ax86 (Android x86 emulator WIP News) - Old PC Games Emulator for Android

January 7th, 2013, 00:37 Posted By: wraggster

Pate the coder of the x86 Emulator for Nintendo DS has started his new project which is the first x86 Emulator for Android:

Since my previous DSx86 blog post at dsx86.patrickaalto.com, I have begun working on ax86. I have been on a two-week Xmas vacation which is just ending, and I have been able to work on ax86 several hours per day during my vacation. It has progressed quite nicely, although there is still a huge amount of work remaining, so do not expect a public release version for a while yet. :-)
I spent the first couple of days of my vacation simply getting a "Hello, World" -style Android application running. Even this first "Hello world" application did however already contain my 386 emulation sources from Raiden Legacy, but the problem was that I did not know how best to interface to them from Java. I am reasonably familiar with Java, but not with the Android specialities, so I began searching for tutorials on the net. I found a blog post by Richard Quirk, which seemed to be exactly what I was after. He also moved on to Android programming after coding for Nintendo DS, so it was easy to follow and understand his code and techniques. On the 26th of December I got my "Hello world" application (which was mostly based on his example code) working on my Asus Nexus 7 Android tablet, so I was in business!
The next couple of days were spent studying the example code and figuring out ways to add my own code to it, porting the BIOS and DOS emulation stuff (which had not been needed in Raiden Legacy) from Nintendo DS to Android, and such. I also needed to code the text screen blitting code, so that it converts the PC text mode screen character buffer to RGB565 format used by the Android OpenGL system. Then finally on the 29th of December I got 4DOS.COM starting up in Android!


http://ax86.patrickaalto.com/ablog.html

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