About ExaGear products
ExaGear - a series of commercial programs created in 2013 by the Russian company Eltechs to translate x86_64 instructions to ARMv6, ARMv7, ARMv8 to run applications and games from Windows in a Linux container using Wine, a free implementation of the Windows API.
| Developer | Eltechs |
|---|---|
| Release date | ExaGear RPG/Strategies - November 3, 2014(beta), Windows Emulator - February 2017 |
| Termination of development | February 28, 2019 |
| Sale project | October 1, 2020 |
| Version | ExaGear RPG - 2.6.8, Strategies - 3.5.0, Windows Emulator - 3.0.1 |
History of the company and program
The company Eltechs was established in 2012 in Moscow, Russia. It is known that the team was led by a man with the pseudonym Armmaster. It also featured pUnK2014 and TheAK47. More information about the company can be found here...
On April 15, 2014, Heroes 3 Runner was introduced on Android, a program that allowed you to run and play Heroes 3 on Android by translating x86 to ARM. Also in 2014, Heroes 3 Runner was renamed to ExaGear Strategies. ExaGear RPG went into beta testing on November 3, 2014. It was designed to run Fallout 1.2, M&M 6,7,8 games.
On November 2, 2014, Exagear Desktop was released: a program to run x86 Linux, Windows applications (using Wine) on ARM GNU/Linux platforms. From 2013 to 2019, many new versions were released, the project developed and became more stable. The GPU was emulated by software methods, there was no support for OpenGL.
In 2017, ExaGear Windows Emulator is released - a version of Exagear with Wine 3.0, which was new at that time, to run Windows applications on Android in addition to games. The name "Windows Emulator" is not true, the real Windows was not emulated, there was Wine - a free implementation of the Windows API.
Termination of development, closure and sale of the project
The latest versions of ExaGear RPG, ExaGear Strategies, ExaGear Windows Emulator (2.6.8, 3.5.0, 3.0.1 respectively) were released in 2016, 2018. On February 28, 2019, Eltechs stopped supporting Exagear and removed all applications from Google Play, the project was closed.
In October 2020, Eltechs sold ExaGear to Huawei and the project was relaunched under the brand name ExaGear Huawei. Support for x86_64 architecture has been added. The new version only works on Huawei products and has not been released to the public.
Continued development by enthusiasts in 2019-2022.
In 2019-2020, support for software 3D acceleration (llvmpipe) was added to Exagear by enthusiasts, which marked the beginning of the development of basic 3D acceleration by adapting virgl-renderer to Android.
In April 2021, alexvorxx releases a post on Russian forum 4PDA about VirGL Overlay in Exagear, which was developed by user mittorn. This will mark the start of 3D acceleration support in Exagear. At that time, most games were unstable with it, and those that worked often had graphic artifacts, root rights were also required, and only Adreno GPUs were supported. In the summer of 2021, a version without root is released, game performance is improved, the number of graphic bugs is reduced, support for Mali GPUs has been added,
At the end of July 2021, 2021 on the YouTube channel Grima04 posted a video demonstrating the work of Turnip (Vulkan Adreno open driver) + Zink (Vulkan->OpenGL translator) + VirGL (virgl_vtest_server) in ExaGear using the proot container in Termux. A little later virgl_vtest_launcher is released, an early implementation of VirtIO-GPU in ExaGear. At that time, root was required, and there were graphical bugs.
In December 2021 Chinese enthusiasts release ExaGear with VirtIO-GPU: VirGL but render based on Turnip+Zink drivers for Adreno 618+ using the same method as Grima04.
Already in January 2022, alexvorxx releases a cache modification based on the standard one from Eltechs, which uses the GPU directly without VirGL, using only Turnip+Zink built with the xlib library
In the same January 2022, a new convenient, but so far unstable control Input Bridge from DotNetBurst is released (development stopped on February 24, 2022)
Gallery
winecfg
The main menu of the application.
Game running on Exagear.
A running Oblivion in Exagear.
A Fable game that runs in Exagear.
Stalker: Shadow on Chernobyl launched in ExaGear.
