Anyone who has Android has likely given one of the DOSBox emulator a playthrough(Most notable being Magic DOSBox), but recently there has been a significant push to get Windows emulation onto Android and while there are those that have potentially better performance, one that is standing out by quite a bit is Winlator due to it's ease of use. I'm not kidding, on my Samsung Fold 4 phone I have been able to emulate games with amazing performance. Here's a list of games I've been able to get working on my phone using Winlator:

Tom Clancy's Splinter Cell Chaos Theory (The one works FLAWLESSLY, it almost feels like a native Android game)
Splinter Cell Pandora Tomorrow (Works wonderfully with a small controller issue)
Arcanum (Works great)
Planescape Torment (Movies make it slow, but ingame works fantastic)
Condemned Criminal Origin (Absolutely flawless performance, feels almost like a native Android game)
Aliens Vs Predator Classic (Flawless performance)
Heroes of Might and Magic IV (Flawless performance)
Bookwork Adventures Volume 2 (Flawless performance)
SWAT 3: GOTY (Posted on the SWAT Series forum, was able to get okay-ish performance after some trial and error, but it can definitely be improved)

I'm going through as many games as I can find and some games absolutely surprised me with how well they ran and I've seen people getting all sorts of games to work. Currently trying to get games like Dishonored to work, but I get errors and I'm not sure what to do for it. Mixing Magic DOSBox for DOS games and Winlator for OpenGL/DirectX games means eventually we'll be able to play a hefty chunk of Window games on Android phones!

Would love to see other people and what they attempt on it!

Sounds intriguing, what would you tell about its accessibility and stability? I've installed some time ago ExaGear and in general it works, but it's not very intuitive and I have impression that there are constantly some odd quirks with it, so I would definitely love to check some alternative.

(you've encouraged me especially mentioning that Heroes 4 works fine on it)

I got Realms of Antiquity to work, albeit that using the virtual keyboard would sometimes cause Enter to stop working, for some reason.

(Then again, there may be a TI-99/4A emulator that could run this particular game directly.)

Mixing Magic DOSBox and Winlator for different types of games sounds like a promising approach. Good luck with getting Dishonored to work, and it's exciting to see the potential for playing a wide range of Windows games on Android devices.

Nope. Not me.

I've run DOSBox on Android (for testing, not actual play), but it was through termux (so I was running a Linux build). I was able to get Might & Magic: World of Xeen running this way.

I believe Winlator really just packages a termux-like environment, box86/box64, and WINE together to make things work.

Oh Dishonored works, others have gotten it up and running and have posted Winlator gameplay on Youtube:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TSio_et5nHM

I just haven't got a proper method at the moment, it's definitely one of the games I very much want to get running.

Oh yes, I forgot to mention one of the best features of Winlator. It's got built in Xinput/Dinput, which means it works wonderfully with controllers! I've got a GameSir X2s controller(USB-C) connected to my Fold 4 and if a games has Xinput support, it works perfectly with the controller, but it also has the ability to map buttons to the controller buttons. So games that don't have Xinput support can still be played with your controller, as long as you map everything properly.

I played around with both Winlator and Magic DOSBox in the past. My thoughts:-

1. The more RAM the better. Given that Android 13-14 typically eats up to 2.5GB RAM idle, allowing for overhead + x86-ARM / WINE emulator layers (call it 3GB needed aside from the game), for AAA games like Dishonored it's going to work far better on an 6-8GB mobile device (3-5GB free RAM) than a budget 4GB tablet (1GB free RAM), when just like APU's, that free RAM will need to cover both shared RAM and VRAM, eg, if Dishonored uses 800MB RAM + 600MB VRAM, then it'll need 1.4GB (non-swappable) phone RAM, on top of emulation overhead on top of Android OS.

2. As with Magic DOSBox, the biggest limitation I found was not emulation but rather ergonomics. Platformers, racing games, etc, 'translated' well with a Bluetooth controller, but for genres like RTS (Age of Empires) or Lemmings designed solely around a keyboard & mouse, they were "runnable" but not really playable / enjoyable unless you carried around a Bluetooth keyboard & mouse as controller-to-mouse emulators (AntiMicro) definitely weren't fast / accurate enough for rapid precise clicking on very small objects. And even then there were "quirks", eg, some Bluetooth keyboards don't handle multiple key presses. Eg, Shift + Up or Shift + W (Run Fowards in an FPS) works but Shift + Up + Left or Shift + W + A (Run Fowards whilst strafing left in an FPS) didn't register. Same with some platformers where Left + Shift (run left) works but Left + Space wouldn't always "Jump left". A lot of "only 1 key + modifier at a time" mobile keyboards aren't always a 1:1 replacement for desktop ones if you plan on playing FPS's.

3. Everyone's "runnable vs actually enjoyable" tolerance level is subjective, but I found that whilst 10-12" tablets could play quite a selection of games, only a few games "scaled" well all the way down to 6.5" phone screens. And bearing in mind modern phones are typically 20:9 ratio, a 6.5" size 20:9 phone = 16:9 games are equivalent 5.6" effective size and older 4:3 games are equivalent to just 4.5" effective screen size with pillarboxing. A lot of UI elements in a lot of games were just way too tiny on 400ppi phones. Even dropping down to 1280x720 (on a 400ppi 2400x1080 phone = 262ppi upscaled), is still a bit like using a 14" 3200x2000 laptop at 100% unscaled native resolution, ie, for a lot of non-scaling aware games, everything is absolutely tiny. Even 320x200 DOS games, many just felt a lot more comfortable on 8-10" tablets than phones.

For the games it does work well for though, it definitely has potential for the future.

That's impressive, didn't those games have lots of problem on modern PCs, mainly because they expect certain NVidia GPU chipset or something?

I presume all those games were DRM-free versions of games, ie. you didn't run Steam there to install and run its games, or is that possible too?

Do GOG offline installers install fine there, no problems?

In general, I find these kinds of "playing PC/Windows games on non-x86 architectures" exciting.

I am not sure if it is for Android that I am specifically excited about because I consider Android at least partially a walled garden system... but not as bad as iOS etc., and I might still play some PC games also one Android devices since I will have them anyway.

I'm just hoping this paves way to non-x86 PC. e.g. based on ARM or Snapdragon. They just seem more efficient, use less power, heat up less, maybe even better potential for great computing power in the long run etc... All that matters that I can keep playing my PC games also there, otherwise I don't have any emotional attachment to x86 architecture, anymore than I have to e.g. my PC being able to run real MS-DOS (e.g. DOSBox is enough for me, as it runs MS-DOS games great).

Then again, I am not specifically hoping for the death of Intel and AMD. If they keep releasing cost effective and powerful gaming systems, fine, I will keep buying their products.

I just feel MS has taken too tight grip on the x86 PCs, seeing how there are SecureBoot and what have you that oddly seem to favor MS OSes. Wasn't Microsoft pretty much the one who gets to decide who gets valid UEFI keys (I might remember wrong, but getting different Linux distros to run on a secureboot-enabled PC seems a bit complicated sometimes, already now. I recall e.g. Manjaro Linux flat-out said you can't install it officially on a secureboot-enabled PC, they don't support it, not sure if it would cost them money they'd have to pay towards MS?). And then there are apparently Windows PCs where the ability to replace the OS has been prevented altogether.

At the same time, if you take as an example something like Raspberry Pi (an ARM-based "mini-PC"), it doesn't appear to have any such "secure boot" restrictions where some company might control whan kind of OS you can run on it, and why would it? You can install any kind of OS on it, understandably they are usually Linux-based but I think there are others too (not sure if ARM Windows can be run on it, depends if Microsoft allows and enables that).

So if Microsoft is able to take a tight grip on the x86 PC architecture by introducing restrictions to non-MS OSes (with collaboration of Intel and AMD), then maybe Linux, BSD etc. find a new home on other architectures, and can still offer ex-Windows users to run their Windows stuff there.

Then again, MS also wants to go beyond x86, like the new Snapdragon-based Windows laptops. I bet they don't allow the user to install Linux (or ChromeOS) on them; I'd love to be wrong though.

The installer I tried, Realms of Antiquity, worked properly, so I'd expect all others to work well as well. Now, whether the game itself runs well is another question.

DRM-free installers for the win!

Dunno, maybe it is also possible to run Steam, Galaxy, UPlay, Epic etc. clients there too, but I presume they just make it more complicated and error-prone.

So, how fast Android device do you need for running something like Aliens vs Predator or even the Splinter Cell games? Some very highest end Android tablet (or phone) with the most powerful Snapdragon chipset? I tend to buy cheaper 150-200€ Android tablets (for my kids mostly), and to my understanding different Android devices have wildly different chipsets and CPUs, so does Winlator support them all, and all that matters is how fast your Android device CPU is?

EDIT: I presume some bluetooth keyboard and even a mouse is a must, and then some BT gamepad that is Android-friendly too (my 8bitdo gamepad should be, at least it claims to have an "Android mode" which supposedly is the same as the PC DirectX-mode, if I understood right).

I connected my 8bitdo controller to my Android phone via USB-C, and it worked; I was even able to navigate the home screen with it. (There's the issue with the control pad not working as it should; I may try the mod I've heard about of putting hole protectors beneath the control pad and see if that fixes it.)

I'm actually considering getting one of those controllers that goes around the Android phone, turning it into a little handheld gaming system.

There are a lot of games I've attempted to play and while their performance is great, there is some issue that I don't know if it can be resolved on the user's end. One of the big ones that is keeping some of the best games from being playable with controller is the mouse/joystick issue. Pretty much, the touch screen works perfectly to emulate mouse, but the Joystick emulating the mouse, does nothing. This affects games like Vampire the Masquerade: Bloodlines and System Shock 2, among others. These games work perfectly, but not being able to use the right joystick for mouse makes them not very playable with a controller. Having VtM:B or SS2 as a portable version would be incredible!