Winlator hands-on: The easiest way to emulate PC games on your phone (2024)

While the best smartphones in the market pack plenty of firepower, emulating full-fledged PC games has always been a challenge for Android devices. Sure, Renegade Project technically allows you to install Windows 11 on a smartphone. However, its limited hardware compatibility, alongside the Herculean effort required to set it up, means it’s not something your everyday user would install on their Android phone.

Meanwhile, the other emulator, QEMU, remains rife with performance issues, even on the high-end Samsung Galaxy Z Fold 5. And I’ve spent enough time with Exagear to realize getting any 3D app to run on it would be a futile effort. So, my expectations were quite low when I jumped headfirst into the Winlator rabbit-hole. But having spent the last three weeks testing the emulator on my Poco F5, I was pleasantly surprised by what it's capable of, and here's my deep-dive into Winlator.

How to set up Winlator on an Android device

Downloading the emulator is easy; installing the games, is not

Unlike most emulators, the installation procedure for Winlator is surprisingly straightforward as all you have to do is:

1. On your smartphone, head to brunodev85’sGitHub repository for Winlator and download the latest version of the app.
2. Using the Settings app, grant the File Manager utility the privilege to Install unknown apps.

   

3. Switch to the File Manager and install Winlator.

   

And voilà. Upon launching Winlator, you’ll need to wait for the emulator to set up all the necessary files. Once that’s done, you can create a new container by clicking on the + button. After that, you can launch the container and go through the pre-installed apps, including the classic Minesweeper. But what you’re really here for, is running PC games, and well, installing them is more time-consuming than it is complex (but more on that later).

For now, you’ll need DRM-free copies of games for Winlator. The GOG Galaxy app provides an easy way for you to download clean game files once you’ve purchased the title, and here’s a general outline of the entire procedure:

1. Install the GOG Galaxy app on your PC before signing in to your GOG account.
2. Select the game you wish to play on your Android device and click on the Extra button.
3. Scroll down and download the Offline Backup Installer for the game.

   

4. Once GOG Galaxy finishes downloading the Setup.exe file, copy it to the Downloads folder of your Android device.

   

5. Launch a container in Winlator, navigate to the D: drive, and install the game as you would on a regular PC.

What I like about Winlator

It’s great for playing 2D games

For most of my tests, I used my Poco F5, a mid-range phone with a Snapdragon 7+ Gen 2 processor. It’s not the best processor that you can use with Winlator, but it ran most of the 2D games I threw at it with ease. I started with the least hardware-intensive games I own: Slay The Princess and Hollow Knight, and both games consistently ran at over 30FPS at 1280x720 resolution. To up the ante, I installed Signalis and Ori and the Blind Forest on my Winlator container, and after tweaking a handful of settings, I managed to get them up and running at playable frame rates after dropping the resolution to 800x600. Other 2D titles, such as Darkest Dungeon, Axiom Verge and World of Horror needed similar sacrifices on the resolution front, on top of requiring changes to the DX Wrapper and Box86/64 settings.

Old 3D games work well for the most part

Once I’d gone through my repertoire of 2D games, it was time to raise the bar further by testing my favorite 3D titles. I kicked things off with the original Deus Ex, and my Poco F5 didn’t encounter any issues running the old-school game at playable frame rates. Next, I tried F.E.A.R. and Dead Space (2008), and to my surprise, both games ran at nearly 60FPS with medium settings at 960x544 resolution. Fallout 3, Ys VIII: Lacrimosa of Dana, and Bloodstained: Ritual of the Night produced similar results, though I had to create separate shortcuts with their own set of tweaks to run the games properly.

Feeling emboldened by my successes so far, I tried to give the original Crysis a spin, and the result was interesting, to say the least. At 800x600 resolution, I was able to get the game to boot by switching the Box86 and Box64 Presets to Stability modes. Next, I lowered all settings to Low, and after disabling Joyos on my Poco F5’s HyperOS, I managed to get the game running at close to 30FPS. Well, on paper, the game runs at playable frame rates, but there are a ton of performance issues that make it difficult to enjoy blasting through enemies with the Nanosuit.

What I don’t like about Winlator

Performance issues, with just as many crashes

Continuing from my previous statement, while it’s possible to "play" Crysis on a smartphone on Winlator, only the devices with the beefiest CPUs can run the game without performance issues. On my Poco F5, the water textures and certain lighting sources were glitched, and the frame rate would constantly drop under 20FPS every time a group of enemies showed up.

Unfortunately, Crysis isn’t the only game riddled with these issues. The older Assassin’s Creed games run at terrible frame rates, while certain games like Just Cause 2, Sunless Skies, and Disco Elysium would crash moments after I launch them.

What’s more, Winlator, like other emulators, runs much better on a Snapdragon processor than its Mediatek, Dimensity, and Exynos counterparts. So, if you’re planning to run some of the more demanding titles, you’ll need something as powerful as the Snapdragon 8 Gen 2 if you want decent frame rates. And yes, I deliberately mentioned SD 8 Gen 2 instead of Gen 3, because the latest version of Winlator doesn’t support the flagship Snapdragon mobile chip.

Limited game library and long load times

I mentioned earlier that you can only run games that don’t have any DRM protection on Winlator. Sure, it’s possible to run Steam on Winlator, but I’d advise against doing so if you value your sanity. As such, GOG is your best bet if you want to legally acquire game files for Winlator. But since its library isn’t as extensive as Steam’s, you won’t be able to play lightweight games like the older Final Fantasy and Tales of titles, even though they should run well on the emulator.

And then there are the exorbitantly long load times when installing or launching games. For instance, games with plenty of assets, such as Ys VIII: Lacrimosa of Dana and Dragon Age: Origins, took hours to install. Likewise, certain titles, like Crysis, Hollow Knight, and even Slay the Princess, take a while to boot after you launch them from their containers.

Controls need some fine-tuning

I’ll give credit to Winlator where it’s due: the app has a built-in controller and an RTS keyboard template that you can customize to your liking. Additionally, Winlator detects external keyboards, mice, and controllers, allowing you to play Windows games using gamepads and good ol’ KB+M controls. But depending on the game, the mouse sensitivity can range from alright to completely bonkers. Having tested both the virtual controller and four physical USB mice, I had to spend some time getting used to the mouse sensitivity on the emulator.

As for external keyboards, Winlator just doesn’t register the Esc and Enter keys. An easy workaround involves installing the key remapper application on your current container and binding the inputs to their respective keys. Fair warning though, you may need an extra macro key for Esc, as Winlator failed to accept the Escape key on all three of my keyboards as valid input. I didn't have any issues with this when I used my Redragon K585, but finding a suitable replacement key for Esc was a real pain on my primary mechanical keyboard.

Another pet-peeve of mine was that I had to remap my external gamepads to keyboard and mouse buttons on more than one occasion, which was rather annoying and time-consuming.

Winlator: A phenomenal concept that’s still in its early stages

Winlator is by no means the be-all and end-all Windows emulator for Android devices, and with all the issues and bugs present in the app, it needs a lot of optimization and compatibility updates before it can run well on most devices. With that said, I’d be lying if I said I wasn’t impressed by Winlator.

Sure, it can’t run most 3D titles – or even certain 2D titles – at 1080p 60FPS on the most powerful phones. But just being able to run Windows games on Android without rooting the device or spending hours installing random drivers is nothing short of amazing. There are plenty of glaring issues with it, but for an experimental emulator that’s still in its early stages of development, it’s definitely worth checking out. In fact, I’m looking forward to how the emulator evolves over the course of a year. Given how rapidly the emulator has advanced since its release in 2023, I wouldn’t be surprised if Winlator could run modern PC games by 2025.

Winlator

Winlator is a free x86_64 emulator that lets you run Windows games on your smartphone. While it requires a beefy smartphone that packs a powerful processor for the best performance, you can still use Winlator to emulate Windows games on most high-end Snapdragon mobile chips.

See at Github