Having spent the bulk of my handheld gaming time with the Steam Deck, it was a bit of a shock last year to discover that PC gaming isn’t just possible on Android phones and retro handhelds, it’s powering on in leaps and bounds.

I’ve seen so many different games running beautifully, from older AAA titles like Tomb Raider and Prey (2017), all the way to more demanding ones like RDR2 and even Cyberpunk 2077 (no surprise that the last one is still an imperfect experience, as things stand…but it is possible!).

GameNative lets you play all manner of PC games on Android from GOG, Epic, and Steam.

I reached out to my friend Utkarsh, who is the lead developer of GameNative to ask if he wanted to share his story and let me interview him.

His background in development and gaming through to how GameNative started and is built, all the way to what the future might bring for his program. This is an interview on what I think might be at least part of the future of handheld gaming, and I hope you find this interesting:

https://gardinerbryant.com/i-genuinely-feel-gamenative-could-replace-handheld-pcs/

  • PerfectDark@lemmy.worldOPMEnglish
    2·
    3 hours ago

    I’d recommend seeing what the community has shared, others may have uploaded their games/settings for that phone on EmuReady. The sites is maintained purely to share exactly that.

    https://www.emuready.com/listings?deviceIds=["b600b2d5-3631-4f50-b235-a9d0d2559445"]

    (here is the results filtered just by your handset, but these include all kinds of emulation, not just GameNative)

    But by the same token, 99% of games which do (and don’t) run won’t have been shared there either. So it is a game-by-game basis.

    A good one to start with would be a ‘light’ title like DREDGE, if you own it?

    I’ll do a little checking and see what I can find on your phone though, will come back and edit with what I find soon!

    Edit: Here is a post on Reddit where the OP asks the community how the Pixel 8 is for emulation in general. The top comment says that they’re using Winlator and have 60FPS/720p performance for BioShock, New Vegas, Wow with dx9/10 games. So these should translate to being the same performance/playability on GameNative (I’d hazard, anyway)

    There’s also results in the GameNative Discord, but too many to share here. I do hope this helps, though!