
Starcraft On Android - With Full Touch Controls - Is On The Way [video] - rdr0b11
http://www.androidpolice.com/2013/01/01/a-way-to-play-starcraft-on-android-that-isnt-embarrassingly-bad-with-full-touch-controls-is-on-the-way/
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optymizer
I appreciate the technology demo, but anyone who has played 'serious' SC games
knows that you have to use the keyboard. How are you even supposed to select a
group of units in a messy battle? I suppose you can connect a keyboard to it..
but then, why bother? I think mouse-only games would make better candidates
for successful ports.

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Dove
I agree. The control in the demo looks cumbersome.

I've come to the conclusion that touchscreen devices have a lower information
throughput than traditional desktop machines. Relative to a mouse, the
touchscreen is inaccurate, unreliable, and (using it) blocks your view more.
You can't rely on there being a hard keyboard, and if there is one, you can't
rely on it being big and comfortable enough to use at high speeds.

So it's hard for me to imagine, even in principle, how you'd port something
like Starcraft. It uses almost all of the desktop's information throughput --
two or three mouse buttons and most of the keyboard keys going like mad the
whole game -- and you just don't have that kind of bandwidth on a touch
screen.

I would love to see a Real Strat on a touch device -- not just a lot of tower
defense games. But I think you'd have to do a lot more than port what we have.
You'd have to go back to the beginning, back before Warcraft, when they were
still figuring out how to make the controls work on a PC, and reinvent the
genre for touch screen.

Touch screen games seem biased toward the turn-based and the scripted, rather
than the real-time and manually controlled. Perhaps, with a lot of scripting
and game redesign, RTSs could survive that transition, but I think they'd come
out looking pretty different.

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bytefactory
Apparently they've got Caesar III running on the emulator too!

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lini
If porting Intel compiled binaries (dll/exe) to ARM is as easy as this article
makes it look, then Microsoft has some explaining to do about Windows RT and
legacy apps compatibility.

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jcfrei
_It is similar in a sense to Wine, how it is not a port of Wine. It is
currently under development._

 _It is not an emulator in VMware/VirtualBox's sense of emulation. However it
does implement small subset of Windows APIs, so it is a porting layer._

Apparently winulator just translates the windows api calls to the proper
(native) android function, however why wouldn't you just port wine to android
then? you'd probably just need to add a few missing posix functions, according
to: [http://mobilepearls.com/labs/native-android-api/STABLE-
APIS....](http://mobilepearls.com/labs/native-android-api/STABLE-APIS.html)

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lucian1900
Android lacks things like X11, so it would be non-trivial to port.

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barbs
_Android lacks things like X11_

...or does it??

[http://my20percent.wordpress.com/2012/02/27/android-x-
server...](http://my20percent.wordpress.com/2012/02/27/android-x-server/)

