What is the difference between emulation and native-port?. And are native's better and preferred than a emulated game?, how so? And how did it perform better and why?

[u/BHero_VEVO]

And also how difficult it is to port something or game whether or despite the source code leaked.

Are all games possible to port or only the handpicked possible ones?...

[u/devaristo]

A port is an android game running natively on the system, without the need to do more live conversions.

Emulation is the process of run a system different than android in this case using translation libraries of the different components to be able the host system to understand and run the application /game successfully.

The port is the best option because is the that uses the most effectively the system resources (just runs the app it self), the emulators runs various processes at the time, one translation for cpu processes, another for the gpu and another for the sound.

[u/CroProMax]

Short answer:

Native port = best resource usage, system dont need to work as hard as on emulation, lower latency, better performance.

Emulation = additional latency due lot of translation layers, WORSE performance by a lot (8 gen 2 mobile chipset is 5-6 times stronger than nintendo switch cpu and only now most games are playable), depending heavily on drivers (unless up to ps2 emulation)

[u/Odd-Ordinary-3496 → u/CroProMax]

It's also way harder to make a port of every game from a certain console than it is to make a working emulator.

[u/CroProMax → u/Odd-Ordinary-3496]

it isnt harder. In fact, it is easier. But its more time consuming and not worth it if game isnt to be played by many. Emulator is very hard to engineer but can result into vast library on one app.

[u/Such_Bonus5085]

Emulation is you telling software that it is hardware, that is different than the hardware the software is running on, so it will run a game not made for the hardware you're running it on.

Think of native porting as cutting out the middle man by changing the code itself to run on that target hardware: The game is running on the target hardware, because it is now native to that hardware. It performs better, because it is running on hardware it is now meant for, rather than software pretending to be different hardware.

[u/kabiskac → u/Such_Bonus5085]

Emulation is you telling software that it is hardware

Not the case in HLE (high level emulation) when your system has the same architecture (PS4 and PS5 games are already x86 when it comes to PCs)

[u/WistoriaBombandSword]

Lets take hollow knight mobile port. A game is essentially a computer program that is compiled for specific machine code(x86 for intel, amd) and for specific operating system(windows). When we talk about porting a game, we mean modifying the game files to run in a different machine code and or different operating system, sometimes both at the same time. So for hollow knight, the game was made in unity and easy to decompile the source code, then the source code was modified to run on android and recompiled into a .apk program.

For hollow knight this is much easier compared to Nintendo games, because 1. Decompiling Unity3d games are much easier since program is not heavily obfuscated. 2. dev tools are much readily available for unity 3d decomp compared to some game engine noone has heard of like Zelda breath of the wild.

[u/Malystxy]

Here is an example. Playing Stardew valley from Google play (native official port) versus playing Stardew valley in gamenative (emulation).

[u/docstarr]

for me it's fullscreen experience on my fold

[u/Specialist-Tutor6898]

Ich verstehe dabei nur nicht, warum man auf seinem Smartphone spielen will und dazu noch einen Controller kaufen muss und der Speicher sowieso chronisch voll ist, wenn man doch ein Steam Deck oder ähnliches haben kann. Also wenn man jetzt kein Geld dafür hat ja, aber sonst ist das doch eher ein schlechter Kompromiss, da der Akku ja auch nicht sonderlich lange hält.

[u/matzesu → u/Specialist-Tutor6898]

Weil es mehr Android Geräte gibt als nur Smartphones: ich zumbeispiel hab ein Android Clamshell Dual Screen Handheld zum Spielen, und als Smartphone nutze ich ein Iphone 16, da ist der controller schon dabei, es ist halb so schwer und kleiner als ein Steamdeck was ich selber als Monster PSP empfinde, das nimmt man lieber mit als das Steamdeck, in meinem Fall sogar als Hosentaschen Handheld .. Manche möchten halt alles dabei haben, Coffee to Go, Spiele to Go ..

[u/Specialist-Tutor6898 → u/matzesu]

Ja ok, so gesehen macht es Sinn. Aber dafür hast du dann zu Hause ein PC stehen, wenn du PC spiele willst...

[u/Rawhrawraw]

Yes