wemu

Windows games on the AYN Thor.

wemu runs Windows games on Android. It started as a fork of Winlator Ludashi and kept the engine, which is Wine plus Box64 and FEXCore doing the x86 translation, but the interface has been rebuilt from nothing in Jetpack Compose. The old one was a Win32 desktop pretending to be a handheld launcher. This one was drawn for a device you hold.

It is built for the Thor in particular, which has two screens. The top one carries the library, a wall of cover art you can page through with the shoulder buttons. The bottom one carries whatever you have selected: what the game is, how big it is, which container it runs in, how far its download has got. Nothing important hides behind a menu, and the on-screen keyboard stays on the bottom screen where your thumbs already are.

Games live in containers, and a container is a full Windows environment of its own. Each one picks its Wine build, its graphics driver, its Direct3D translation layer, its screen size and its own set of overrides. A game that wants an older Wine or a particular DXVK gets one without disturbing anything else you have installed, and you can point a game at a different container later without reinstalling it.

Sign in to Steam and your library appears beside everything else. Games download straight to the device through the same depot protocol the desktop client uses, and cloud saves come down with them, at install time rather than the moment you press Play. Downloads pause and resume, and they survive the app being closed.

Epic works the same way. Sign in once, your owned games show up, and the downloader speaks Epic's own chunk format: a game arrives as a few thousand compressed pieces that get stitched into files as they land, so nothing needs the game twice on disk. An interrupted download picks up where it stopped rather than starting again, which matters when a game is forty gigabytes and you are on a phone connection. Epic's manifest names the executable, so wemu knows what to run instead of guessing at the twenty exe files in a game folder.

Everything ends up on one wall. Steam games, Epic games and anything else you point at an exe on your storage sit together, sorted or filtered however you like, with favourites, recently played, and per-store collections. Cover art comes from the stores themselves and from SteamGridDB when you give it a key.

The graphics stack is where most of the tuning lives. Turnip drivers ship with the app and can be swapped per container. DXVK and VKD3D translate Direct3D 9 through 12 to Vulkan. There is FSR upscaling handled inside Wine so the frames are never drawn at full size to begin with, a frame rate cap, frame generation through Lossless Scaling, and post-processing filters. Performance mode, thread affinity and a pile of Box64 and FEX switches are there for the games that need them, and off for the ones that do not.

Themes are generated rather than picked from a list of five. Choose a colour and the whole palette is built around it in OKLCH so the contrast holds, or choose a theme that runs on several colours at once. There is wallpaper, glass, blur, grain and glow, corner rounding, font choice and text size, plus a pure black mode for the OLED panel. Colour vision correction covers the three common types, and high contrast, large text, reduced motion and larger touch targets are all one switch each.

Controllers work as controllers rather than as a mouse pretending to be one, with an XInput toggle bound to a shortcut for the games that want DirectInput instead. Touch controls, haptics, clipboard sharing between Android and the guest, and a shared folder both sides can see are all in there too.

Credit where it is due wemu descends from Winlator by Bruno Domingues, by way of Winlator Ludashi, and the Epic and cloud save work is ported from GameNative by Utkarsh Dalal. Both are GPL-3.0 and so is this. The full list of what came from where is in NOTICE.md.