So, you play Ragnarok Mobile on your phone but it heats up so easily and gets the battery drained like water in the sink. You have the option to play on emulators which some, by the way, are promoted by XD's website themselves BUT you only have an old laptop or desktop that you don't think can run such emulators without any decent graphics card or memory.
You might want to rethink that idea because with my own experience, I was surprised with one emulator running seamlessly on my slow laptop. Take note: my laptop only has a built-in graphics card.
Can't believe it? See for yourself. My laptop is an Asus X453MA (with Bing). Look it up on Google if you want but quick specs will be:
Processor: Intel® Bay Trail-M Dual Core Celeron N2830 2.16GHz
RAM: 2GB DDR3
Display: 14.0" Auto HD (1366x768)
Storage: 500GB HDD 5400 RPM
Battery: 2Cells 30 Whrs
Again, this thing has no GPU but comes with an integrated graphics card from Intel which doesn't really do much but to generate the display on the LCD. This comes pre-installed with Windows 8 with BING but I recently upgraded it to Windows 10 Home edition because it comes free with the license it came with. Now, imagine how slow this laptop is, even if Microsoft claims Windows 10 runs smoother and faster with lower resources or memory compared to Windows 8. Yeah, maybe a bit. You know when you have an old desktop and still running Xp for 8 yrs then you decided to reformat it and give it an upgrade to Windows 7? Looks and feels like its brand new cause its fast and all but after you install all your apps on it you start to realize it ran faster before you upgraded it. That's exactly how I felt when I upgraded to Windows 10.
Now, what did I do? I upgraded the RAM to 8Gig.
The upgrade was worth it. It made the laptop snappy, opening apps quickly, booting up faster, even! So, it gave me hope to run emulators and finally relieve my phone from my gaming torture.
I WAS WRONG.
I have installed KOPLAYER and NOX before I upgraded to Windows 10. The upgraded didn't really wipe my laptop but just installed Windows 10 on top of Windows 8 that's why the apps stayed. I tried to run these two (separate instance, of course) but still they can't run ROM properly. Both ran the game so slow that it's like running the game in a Virtual Machine. This crushed my hopes of playing ROM on it so I decided to find other ways.. I installed Remix OS on it. (see
https://tipidgaming.blogspot.com/2017/03/ro-mobile-on-remix-os-old-laptop-new.html)
Yey! It works like a charm! So fast, so seamless! But, the downside to this is that it's unstable and it crashes, freezes. I've researched and the crashes and freezing seems like to be happening often on Asus Laptops.
Okay, I can play ROM on Remix OS but I always pray that it does not freeze because the freezing seems random, regardless of when I had turned the laptop on. The frequent crashing had led to corrupting the partition I created for Remix OS. This prompted me to reinstall Remix OS but it scared me that it might corrupt my whole HD! So, I tried emulators again to avoid killing my one and only laptop.
I went to Discord and asked around for any good and fast emulators that run on quad-core PCs. And Clo advised bluestacks.cn or Memu. I tried
http://bluestacks.cn/ and I almost dropped as I can't believe what happened next.
At first I thought the emulator would lag while opening up ROM, that I would get chappy sounds and/or delayed display from the background music but NO. It was fast and fluid as if I was playing it on my phone. This did not put up my hopes though because I was skeptical that it might be on the login screen only so I decided to patch the game up and play. While the loading screen shows up the Poring running on the bottom of the screen, I quickly ran to the kitchen to get some water to drink then went back to the laptop and was ready to be disappointed.
But NO.
I can't believe my eyes as I was looking at the screen, seeing all the other players and even the NPCs moving with no lags nor delays as if being played on a mobile device. Then I tested the sound and there was no delay as well. I clicked around to move my character and a grin started to stretch on my face because the experience was unbelievable and I was excited that I can finally play safe knowing that my laptop wont be frozen anymore, risking to get corrupted and becoming an expensive piece of paper weight.
ANYWAYS.
I'll try to update this post with a video of how snappy bluestacks.cn is. I am not so sure if the developers of the original bluestacks is different from that of bluestacks.cn but I'm sacrificing my eyes for bleeding out of trying to choose or understand the options of bluestacks.cn but it's all worth it since it plays ROM so smooth that I can chat in discord, play a movie and/or browse the internet while playing ROM.
I hope you guys find this review satisfying.
