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Comment by mepian | Hacker News Reader

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mepian·

Smartphones can't run PC games natively, which I personally prefer to smartphone games.

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"Can't".

There are plenty of PC games that have mobile ports. All the GTA3 ingine games, several bioware rpgs.

You're confusing "can't" with "publisher hasn't bothered".

The hardware, certainly on newer iphones,is plenty powerful.

His claim is still correct. It does not run PC x86 games natively. If you have to port every PC game one by one it will take forever.

Yes, the body of x86 PC games is massive and the overwhelming majority will never receive mobile ports. Furthermore, it's still going to be a few years before phones have enough power to emulate x86 competently enough to be able to play these titles via emulator.

Crazy how people buy computers nowadays based on which OS you are allowed to run on it, right? Almost feel like the early 80s all over again, but less for technical reasons.

In this case it's also a hardware issue. If smartphones ran x86 I'm sure some clever hackers would've found a way to boot windows on them and from there you could play any game you like. But being ARM it's pointless.

that is pointless and show a lack of understanding of the core issue.

first, there were tons of x86 android devices. samsung tab3 to name the last one i used.

second, most of the code on android is tainted GPL code. technically GPL was supposed to not prevent you from running whatever you want on devices you own if it was distributed with GPL based code, but alas, that is exactly what happens.

> Almost feel like the early 80s all over again, but less for technical reasons.

It's almost exclusively due to technical reasons.

right...

(tried to add as much as you to the discussion)

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