Every week or so, a new emulator grabs my attention, or gets a new update, and more often than not, when I go to test it, I am met with instant signs of proof that it is indeed not great at all. It's one of the negatives of being a retro gaming news publication, but today the trial and error of exploring new XBOX emulators month in month out on Android has paid off because I have finally found one that actually works.
And by actually works, I mean that. This new Android emulator is called HakuX, and although it's not available on the Google Play Store at this moment in time and has to be downloaded via GitHub, it works as well as you'd expect your favourite XBOX games to do on original hardware and is apparently not a fork of Xemu: "the emulator has been rebuilt completely, taking into account what I learned about the inherent limitations of optimising a xemu port", states the developer who previously created a fork of Xemu.
Download the .apk after doing your own due diligence, open it on your Android device of choice (I have been testing this on the Retroid Pocket Duo and Pocket Nova), choose your XBOX ROMs folder that features either .iso or .xiso.iso folders, and you'll be greeted with your library on the homepage. More often than not, the game will load instantly on your device with no performance problems, already mapped buttons and the ability to upscale it as you please. I have tested a handful of games, and 80% of them run well, such as Halo: Combat Evolved and Jet Set Radio Future at 30fps+, which are cumbersome games to run, I'll admit!
Though there are a couple of games that I couldn't get running well, it's clear that this new 1.2.0 update has done great things for performance, more specifically on Adreno-based handhelds, but there's still some ironing out of bugs that's needed before this becomes a "flawless" performing XBOX emulator for Android, even if the developer has stated that many games run well; some of the very games I couldn't run on my devices, such as Fable and Halo 2, had glitching artefacts all over the place. Likely because I need extra drivers to get it working, which is where things get less consumer-friendly; I want this to work straight out of the box, so to speak, but in some areas it needs major tweaking by the user, which is why I am yet to say this is flawless. I installed the Turnip drivers, and indeed performance increased on Fable and Halo 2, which is a good sign if you are willing to tweak!
But that said, there are signs of incredible performance upgrades that have given me so much joy. Like you, I have been waiting for a long time to get a good-performing Android XBOX emulator, many failing to meet my needs, but this... this is almost there! When jumping into the settings, you can tweak your controls, change aspect ratio, upscale to 1080p, you can even do multiplayer via local area network if you and a friend are on the same WiFi network, and more.
I urge you to have a go. I'm seeing a lot of mixed opinions on the performance, many going as far as saying it's "superb", but I think it has some time to get there; this is one of the best I have tested, though, which is credit to the developer behind this, known as r-fandango. I do reccomend installing the drivers on Retroid devices to squeeze out better performance. This is an emulator to keep a close eye on!
