Developing for Android on PowerPC

If you’re like me and own any PowerPC based Mac, you’ll probably be frustrated at the fact that Google has only decided to release an i386 version of their Android emulator. The good news is that the emulator is open source, and based on qemu, so Google has released the source code to the emulator. With the source you can build your own PowerPC binary of the emulator. Here’s what you do:

1. Download the Android emulator source from http://code.google.com/p/android/downloads/list
2. Unzip the file, then execute the script ./build-emulator.sh
3. Copy the emulator binary to the /tools directory of your SDK folder.

The bad news is that after you launch the emulator, it freezes. I’m not quite sure why, it’s possible it could have something to do with how the linux kernel image was compiled. I’ll see if I can dig any deeper into making it work.

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Tagged as: android, emulator, linux