Wine on Android
Did you know that you can use wine on android? It's possible thanks to Winulator, a free and open source android application that makes use of Wine (Wine is not an emulator) and Box86/Box64.
What does this mean for us? Well it means that we can run windows applications (including games) on android! There is a major catches to this, you need a fairly new device and if you want to run demanding games you will need a phone or tablet that has a cpu with a cpu and gpu that have well supported drivers. I don't and because of that I won't be showcasing anything crazy like doom eternal or a resident evil remake. I couldn't even get ultrakill to run. The only 3D game that I have gotten to run so far is the original Half Life and Jet Set Radio's PC port. Not exactly the most demanding games given that HL1 was made in the 90s and JSR was originally released in 2000.
The tablet that I've been using is the onn 11 core 2026. It's a budget 11 inch tablet and well, it doesn't have a well supported CPU and GPU for all this. That doesn't mean I have not gotten any results. I have not tried anything other then gaming applicatons yet. Again, I can't run games too demanding through Winulator on this device. Steam even struggles to run at times. The tablet has a mediatek helio g99 cpu, an mali-g57 mc2 gpu, 6GBs of ram, 128GBs of storage. If you have only 4GB of ram on your can probably kiss the idea of running steam goodbye since I was actively using more then 4GB with steam running. That all being said, I was able to play some Windows games on a freaking budget android tablet. This is all really cool and promising stuff. I really hope the software is able to mature over time and become even better then what it is right now.
U got games on ur phone?
When you first set up a container on Winulator it should load into a Wine desktop environment. It will most likely run but you will struggle to get games to launch unless the default container settings work best for your device. You will need to edit the container settings play around with drivers until you find a setup that works for you. If you are using the same device as me I have found that the Vortex Vulkan driver, Zink OpenGL driver, DXVK Direct 3D wrapper, and VKD3D Direct X wrapper is the best combination. I lowered my resolution down to 854x480 which might not be a requirement but I was tryinng to squeeze out as much preformance as I could.
JSR ran at a fairly solid 30fps which is perfect since the game is locked to 30fps.
Half Life struggled a bit more then JSR. I only tested out the training map but I was getting between 22-35fps. I would have played more but playing a fps game on a touch screen with less then optimal settings does not really appeal to me. (More on that later) It seemed to me like a mostly playable experience.
DELTARUNE and UNDERTALE both ran beautifully on Winulator. There was some very minor screen tearing when moving a lot but it's not a bad experience at all. I will be replaying these games to completion on this setup because honestly these games feel perfect to play on the go. Sure I could just get a Switch and play them on that but a Switch costs far more then this tablet did and I already own the games on PC.
Old 3D games and non demanding indie games that can run on potatos seems to be this setup's bread and butter.
Standard Applications
I have not tried out standard applications yet. Will report back with results once I have.
One of the things that held me back from trying it before is the way the controls are all setup, it's much a much better setup for touch screen gaming then it is for productivity and casual pc application usage.
How to get Winulator
Winulator isn't on the play store, you have to download the APK file from it's github page and install it.