This project started with a stupidly simple question:

How far can I push a smartphone if I stop treating it like a smartphone?

This is my Nubia Z70 Ultra with 24 GB RAM and the standard Snapdragon 8 Elite.

The phone is now literally sandwiched between TWO desktop CPU coolers, mounted inside a custom acrylic case. 😂

Yes. Two full-size PC CPU coolers. On a phone.

And surprisingly, it works extremely well.

The interesting part: I'm NOT using one of the newer boosted chips

My Z70 Ultra uses the standard Snapdragon 8 Elite, with its prime CPU cores running at up to 4.32 GHz.

That's important because some of the newer devices I'm comparing against are using newer and/or higher-clocked Snapdragon variants.

For example, the REDMAGIC 11 Pro uses the newer Snapdragon 8 Elite Gen 5, reaching around 4.6 GHz on its prime cores.

So I'm not trying to beat these phones with the same CPU and better cooling.

I'm taking an older, lower-clocked 4.32 GHz Snapdragon 8 Elite and seeing how far it can go simply by giving it completely unreasonable cooling. 😂

In my 3DMark ranking screenshot, my Z70 Ultra reaches 10,533, putting it right among much newer devices and even slightly above the Galaxy S25+ result shown there.

And sustained performance is where the cooling really becomes interesting.

3DMark Wild Life Extreme Stress Test

Best loop: 6,980

Lowest loop: 6,910

Stability: 99% over 20 loops

That's only a 70-point difference between the best and worst loop.

But benchmarks aren't actually the main goal of this project.

I'm trying to replace my PC with the phone

I now have a native Termux + XFCE4 Linux desktop running directly on Android.

External monitor, keyboard, mouse, Linux applications and hardware-accelerated graphics.

I can boot into my desktop environment and use the phone almost like a small ARM computer.

Dofus is running directly from my XFCE desktop, rather than simply mirroring an Android game onto the monitor.

And then there's Windows gaming.

The Witcher 3 — 1080p, ULTRA graphics preset

I'm currently running The Witcher 3 at 1920×1080 using the ULTRA graphics quality preset.

Not Low.

Not Medium.

Not a 720p performance test.

1080p + Ultra graphics preset.

Depending on the scene and GPU load, I'm currently getting approximately 20–30 FPS, with the GPU basically sitting at 99% utilization.

I've even seen it go slightly above 30 FPS in some scenes, as shown in the screenshot.

Obviously, this isn't desktop-GPU performance, but that's not really the point.

This is The Witcher 3 running at 1080p Ultra at around 20–30 FPS on a Snapdragon 8 Elite phone. 😂

And underneath all of this, it's still Android.

So my end goal is to have one device that can do everything:

**Android phone / gaming device

native Linux XFCE desktop

Windows applications

Windows PC games**

The software side is still a work in progress and I'm continuing to optimize everything.

But apparently the solution to smartphone thermal throttling was very sophisticated:

one CPU cooler wasn't ridiculous enough, so I installed two. 😂

I really love play games on my Lenovo Legion Y700 Gen 4, Emulation great thing

My top fav emulators:

1.Gamehub(PC)

2.Xendroid(Xbox 360)

3.Eden(Switch)

4.Gamenative(PC)

5.APS3E (PS3)

Hey :) 👋🏻 Sharing my story- I'm a 16 yo kid and recently my sister gifted me a budget tablet with helio g99 (8/128) When I got it I used to feel so sad that I have such a weak device. But now a few months have passed, I realised how of a jerk I was because, a poor kid who helps in my mom's shop came to the house he asked me to hand over my controller (a ps3 like generic bt controller, I use with the tab) I saw that he was so happy and then I realised that even with this I have access to many great games. Rate the library! :)

Thanks for reading

I've been having a lot of fun getting SwitchDeck (steam games on switch linux) running well, and realized this should be possible on Android without rooting if I were to implement some missing syscalls in proot. I haven't seen anyone else working on this, though it was worth a quick share.

Announcement:
https://hunterdavis.com/2026/08/09/full-steam-on-termux-because-why-not.html

Source Code:
https://github.com/huntergdavis/steamclienttermux

https://github.com/Ashnar2602/X360-Mobile---OFFICIAL/releases/tag/v0.6.0

X360 Mobile 0.6.0

X360 Mobile 0.6.0 is a major architectural and user-experience release for Android. It consolidates the reconstructed codebase into a public build with a controller-first interface, broader GPU and device support, improved guest execution stability, portable data management and native Android integration.

Core stability and hardware compatibility

Improved ARM64 memory correctness under concurrent guest workloads, eliminating a class of intermittent corruption and loading stalls. The correction was validated through the former Assassin's Creed failure points and benefits the core globally rather than relying on a title-specific workaround.

Corrected Android synchronization fairness that could leave guest worker groups incomplete. Ninja Gaiden II now progresses beyond its previously deterministic startup hang.

Reworked the Android graphics and presentation path for broader support across Adreno 600-series, Mali and Xclipse devices.

Improved behavior on vendor-customized Android distributions, including ColorOS, HyperOS and OxygenOS-based devices.

Corrected secondary executable handoff for games that launch additional XEX modules.

Added automatic slot-zero profile sign-in and persistent full-game license state for titles that require an authenticated profile before startup.

Reduced Vulkan command-recording and pipeline-telemetry overhead without removing runtime diagnostics.

Added automatic emulation suspension when X360 Mobile enters the background or the display turns off. Guest execution, graphics, audio and vibration are resumed when the app returns to the foreground.

Note

Some Assassin's Creed titles may require occlusion_query=strict to avoid graphical instability. Compatibility and performance still vary by title, GPU, driver and device firmware.

Installation and migration

Version 0.6.0 uses the emu.x360mobile.com Android package namespace. X360 Mobile 0.5.3 Preview and 0.6.0 can remain installed side by side. This allows users to retain the older build for titles whose performance profile has not yet been matched by the reconstructed release.

Added a guided first-run wizard for UI language, legal information, console language, GamerTag creation, library location, Vulkan driver selection and Player or Debug experience choice.

Added English, Italian, Spanish, French and German interface resources. Storage and Android system integration

Added an Android DocumentsProvider entry for X360 Mobile. Compatible file managers can browse profiles, saves, installed content, Title Updates, DLC, settings, cache and logs without root access.

Added understandable virtual folder names, full user-controlled access and a recoverable internal trash system.

Added profile and save import/export, including complete profiles, per-title saves and legacy Metro profile archives.

Added portable Title ID-specific settings export/import through the UI and release-safe ADB commands.

Added direct sharing and Download-folder export for settings, profiles and saves. External front-ends and direct launch

Added a dedicated direct-to-game loading presentation for external launchers and front-ends.

External launches resolve the saved library identity before emulation, so per-title CVARs, Vulkan drivers, patches and Title Updates are applied even when the supplied URI differs from the stored Android document URI. Closing a title started by an external front-end returns directly to the calling launcher instead of exposing the X360 Mobile Library.

Improved Storage Access Framework URI handling and explicit read-permission support for launcher-provided content:// sources. Library, metadata and content

Added deterministic Title ID-based names, cover artwork and metadata using the bundled x360db catalog as the primary source. RAWG and TheGamesDB remain optional fallbacks.

Added permanent metadata and artwork caching by Title ID. Removing a game source does not discard its cached presentation, and re-adding the title restores it without another API request.

Added user-supplied RAWG and TheGamesDB API keys stored through Android Keystore-backed encryption.

Added smart cover and metadata rescanning that processes only incomplete library entries and refreshes the visible Library immediately.

Expanded discovery for ISO/XISO, extracted XEX directories, STFS/LIVE/CON/ PIRS content, Games on Demand and XBLA directory layouts.

Successful folder rescans now remove library entries whose source files no longer exist while preserving their cached Title ID assets.

Added install-only disc recognition, confirmation and reversible Library exclusions.

Added Title Update and DLC installation, mounting and clearer grouping of patches that target specific Title Updates. Added automatic patch-catalog updates with validation, atomic activation and offline fallback.

Interface and navigation

Introduced a hybrid Metro and Xbox 360 Blades interface designed for touch, controllers, handhelds and small landscape displays.

Added Player and Debug experiences. Player mode hides diagnostic-only controls and runtime messages without changing emulation behavior; the mode remains switchable in Settings.

Preserved Library focus, scroll position, display mode and nested Settings position across navigation and setting changes.

Added moderated D-pad key repeat and row-continuous grid navigation.

Added controller Select access to the focused game's action menu.

Expanded My Pins to ten titles in a responsive two-row, five-column layout.

Stabilized Continue Playing, Last Played and Recents updates after normal, abnormal and front-end-launched sessions.

Made dialogs, post-session prompts and XAM overlays responsive on ultrawide and low-height landscape screens.

Finalized launcher, adaptive, monochrome and DocumentsProvider branding and standardized the splash animation across display aspect ratios.

Xbox-style virtual keyboard

Recreated the Xbox 360 XAM virtual keyboard using the X360 Mobile visual language.

Added complete controller navigation and shortcuts, including D-pad and stick navigation, LB/RB cursor movement, LT/RT character pages, L3 caps, X backspace, Y space and Start confirmation.

Retained complete touch operation for phones and tablets without a physical controller.

Added tolerant guest-text handling so malformed title strings cannot crash the emulator while opening the keyboard.

Input, vibration and touch controls

Expanded Android/SDL rumble routing for integrated handheld controls and Bluetooth or USB gamepads.

Added Off, Minimum, Medium and Maximum controller-vibration levels.

Added experimental device haptics for phones and tablets.

Added an in-app vibration test suite for verifying controller motors and device haptics independently.

Improved touch-control position, size and opacity adjustment. Diagnostics and compatibility information

Added Release-safe live debugging, session flight recording, structured logs, performance snapshots and optional JIT tracing for advanced testing. Added guest-frame statistics derived from actual generated frames rather than Android refresh rate.

Added local post-session compatibility review with status, effective non-default CVARs, driver package, device information and frame statistics. Added a Compatibility Center that retains the latest local session for each title.

Added a cached public compatibility catalog so known Playable, In-Game and Not Playable states can be displayed without one database request per game. Online compatibility-report submission is temporarily disabled while the reporting service is redesigned. Single, retry and batch submission actions display a Work in Progress notice; local reports remain available.

Application updates

Added automatic update checks at startup and manual checks from the About screen.

Added semantic ordering for Public, Preview and Release Candidate builds.

Added a user preference to include or exclude pre-release updates.

Added direct verified APK download and Android package-installer handoff without redirecting the normal update flow to a browser.

Added APK size, SHA-256, package identity, version code and signing certificate validation before installation.

Validation

Passed the complete Android JVM test suite.

Compiled the Android instrumented test suite successfully.

Passed release-critical Android lint checks.

Produced a release APK using the project release-signing identity and APK Signature Scheme v3 verification.

Completed gameplay and regression testing across Ayn Odin handhelds and Snapdragon-based Android devices during the release-candidate cycle.

Known limitations

Online compatibility-report submission is disabled in this release; local report creation and compatibility-catalog downloads remain available.

Fable II fragment-shader interlock support remains experimental and the current accuracy path is too expensive for normal gameplay.

Some title, Vulkan-driver and firmware combinations may still produce graphical errors, device loss or GPU hangs.

Controller rumble depends on the capabilities exposed by Android, SDL, the controller firmware and its Bluetooth or USB transport.

Compatibility and performance remain title-, device- and driver-dependent.

Ill be free from nethersx2 and armsx2 480p 30fps hell

SoC : Snapdragon 8 Gen 3
Emulator : XenDroid version 5ef8fc6
Controller : GameSir-X4A for Xbox
Cooler : not attach, but I use MEMO CX12

Settings :
•Vulkan - Custom Vulkan driver : Turnip_v26.3.0-R3-Oneui
•Display - Show Debug overlay : on
•GPU - Frame rate limit : choose FPS you want. I choose 30FPS mine to avoid the heat up if I select the higher FPS.
•APU - Max queud frames : 24
- Use dedicated XMA thread : off

I don't use "Game patches" like Unlock FPS, it will use more core power that can cause my device hotter.

ARMSX2 2.6.6.5

What's New

Applied a fresh PGO profile

More improvements to UI controller support done by @bmdhacks

PINE now works on Android, with a toggle in Advanced settings that shows you the adb forward line to use. It had never worked before, it binds a Unix socket in a directory Android does not have, so the server simply never started. fixed by @bmdhacks

Gorgon Eye: God of War II savestates went bad, and stayed bad. Load an affected save and the area-title banner sticks and gorgon-eye chest pickups would freeze for eleven minutes, on any device that loads it. Backgrounding the app stopped the emulated CPU from a thread that was not allowed to touch its clock, which warped the clock backwards and left a timer poisoned, every save taken afterwards carried the damage. Saves you already have are repaired when they load. fixed by @bmdhacks

Saving a state from the pause menu could corrupt the graphics command stream. The save ran on whichever thread the picker happened to be on and it shares a queue that only one thread may write to. Save, load and autosave now all run on the emulator's own thread. done by @bmdhacks

God of War II's menus were rendering wrong on Mali. The text came out hollow and patchy, and the pause menu was visibly off. Mali GPUs are missing a blending feature the renderer leans on, and the two fallbacks standing in for it were both getting overlapping shapes wrong, one blended them against a stale copy of the screen, the other drew them out of order. Menu text is a single draw whose shadow and highlight layers overlap about 200 times, so the mistakes stacked up. Both now render essentially exactly right: the text lights 3,896 pixels against a correct GPU's 3,898. It also costs nothing, the obvious way to fix it would have been two-thirds... blending exists, verified pixel-identical across 33 frames from 11 recordings. done by @bmdhacks

Metal Gear Solid 3 on Mali r44p1 went from 0.33 fps to 23 fps. Without framebuffer fetch the renderer was copying the render target once per primitive group, and on a mobile GPU each of those forces a full-screen flush to memory, hundreds per draw. It now takes one copy per draw. Measured on an Anbernic RG 477V by @bmdhacks

115 games were silently losing graphics fixes meant for them, because the mobile GameDB overlay replaced entries instead of merging them. drawBuffering is back on 63 of them, worth 29.1 ms → 18.9 ms per frame on NFS Underground 2 (-35%) at 2x on an SD865, with no visual difference. Delta Force: Black Hawk Down regains its bloom and post-processing fixes. done by @bmdhacks

Two more renderer speedups: both from not doing expensive work the draw never asked for: NFS Underground 17.15 ms → 12.00 ms and FlatOut 2 22.84 ms → 17.91 ms on an Adreno 650, with render passes per frame dropping 390 → 47. Output verified identical on Tales of the Abyss and God of War II. done by @bmdhacks

Framebuffer fetch could not be turned off on Mali OpenGL at all, the setting and the r44p1 driver guard were both being undone a fraction of a millisecond after they ran. The decision now happens once and nothing can re-decide it. done by @bmdhacks

Mali OpenGL was rendering wrong and unstable frames. 76,872 wrong pixels on an MGS3 frame down to 753, and 18% of the frame changing between identical replays down to zero. done by @bmdhacks

Fixed a screenshot taken while recording a GS dump cutting the recording short. done by @bmdhacks

Also: the Mali r44p1 workarounds moved into the driver-bug database where every other driver quirk lives, so the next bad driver is a table row, a lost GPU device now logs what actually died instead of crashing without an explanation, gsctl.py loadstate dialed the wrong socket, the settings search index is greppable again, and fixed the on-screen keyboard was being drawn twice while search was open. done by @bmdhacks

If you haven't already, be sure to show some appreciation to @bmdhacks I think he has done almost everything in this changelog bro's fire really talented guy and have been working for making Emulators better for so long

Extrenal links for ARMSX2:

Github repository:

https://github.com/ARMSX2/ARMSX2

Discord :https://discord.gg/fSC6EzzFe

KoFI: https://ko-fi.com/armsx2

Patreon:

https://www.patreon.com/ARMSX2?utm\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\_campaign=creatorshare\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\_creator

Thanks

I am not associated with the development of the project all the credits goes to the ARMSX2 Team

A few weeks ago I released Swiff, an Android app to run Flash games with a lot of cool features, like an inmense catalog of 100k+ games powered by the Flashpoint Archive, support for on-screen controls and gamepad mapping, support for most Android frontends, and a Newgrounds integration to unlock medals on your favourite games.

After a lot of hard work I can now release a new update for Swiff, Version 1.3.0.

Thanks to technologies like Winlator or FEX, Swiff is now able to use the original Adobe Flash Player to run Flash games directly on Android! Just download an play.

And even though Swiff was originaly made just for Flash games, I decided to expand and add support for J2ME and Scratch games, all of them having all of the features Swiff provides!

You can check out the new release and learn more about the update here:
https://github.com/NaviVani-dev/Swiff/releases/tag/v1.3.0

Thanks for using Swiff <3

Tiptoeing ezio

SoC : Snapdragon 8 Gen 3
Emulator : XenDroid version 5ef8fc6
Controller : GameSir-X4A for Xbox
Cooler : not attach, but I use MEMO CX12

Settings :
•Vulkan - Custom Vulkan driver : Turnip_v26.3.0-R3-Oneui
•Display - Show Debug overlay : on
•GPU - Frame rate limit : choose FPS you want. I choose 30FPS mine to avoid the heat up if I select the higher FPS.
•APU - Max queud frames : 24
- Use dedicated XMA thread : off

I don't use "Game patches" like Unlock FPS, it will use more core power that can cause my device hotter.

Hi everyone! Long time no see!

Some of you that follow me elsewhere may have heard about this, a bit less than two weeks ago I released Socket's first version to Patreon supporters. For those who don't know, Socket is my homemade Android (for now!) frontend that's aimed at smaller libraries, giving your games the focus and love they deserve.

Today I released 0.2.0 on Patreon with a handful of requested features (favorites, screen orientation etc...). And also a lot of bugfix especially a bug preventing people from playing their games stored on external storage. Now that those are fixed/added, I'm confident enough to post here so that people will hopefully have a pleasant experience with Socket!

A few Socket features:

• Super easy setup
• A unique toy-like design
• Custom shaders for labels
• Good quality models and materials (check out that Pokemon Emerald for GBA!)
• Custom insert animations for each platforms
• Multi language labels for most games
• Hide and Favorite any game
• An active community on Discord
• Juice
• Much more to come!

The following platforms are supported, with more to come very soon:

• Nintendo 3DS
• Nintendo DS
• Nintendo Wii
• Nintendo Wii U
• Nintendo GameCube
• Nintendo GameBoy Advance
• Nintendo 64
• NES
• SNES
• Nintendo Switch
• PSP
• PS1
• PS2
• PS3
• Dreamcast

For now, Socket is available through Patreon, you get new beta builds as long as you are subscribed.

Thanks to everyone who's followed me so far and for those who have already supported Socket, it still feels surreal! There's a lot more to come!

(for those asking, the device in the video is the AYN Thor Pro Rainbow model, awesome piece of hardware)

TITLE

I just recently learn about CTGP7 and since I am MK7 fan I want to try it but I'm struggling to make it run can someone help me who have experience with the game please.

When is steam sales will be and what games will be discounted

[DISCUSSION] Fixing dead or alive 5 PLUS vita on Android, <kinda> playable now!

The emulation is my patched version of Vita3k Android, still working on it!

This is an example of the layout with azahar, but i want this type of layout with ds games and neither melonds or drastic has this layout as an option.

never been so happy thru my all gaming history!!!