The community has been longing for more and more ways to play their x86 games on Android handhelds. Whether that’s been through weird sideways methods like Starboard, or through dedicated emulators like Gamenative or Gamehub. There’s ways constantly developing, and one of the more popular options as of recent has been a new operating system on the block; Armada.
Armada is essentially taking SteamOS and porting it over to your Qualcomm Snapdragon handhelds on the higher end. Whether that’s the 865 in the Flip 2, or the G3 Gen 3 in the Konkr Pocket Fit, or even the 8 Elite in the Odin 3. There’s a lot of devices trying to take on Armada, but one company has been seemingly left out until now. And that’s Mangmi.
Thanks to a recent, or soon to be released build of Armada, the Mangmi Air Y Pro has taken on a new life in the form of the weird vertical Steam Boy handheld we saw a few weeks back. Because of the Snapdragon 865 it’s packing, it seems that the Mangmi Air Y Pro is going to be perfect if you’re looking for a new way to play your low end x86 games. If you’re interested, I highly recommend keeping an eye out on either the Armada Github or the Armada Discord that’s where you’ll get the most up to date information on updates, and new device support.
That being said, I feel like it’s worth advising caution on if you’re wanting to do this yourself once the proper build for this handheld comes out. This will not be an OS for the standard Air Y, and on my personal stance, I wouldn’t really recommend this on the 4gb Air Y Pro. In doing my own testing with x86 emulation on a 4gb unit, it struggles to boot up much of anything thanks to the overhead needed. So if you have the full fat 8gb Air Y Pro, go wild and enjoy what you’ve got. Cause it’ll be good.
Hopefully the Pocket Max is next…
