How come emulator games look better than Android games?

[TheTrueSpin]

Seriously, emulation is not good for performance, but most roms running on gensoid look and play better that games developed for Android. Sonic 3 looks lovely, runs at 60fps and never stutters. It even seems to look higher rez than most Android apps.

Android platformer games are nowhere near as good looking or smooth.

So what the hell is going on? The hardware on top end Android phones (Desire, galaxy etc) is clearly capable...

 

[dguy]

Sonic 3 was developed by a professional company with a huge budget and perhaps more than a year of development time. Most games on Android are made by one person or a handful of people in their spare time as a side project.

 

[TheTrueSpin]

Sonic 3 was developed by a professional company with a huge budget and perhaps more than a year of development time. Most games on Android are made by one person or a handful of people in their spare time as a side project.

Yes, but Sonic 3 is 15 years old...

 

[dguy]

Sega had professional programmers, professional artists, and professional composers working on the game. Even with the age difference, I don't think a handful of people who are mainly just programmers could produce something as polished. Sonic 3 sold for over $50 when it came out too.

 

[rushmore]

I think the issue is more to the point- why do the emulated games PERFORM better than most Android games, since they are emulated. You would think native games would do better.

True though, in that it shows how much talent is out there, since a lot of old school games are mega playable and still look good- especially for portable devices.

Just wish the Inc had a snap-on game pad.

A snap-on usb pad that could be folded and act as a protective cover. Use it when you need it and take it off when you do not.

 

[TheAndroidWorks]

It is most likely because the games were originally written in C, not Java and the emulators are actually utilizing the native development kit. I have not looked into emulators on this platform, at all, this is just my assumption as a developer!

But the others are also very correct. These are games that were produced by LARGE teams of people over a year+ of effort on top of mature game engine frameworks with tons of QA testing and so everything was extremely optimized from graphics to game logic functions. A one, two, or three man team (95% of android programmers fall into this group) running on 1/100th the budget starting fresh on a new Java SDK, just can not afford to do such a thing until the android market starts selling a LOT more apps!

 

[Deleted User]

There is a WII app to allow you to bond a Wii controller to your android for gaming! Looks nice!

 

[TheTrueSpin]

I think the issue is more to the point- why do the emulated games PERFORM better than most Android games, since they are emulated. You would think native games would do better.

True though, in that it shows how much talent is out there, since a lot of old school games are mega playable and still look good- especially for portable devices.

Just wish the Inc had a snap-on game pad.

A snap-on usb pad that could be folded and act as a protective cover. Use it when you need it and take it off when you do not.

Exactly... how come emulator performance is BETTER? Emulation normally causes performance issues as you are emulating an OS on top of your real O&S and then running programs within this shell. But Android Emulators always out perform native games.

 

[dguy]

There is a WII app to allow you to bond a Wii controller to your android for gaming! Looks nice!

That is amazing. I just found out that it does not work on HTC Sense devices because HTC doesn't update the Blue tooth stack. Time to email HTC.

 

[Eddie_Brock]

That is amazing. I just found out that it does not work on HTC Sense devices because HTC doesn't update the Blue tooth stack. Time to email HTC.

Wow, I realize we're getting off-topic a bit here, but please tell me more. I've done a search on the market and found a couple (Wiimote Controller, SimpleWiiController). Very cool if indeed this works for your phone. How can you tell if your device is supported?

 

[dguy]

Wow, I realize we're getting off-topic a bit here, but please tell me more. I've done a search on the market and found a couple (Wiimote Controller, SimpleWiiController). Very cool if indeed this works for your phone. How can you tell if your device is supported?

I tried several different ones and couldn't get any of them to work. It looks like what I read about them not working on Sense devices is accurate.

 

[TheAndroidWorks]

Exactly... how come emulator performance is BETTER? Emulation normally causes performance issues as you are emulating an OS on top of your real O&S and then running programs within this shell. But Android Emulators always out perform native games.

You are correct in the fact that traditional operating system emulation running on top of another will yield about 25% processing speed, but Android's native development kit allows these games to actually run from their original C or C++ libraries as I indicated above.

Please see this link to understand what I am talking about:

Android NDK | Android Developers