Can one of these be turned into an Android emulator for Libretro?

Shashlik: https://github.com/shashlik Anbox: https://github.com/anbox/anbox

I feel like Anbox makes the most sense as an Android Libretro core but what do you think?

Anbox relies on the Linux kernel to isolate a container, so it wouldn’t be able to make it into a portable core, I’d say.

Shashlik uses a custom version of Qemu, so that one would be more portable. But it probably would be a lot of work and require a beefy machine to run decently (similar as how you’d need a good machine to run a game in the official Android emulator from Google), since it uses virtualization.

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It’s sad how little good open-source portable Android emulators there are. Is QEMU for virtual machines? That would make for an dope libretro core imo.

Yes, QEMU is for virtual machines. And it has versions for Linux, Windows and MacOS so I’d say it’s more portable.

It’d be an interesting core, you are right, since you theoretically could run any software that can run in the hardware it virtualizes. Only that it might use more resources than other alternatives like DOSBox. It’s an old and complex software so it might not be easy to libcore-ize, but it’s probably more attainable I’d say than Virtualbox, everything is self contained, it probably doesn’t have that many required dependencies.

Another core that would be cool to have, in a similar spirit as DOSBox, would be one that used libwine to run properly packaged Windows games and programs. This would give retroarch automatically compatibility with thousands of games. Though I’m aware it would also be complex to implement. And it won’t work for ARM devices.

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