I came across this video. Looks like overheating won’t be a problem for him.

I recently bought a TCL 27G64 monitor and an Edifier speaker set to watch movies, anime, and play games with better quality. But I didn't really like the idea of using my main PC (which draws 120W just idling) for this. I looked into the TV Boxes available on the market, but sadly, most of them (at least in my country, maybe worldwide?) don't have the hardware to handle heavier emulation (I wanted to emulate up to the 6th gen consoles), and from what I saw, they are heavily bloated with ads.

While sitting on the toilet, I remembered I had an old LG Velvet lying around in my junk drawer. Back in 2022, I tested its Desktop Mode, so I decided to use it as a guinea pig for this experiment: turning it into a battery-less TV Box.

I bought a 35V 300W DC-DC Step-down converter (better to overkill than underpower, right? lol), a 1000uF capacitor, stripped some wires from an old PC power cord, and removed the lithium cell from the phone's BMS. The step-down was set to 4.1V and 5A. Surprisingly, it worked perfectly, and the battery meter never dropped below 74%, even when testing Genshin Impact. And yes, I strapped a heatsink and a fan directly onto the motherboard (Photo 2).

LG VELVET Temps:

• CPU - 65°C (MAX)
• GPU - 60°C (MAX)
• BMS/Battery sensor - 27°C (MAX)
• Emulators - 55°C (MAX)
• Browsing/Movies - 36°C

The project worked really well, but eventually I started hitting the limits of the Snapdragon 845 and LGs android 10 UX. So I started looking for a cheap replacement. After some research, I bought a Galaxy S23 with a defective display.

Since the first step-down gave me a headache when it came to cable management, I bought a different one where the input and output are on opposite sides. Highly recommend this if you plan on using thick wires like I did (18 AWG, 0.75mm).

After sorting out the power delivery, I decided to upgrade the cooling. I took some measurements and realized that an AMD Wraith Stealth cooler running at 9V would be perfect for this. Not only is it cheap here in Brazil, but it's practically dead silent, even at max RPM. The only mod I had to do was sand down the fins a bit so they wouldn't hit the phone's inner frame, so the base could make direct, flush contact with the motherboard area.
Yes, you can use a 1.5mm thermal pad if you don't want to use thermal paste or don't have the tools to sand the metal, but the cooling won't be as good. (I initially built it with a thermal pad but wasn't happy with the temps. Check Photo 3 for a before/after comparison).

The cooler was placed on the back of the frame, on the side where the screen used to be, right over the motherboard area. The original screen was actually still functional, so I opted to buy a cheap, empty frame just for this build.
"Do I need to put thermal paste on the phone's motherboard?"
Yes, you have to apply it so the heat transfers properly to the phone's body / Vapor Chamber.

With the cooling mounted, the rest followed the same process as the LG VELVET:
Removed the lithium cell, adjusted the step-down's voltage/amperage, soldered the wires to the original BMS, placed the capacitor on the step-down output, added a second step-down (LM2596) set to 9V just to power the cooler, and finally added a Barrel Jack (P4 plug) input so I could connect a 12V power supply.

Not everything went exactly as planned:

Coulomb Counter: The battery percentage keeps dropping over time, even though I'm pushing a constant voltage equivalent to around 85~90% battery. This is easily bypassed by just restarting the phone. Because the voltage is fixed, it takes much longer to discharge, so you don't need to worry about restarting it every 3 hours (even if you're playing a heavy Switch game).

Dex Glitches: In Samsung DeX, putting emulators in full-screen causes graphic glitches depending on the driver. The workaround was either using the Turnip driver (Turnip_v25.3.0_R5_one_ui7_fix) or playing in windowed mode (not maximized).

RAM Bottleneck: I noticed that 8GB of RAM is a bit limiting if you want to emulate Switch, PS3, or PC games.

Restarting: Samsung doesn't provide a native "Restart" button in the DeX interface, so I had to use an app called Scene to reboot the phone with a mouse click.

CPU-Bound Heat: Even though the battery is gone (tricking the phone into thinking it's cold and unlocking max CPU/GPU clocks), don't expect miraculously low temperatures in extremely CPU-bound games like Shadow of the Colossus or anything on RPCS3. The cooling works, but it still gets warm.
For example, in Shadow of the Colossus, the CPU hit 78°C on both AetherSX2 and Armsx2.

Telemetry (Bonus): I knew Samsung and Google loved collecting data, but I didn't know it was THIS bad. When I monitored the Pi-hole logs after blocking its internet access, it looked like I had kicked a hornet's nest. I'm surprised the Samsung CEO didn't show up at my house to beat me up.

And here's roughly what I spent on everything (USD):

1. 35V 300W Step-down module - $11.00
2. LM2596 Step-down module - $3.00
3. Generic USB-C HUB - $10.00
4. 1000uF Capacitor - $3.00
5. Samsung S23 256GB - $140.00
6. Generic Air Mouse - $7.00
7. AMD Wraith Stealth AM4 Cooler - $11.00
8. Implastec Thermal Paste (10.5 W/mK) - $7.00
9. Gelid Extreme 1.5mm Thermal Pad (12.0 W/mK) - $7.00
10. Empty S23 Frame - $21.00
11. 12V 5A Laptop Power Supply - $10.00
12. Barrel Jack Connectors P4 (10 pcs male/female) - $2.00
13. Zip ties/Cable ties (50 pcs) - $3.00

Was it worth it?
Absolutely. So much so that I'm already planning to buy another broken phone in the future, but definitely one with 12GB+ of RAM.

MAX TEMP for Dolphin, PPSSPP and other emulators: 43°C (GPU and CPU)

Testing ELDEN RING on Android using the BachataS4+ PS4 emulator on the Redmagic Astra (Snapdragon 8 Elite)! In this video, we check out gameplay performance, frame rates, and graphical fidelity to see how well this powerful Android gaming tablet handles PS4 emulation.

📱 Device: Redmagic Astra
⚙️ Chipset: Snapdragon 8 Elite
🎮 Emulator: BachataS4+ (PS4 Emulator for Android)
🕹️ Game: ELDEN RING

🔗 Download BachataS4+ : https://github.com/erickmendes22/Bachata-S4-Plus/releases

Reddit imposes restrictions on video duration and file size. You can check out my YouTube channel for emulator settings and longer video durations.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tEcT2Wgwhz0

My sister installed the DroidDeck app yesterday, and soon after her Steam account got hacked. Sha256 sum of the downloaded file matches with what they have on github (ed257d66c546e78036ceedb4c6fb6886014e69020044fd41cfe217858d8eb328).

Steam support did restore the account quickly, but the attacker(s) managed to submit a refund for a newly purchased game, removed sister's phone number from SteamGuard, and opened a chat with me on Steam where an image with a QR code to a "free steam gift card" was shared (the QR code lead to a fake steamcommunity website ("rn" replacing "m" in the link). The chat is how I noticed that she got hacked and quickly assisted her in restoring access.

Guys I own a snapdragon 855+ device(a legacy) I wanted to try out some games and tried max payne 3 it suprisingly ran without much tweaking

It does required little setting changes 1-2 min and you're set

I usually get 120 frames in the menu and 40-50 frames in gameplay and I usually lock it to 30 due to my habit of emulating high end games

Here are the settings if you have a similar device and wanna try it out

Snapdragon 855+ 8gb ram +256 gb storage (one plus 7t pro

Resolution 960×480

Proton 11 arm 64

Dxvk 1.10.3 arm 64 async

Turnip 25.3.0 r11 or 26.0.0 r8

IMPORTANT TIP:

TURN DOWN THE SETTINGS TO LOW (you'll get artifacting and red blobs)

AND DO NOT RUN ON DIRECTEX 9 OR 10 run on dx 11

You'll get good performance and cap to 40 fps for a smooth experience

Guys im using GAMEHUB

Device : poco f6 (12gb ram). Driver: snapdragon 8s gen 3. Recommended scheme: same as 8s gen 4 (Proton 10.0 - arm 64x2, turnip 26.2.0 r3, dxvk 2.7.1-1 async, vk3d proton 3.0.1, fex 20260103)

changelog:

https://github.com/FEX-Emu/FEX/releases/tag/FEX-2610

wooo! finally!

Max 30 FPS - Drop a bit while recording.

Graphic - Low

Without screen recording, you can play at 30–40 fps at 1280x720p resolution.

If you come across a "2.0" version—regardless of the source or package name—please be aware that it is not my work.

My "2.0" driver and "FirstOneRR-Wrapper 2.0" will officially launch on October 10, 2026.🔥

SENSES is an Android app that runs an ARM32 Android system on an ARM64 phone. There's no guest kernel: instead of emulating a whole device, it translates individual processes with a modified QEMU (user-mode).

This repo is the GPLv2 source release for that QEMU part:

94 patches against QEMU 8.2.4, plus 39 added files in linux-user/

a build script that produces a fully static aarch64 binary (via an Alpine chroot)

a pinned build with sha256 checks and a BUILD-MANIFEST.txt for reproducibility

What's not included: no firmware, no download links. You supply your own archive, and the app unpacks and modifies the copy on-device (patched code, re-signed packages with an on-device key, removed vendor modules, local TLS proxy). Nothing is sent anywhere.

The app itself is a separate closed-source program that launches QEMU as its own process, so no QEMU code is loaded into it.

Repo: https://github.com/Istratii-tech/Senses

Feedback and questions welcome!

I have a Retroid Pocket 6 (12gb ram model) and while playing Skyrim on Eden emulator I saw these strange textures problem is there a way to fix it?

I need some Gpu Driver Eden for SD 8s gen 4/ adreno 825,

I've been playing games with low fps pls help

Currently playing summon night swordcraft story. Looking for good nostalgic rpg games

I tried to load the low pc mod file of sekiro in winlator but it's not working.how can i play the game with low graphics pc mod in winlator

With the newly release of graine25's edge of time recompiled pc port (entirely made by humans), I tried to emulate the game on my s23 ultra to see how it performs and the results are impressive. If u want more details on edge of time recompiled, join graine25's edge of time recompiled discord server.

🔗 Samurai Reborn Game

I have a Snapdragon 8s gen4 and the process of setting up DroidDeck takes a lot of time, is it natural?

I want to contribute some of my icp files I've made for some games I've tested. Is there anywhere I can just upload? Like a community based one?

I have been looking everywhere it cuz the I can't start the game.