Demo: Mobile Gaming on Personal Computers with Direct Android Emulation

Abstract

Playing Android games with Windows x86 PCs is now popular, and the common solution is to use mobile emulators built with the AOVB (Android-x86 On VirtualBox) architecture. Nevertheless, running heavy 3D Android games on AOVB incurs considerable overhead of full virtualization, thus often leading to unsatisfactory smoothness. To tackle this issue, we present DAOW, a commercial game-oriented Android emulator implementing the idea of direct Android emulation, which eliminates the overhead of full virtualization by providing foreign Android binaries with direct access to the domestic PC hardware through Windows kernel interfaces. In this demo, we will demonstrate that DAOW essentially outperforms traditional AOVB-based emulators in terms of running smoothness, game startup time, and memory usage.