Limbo PC Emulator Reviews

Limbo x86 is a port of Qemu x86 for a cruddy Android API (which is basically worthless on its own). And (obviously), the most common use of this emulator is going to be running an *older* x86 system (an *operating system*-- not a crappy Windows system, which is just a useless toy) on an Android device that is running on top of an ARM based system. This will be somewhat slow. If this is not obvious to you, you are using the WRONG SOLUTION. You would like to run a brand new Windows system on a brand new x86 desktop that you payed hundreds or thousands of dollars for. So-- buy one of those and stop trying to be a hacker. Limbo x86 runs Slackware 11.0 really well on top of an Android system for ARM. Damn Small Linux runs pretty well, too (but-- I couldn't stand using it because it doesn't allow a user to improve the system!) And, Limbo makes what would (basically) be a useless hunk of plastic into a halfway decent system that allows a user to actually make use of the device. Android only allows permissions on a FAT32 filesystem. So, this leaves a user needing to install a system on disk images that are (at most) 2GB (just one of the many, many completely unnecessary limitations of worthless Android). Also, a user is limited to (at most) four disks by Qemu. So (using a RAID), best case scenario is installing a system on an 8GB filesystem. *My* device does not allow integrating an add on Micro SD with the system disk. And, Limbo does not request write access on external disks. This leaves me with only 4GB on the main system disk. So, I gotta run Slackware 11.0 w/ minimal packages from that (and, that's pretty tight-- but doable). I am able to run an X Window System (TWM), Emacs, games, and most of the bells and whistles a person would expect. And (obviously), CUPS and network mounts and Samba and ssh and wget. I've even used its Apache daemon to host my website a couple times. I compiled Wine 1.39 (using Slackware 11.0's 2.6 kernel). And, I even installed Office 97 with file format converters (not that I need it, because I also compiled Abiword and Gnumeric from source). Even got sound working (by compiling Pulseaudio and piping signals to a Pulseaudio simple protocol player that is available for useless Android-- but pretty choppy). Also got Rollercoaster Tycoon working in Wine (just-- 'cause I could). Probably too slow for many people's liking. But-- totally possible to do that. Limbo provides Qemu (w/ all its functionality) for Android. And-- that's what the project is all about. Definitely deserving of five stars-- minus one because the developers did not think to request permissions on external filesystems. This needs to be changed for sure! It is quite limiting on most systems. Limbo is about what it is-- not what it's not. What it is-- is the only way to run a REAL operating system on top of Android (which is really just a completely useless piece of junk).

I have a Samsumg Galaxy S6 with a Nougat Custom ROM. I have tried booting a Windows 7 installation ISO. Takes over 15 minutes without ever accessing the initial setup screen. Stuck at tue white loading bar at 100%. Now...the 2 stars go because of the fact I cannot use a CDROM with a hard drive. If I check a HDD....when I check CDROM...the HDD unchecks itself. It doesn't do that when choosing a floppy...just the CDROM. So...it boots but cannot even load a CDROM ISO of Windows 7 installation in a reasonable loading time. I know instructionsets are longer because of translation between x86 to ARM but there is a limit in waiting. Looked promissing... Version used of LIMBO: 4.1.0

Great effort really appreciate it. But its very slow needs a lot of improvements. For running windows applications/games right now the best choice is "ExaGear" (Which uses WINE to run windows executables).

Emulator is work but in SDL interface when I click the three-dot menu it would crash! Please fix it! System is Android 5.1 arm64. My device is LG G4.

Honestly good, been trying for days to install Win95/Win98 on my Samsung Galaxy Tab 3. Had a hard time (impossible) until I find on youtube that the Hacker Keyboard was absolutely necessary. Then it turned almost okay, as long as I don't touch at the option button on the upper right. Actually sometimes it doesn't crash and you can install Win 98 (I did, it took 4 hours easy) and you can get the keyboard. But if you try to mask the keyboard, well chances are 99% crash. Don't even try to use the save state, it will automatically crash. That's too bad but hey, better than nothing. I'll try to install old games since DosBox doesn't work. A few corrections would be welcome, especially when we want to mask/display the keyboard or use stave state.

During emulation, if I were to open the tab with the keyboard and mouse settings (the options I guess) the app force closes. It doesn't do it on my old phone, but it doesn't have a lot of storage space. My current phone is an HTC desire 816.

Good job with this program, but there's only a few Oses that work. Cannot work properly with puppy linuxes (any) And cannot run any versión of OS/2 with PM. Would be good if the developer fix this issue.

I think Limbo works well and is an interesting application. It is slow but still usable. Tested it with Windows 98 installed and booted from a hard disk image and it worked faster than I expected and did not crash. FreeDOS also worked fine. I also tried my Nanolinux distribution and that worked too. I wrote a Wiki page about that describing how to install Limbo, Hackers Keyboard and Nanolinux and how to run Nanolinux with Limbo on an Android system. Could compile a small program with gcc and run it. My Nanolinux project and the Wiki page mentioned can be found on Sourceforge. I am not allowed to provide a link here. What is missing I think is a utility on Android to copy files from the hard disk image to a file in the Android file system. Georg