now that we already overclocked to 1.6ghz without even a custom rom or bootloader unlocked. It'll only get better from here. I'd say we doing great, developement wise, in Prime first month of usage. OVERCLOCK, root, ICS, Ubuntu, Fedora, Linux(Backtrk5), added drivers, themes, n so on.
The problem here is you will be trying to run an x86 game on ARM. I'm not sure if x86 emulators even exist to the required standard to even attempt this, but even if they do then you'll likely need a machine with way more power than the prime. Probably 3-5 times at least.
Emulating is very resource demanding.
Thanks for the replies everyone im looking forward to seeing what the prime can do in the near future, i do really enjoy having one, i cant wait untill everything runs perfect with it (rdcs with keyboard bindings for the dock, alt/esc and left/right click working properly) thanks again everyone

Parallella super computer, compiling android?

Does anyone know if the computer spoken about here http://www.kickstarter.com/projects...a-supercomputer-for-everyone?ref=home_popular would be able to compile android if it were running linux??
You would need to get all the tools for teh build system running for arm. I'm pretty sure most of it has been done (gcc, python, bash) because there is a ubuntu built for the arm cpu. The specs on that thing even say it will come with ubuntu on it,. I'm not sure if the jdk is done yet for arm.
I think you're gonna hit a wall with 1GB of ram easily. The operating system youre using will probably take up 1/4 to 1/3 of it. Go around and look at the requirements to build projects like firefox and openoffice. Last time I saw it, firefox needed like 3GB of ram for the linker. You can get a huge SD card and use it as swap space, but thats gonna slow down all those 64 cores. Next up is the disk interface. It has usb2, which is capped at 480MB/s [citation needed]. It doesn't benefit you at all that your cpu can build a bunch of source files at once if it gets bottlenecked at reading those source files from and writing the object files to the hard drive.
I say you probably will be able to get it to build android, but it wont be lightning fast, or really even remarkably fast. By the time you buy that thing for $99, and a keyboard, mouse, usb HDD, SD card, HDMI monitor, and whatever else you need to actually use it, you could have bought a "traditional" computer that has SATA and > 1GB of ram.
noneabove said:
Does anyone know if the computer spoken about here http://www.kickstarter.com/projects...a-supercomputer-for-everyone?ref=home_popular would be able to compile android if it were running linux??
Click to expand...
Click to collapse
No, it will not.
Compiling isn't a task suitable for such a parallel computer. Compiling is mostly I/O intense, not CPU intense, hence you would not gain anything here, even if you'd be able to distribute the compiling task to multiple cores, which is by itself not a trivial task if we are talking about more than a handful of cores.
Also, you don't need a project like this to run a parallel super computer. You can run in parallel on modern graphics cards today. E.g. get a NVIDIA GPU and start using CUDA, and you'll get the idea what it's all about.
Parallel supercomputing is more suitable for specific CPU intense task such as FFT, flow analysis, brute forcing crypto, neural nets and such, where you've got a relative limited amount of data in comparison to the amount CPU needed.
As has been said, much return (financial and performance) and less work to implement with CUDA.
example of the outrageous performance of a system CUDA:
with a password cracking software, with a core i5 was 125 000 operations / s ... to enable support Cuda software, has become more than 8 million / s

[Q] x86 emulator (QEMU, BOCHS etc) slow on x86 based Android

Hi,
I hope this is the right place to ask. I haven't found anything similar until now.
I was experimenting with QEMU, x86 emulator on Android on my Asus Memo FHD tab which is already based on an x86 Atom architecture.
I see way slower speeds (unusable) than I read about arm based counterparts. I assume this is because QEMU assumes ARM architecture and the x86 atom is also emulating ARM.
-Is there an other way to emulate a complete x86 system faster on this architecture?
Thank you!
demodl said:
Hi,
I hope this is the right place to ask. I haven't found anything similar until now.
I was experimenting with QEMU, x86 emulator on Android on my Asus Memo FHD tab which is already based on an x86 Atom architecture.
I see way slower speeds (unusable) than I read about arm based counterparts. I assume this is because QEMU assumes ARM architecture and the x86 atom is also emulating ARM.
-Is there an other way to emulate a complete x86 system faster on this architecture?
Thank you!
Click to expand...
Click to collapse
QEMU is extremely slow because it interprets and convferts code on the fly.
You would be better off to burn an iso of this http://sourceforge.net/projects/android-x86/files/Release 4.4/android-x86-4.4-RC1.iso/download
and burn it to usb stick with Unetbootin. THen boot off of that with a pc that can do so.
Lgrootnoob said:
QEMU is extremely slow because it interprets and convferts code on the fly.
You would be better off to burn an iso of this http://sourceforge.net/projects/android-x86/files/Release 4.4/android-x86-4.4-RC1.iso/download
and burn it to usb stick with Unetbootin. THen boot off of that with a pc that can do so.
Click to expand...
Click to collapse
Thanks, running x86 virtual OS (Windows) on an android tablet sounded fun and I was just wondering if there is a more efficient solution for systems already based on x86. I guess there isn't.
Thanks!
demodl said:
Thanks, running x86 virtual OS (Windows) on an android tablet sounded fun and I was just wondering if there is a more efficient solution for systems already based on x86. I guess there isn't.
Thanks!
Click to expand...
Click to collapse
Well, there is an emulator I use, but it is extremely slow also. We just don't have native virtualization acceleration support on our processors in the phones. Otherwise it would be lightning speed.
Lgrootnoob said:
Well, there is an emulator I use, but it is extremely slow also. We just don't have native virtualization acceleration support on our processors in the phones. Otherwise it would be lightning speed.
Click to expand...
Click to collapse
Found this: http://forum.xda-developers.com/showthread.php?t=2600589
Based on the specification the intel Atom Z2560 (x86) cpu supports virtualization, however there is not software to utilize this yet.
I hope this changes, it could be useful.
Looks like someone has already did it. I hope it'll be available for the public.
See: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sZQ-xZfc8NA

Future of x86 emulation on Android

Hello,
I'm asking about the future of emulating x86 PC on ARM based Android devices.
Anything you can find is from 2012 or older, aimed to single- or first dual-core devices. Guys trying to run Windows XP on their single core Moto DROID etc.
Now, devices don't limit us, we have 2.3GHz Quad-Core CPU, 2GB and more RAM, not bad NAND and GPUs suporting OpenGL and DirectX API's.
We have about 4 option now - DOSBox, Bochs, QEMU, Limbo
DOSBox - Emulating very low spec HW, can run DOS based Windows (9x, ME)
Bochs - Old version of Bochs, old version of SDL, stable but slow
QEMU - Old version of QEMU, old version of SDL, unstable but fast(er)
Limbo - pretty good HW, not very fast, based on old version of QEMU (1.1.0), abandoned project
This is where we stopped,
but i have few ideas about what to do next:
PORT latest version of Bochs and QEMU, also regular APK builds from source + regular builds of SDL
It will be good to re-open the project Limbo. Before maintainer closed it, rebase to newer QEMU was planned, so, after new version of QEMU will be ported to android, it can be used as base.
KVM can also make emulation better for x86 devices
If there will be a 3D video adapter emulation with at least power of Voodoo3 it will be amazing!
Imagine things like Age of Empires 2, Might & Magic IV, or Warcraft 3 (not naming other awesome titles) on our phones or tablets.
Finally, i'm asking you people that want to push this project forward and continue developing it.
Thanks to everybody that will do so.
DOSBox
Bochs
QEMU
Limbo on sourceforge.net
Limbo on code.google.com

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