Bluestacks, an Android emulator, lets you play apps and games on your PC!

Well, technically it's not an emulator but a virtual Machine. In the end that doesn't matter though. :)

Bluestacks lets you run almost any Android app or game on your PC. I killed a lot of time with Drag Racing and Angry Birds Space. :) If you need some kind of multi-touch controls try experimenting around with the keyboard. A lot of standard user interfaces seem to be mapped to the keyboard. That way you can use keyboard and mouse like you would anyway on a PC.

At this time it's still in beta but already runs like a charm. It crashes maybe once a week but I'm sure that's not as annoying as real phones telling you that their Battery is getting low.

Until it is officialy released it's completely free to use. After that it will cost some money but it should still cost much much less than a new Tablet or Phone.

If you want to give it a try you can download it here.

Should you own a Mac and be interested, the developers have said they're working on a Mac-version as well.

All in all I'm really excited about this and I'm looking forward to the actual release.

If you want to get in touch with the team behind Bluestacks you can do that best over Twitter at http://twitter.com/#!/bluestacksinc



Customization


You will probably see that a part of Bluestacks, the RocketDock, gets autostarted with Windows. Although I love Bluestacks, this thing annoyed me, because I found exactly no use for it. I got rid of it after killing the process "RocketDock.exe" and renaming the exe itself in "C:\Users\Your Name\AppData\Local\BlueStacks\RocketDock\" to "RocketDock.meh"

Other than that I can see that some of you could get annoyed that you "have to" login to Bluestacks with your Facebook account. Well you actually don't. You only need to do that if you want to synchronize Bluestacks with an actual android device you already own. Because I don't own an android phone I could not test the cloud functionality of Bluestacks.

If you want to change the path of the SDCard -file Bluestacks uses you can change that in the registry under "HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\BlueStacks\Guests\Android\BlockDevice\2\". There are other options you can fiddle around with, like the resolution of the Bluestacks window while it is not in fullscreen mode.

Also you should get yourself another launcher because the default one is at this moment a bit lackluster. I'm using the AWDLauncher.

Android/iOS Drag Racing Half Mile Tunes Level 1-10

Here are the half mile tunes for Drag Racing

Level	1	2	3	4	5
Car	Honda S2000	Honda S2000	Honda S2000	BMW M3	Aston Martin
est. Time	19,080	16,639	15,499	14,417	14,006
Upgrades	011010	011545	555555	555555	111012
NOS  length		4,31s	4,30s	4,30s	3,18s
Final Drive	3,564	4,852	3,085	2,492	1,845
1st Gear	3,134	3,135	4,000	4,062	3,998
2nd Gear	2,650	2,649	3,150	3,358	3,401
3rd Gear	1,950	1,402	1,922	2,299	2,800
4th Gear	1,552	1,098	1,578	1,801	2,351
5th Gear	1,248	0,901	1,351	1,499	2,000
6th Gear	1,111	0,775	1,172	1,349	1,680

Level	6	7	8	9	10
Car	Aston Martin	Novitec Rosso	Pagani Zonda	SSC	Venom GT
est. Time	12,879	12,363	11,639	11,141	10,896
Upgrades	142455	555555	443455	252455	555555
NOS  length	2,50s	2,32s	2,36s	2,16s	2,15s
Final Drive	2,248	3,609	3,418	1,616	3,324
1st Gear	3,152	1,779	1,792	3,042	1,498
2nd Gear	2,648	1,485	1,518	2,501	1,261
3rd Gear	2,048	1,165	1,191	2,021	0,959
4th Gear	1,702	1,026	1,050	1,719	0,850
5th Gear	1,439	0,916	0,932	1,492	0,759
6th Gear	1,282	0,825	0,822	1,330	0,688

Have fun! :)

Android/iOS Drag Racing Quarter Mile Tunes Level 1-10

I played almost entirely through Drag Racing on Bluestacks and wanted to make my tunes public because I had a really hard time finding a place where just all tunes would be on one place.

Most of these tunes are from around the interweb and all of them customized for myself. All of them also start in second gear. That means you punch the pedal to the metal and as soon as the race starts you shift into second gear.

Fire your Nitros as soon as the tires stop smoking not earlier because that would waste the extra boost.

I'm not the world leader in any race or level but these tunes are all very competitive and you will first place about 90% of the time.

Let's start with the quarter mile tunes:

Level	1	2	3	4	5
Car	Mazda RX-8	Honda S2000	Nissan Skyline	BMW M3	Lambo G
est. Time	12,374	10,657	9,992	9,581	9,409
Upgrades	011412	011545	555555	555555	011451
NOS  length	4,39s	4,38s	2,86s	3,18s	2,52s
Final Drive	4,596	4,074	5,000	3,364	4,551
1st Gear	3,869	3,998	4,949	2,949	3,299
2nd Gear	3,202	3,152	3,670	2,498	2,402
3rd Gear	1,901	1,761	2,000	1,702	1,462
4th Gear	1,601	1,458	1,501	1,451	1,158
5th Gear	1,380	1,202	1,119	1,269	0,962
6th Gear	1,221	1,022	0,930	1,139	0,870
7th Gear	\	\	\	\	\

Level	6	7	8	9	10
Car	Lambo G	CM Biturbo	CM F1	FXX	Veyron 16.4 SS
est. Time	8,638	8,305	7,878	7,594	7,269
Upgrades	433555	112555	151555	235555	555555
NOS  length	2,40s	2,06s	2,32s	2,23s	1,99s
Final Drive	4,438	3,594	1,994	2,557	3,341
1st Gear	3,312	3,162	3,779	3,498	2,903
2nd Gear	2,733	2,499	3,100	2,879	2,201
3rd Gear	1,759	1,550	2,058	2,100	1,680
4th Gear	1,299	1,249	1,779	1,799	1,349
5th Gear	1,049	1,051	1,559	1,598	1,109
6th Gear	0,891	0,880	1,452	1,462	0,919
7th Gear	\	\	\	\	0,780

Next Post will be all half mile tunes.


Edit: 24.04.2012 Screwed up the time for the lvl2 Honda S2000.