Xiaomi promotes PC emulation on Android with new phones with Silksong and Stardew Valley

There’s been something going on on Android for a while now. PC emulation has improved, and I’m not talking about DOSBox or loading a virtual machine. No, this particular aspect of emulation focuses on bringing native games from PC and running them on Android.

Now, Xiaomi has rolled out an update for its Game Center app, which is confirmed to work on the Redmi K90 Pro Max and K90. Rather than having to use a third-party emulator like Winlator, Xiaomi cuts out the middlemen and simply integrates its own emulator into its phones.

Xiaomi cuts out emulation middlemen and does it itself

Announced by Sun Cun, the company’s Redmi product manager, on Chinese social media site Weibo, the company confirmed that it supports Hollow Knight, Silksong, and Stardew Valley. These include less demanding games, but Silksong has become a must-have on mobile for a certain sect of users.

Although the game has arrived on platforms like the Switch 2 and is incredibly playable on the Steam Deck, some players only have access to it on their phones. As such, Silksong quickly moved from being available to being playable on non-Xiaomi emulators. In fact, there is now a sub-sect monitoring an unofficial Chinese port to Android. I don’t know, maybe there’s something to this “gamers want stuff everywhere” thing.

Xiaomi’s emulator efforts also bring support for Steam Achievements, cloud saves, and Steam Friends. There is also support for a mouse and vibrations.

Android developers have been tackling PC emulation on systems for months now. Even with mid-range phones with decent or impressive processors, it becomes easier to just force performance, especially for 2D games like Silksong and Stardew Valley.

Phone chips are becoming ridiculously powerful

I heard about it at the very beginning of this year. At the time, the most impressive thing to appear was a fully functional copy of Red Dead Redemption 2. Early videos showed impressive performance, especially since they were in an emulation environment on a completely different architecture.

However, these chips are becoming so good that we are now starting to see other companies starting to take an interest in them. A good example is our almost continuous coverage of Valve’s upcoming headset. In the company’s owned codebases, it’s heavily implied that they’re working on a version of its Windows-to-Linux translation layer, Proton, for ARM chips, which typically power mobile devices – or VR headsets.

Since the start of the year, development has accelerated, with the popular Winlator emulator now available in beta version 11. Last year, it kicked off with version five. Obviously, it’s not perfect and is better suited to much older games or 2D titles. For those who like to tinker and test different emulators, well, there’s another one on the way for you to see if Cyberpunk 2077 will work on your mid-range phone.