User blog:BunsenH/Mobile-device version of MSM in Windows using Andy

Occasionally people have mentioned using the BlueStacks Android emulator to play the mobile-device version of MSM on a Windows machine. I tried it briefly, and had no problems with it. The installation was simple: download and run; then install MSM.

But my main goal in trying to use the mobile-device version of MSM is to figure out how to get access to the game's files, so I can "dress up" my monsters. BlueStacks is somewhat limited in that regard; it's intended to be relatively simple and hassle-free, at a cost in flexibility. From my reading on the net, I heard that the Andy Android emulator is more configurable, if somewhat more complicated to set up.

My experience was that for basic use, Andy was no more complex. Download and run; choose the default options.

There were a couple of gotchas. The first was a fairly basic thing: on boot-up, Andy presents you with a window showing a clock and a padlock symbol. With a bit of mousing around, I figured out what was going on. Andy was pretending it's a mobile phone. You have to swipe across the lock symbol with your mouse (or whatever) and drag the lock out of the circle that appears. You know, so you don't accidentally activate Andy by sitting on it, or something like that.

The second was a bit more tricky, and took more rummaging around on the net to figure out. A number of touch-screen operations work by touching two points and spreading them apart or pulling them together. Typically, it's to "magnify" or "shrink" what you're seeing. In MSM, it's to expand or shrink your view of the current island, which in the Windows version we do with the "page up" and "page down" buttons or with a mouse scroll wheel. With Andy... you move the mouse pointer into the Andy window, then press-and-hold the "Ctrl" button on your keyboard while you're moving the pointer towards or away from its starting point. The pointer location when you press the "Ctrl" button is one of the two locations; the second locatoin is wherever you move the pointer after that. When you've got the second location, left-click and drag the mouse. That gives you the two-point "spread" or "shrink". Move the pointer around and eventually you find a magnification that suits you. It's awkward, but it gets you there.

I still haven't figured out how to get into the game's files, though.

I imagine that it will take me a while to push my way through Andy's configuration to see if I can get shared folder access in a useful way. (The ways I've found so far haven't been useful, for my values of "useful".)  I'm under the impression that if I can make my PC think that Andy is connected to it by a virtual USB cable, I might then be able to access the files using the regular Windows file explorer.

Failing that, there are a couple of other Android simulators to try, including setting up a virtual machine with VirtualBox.

If anyone cares to short-circuit my efforts by telling me how to access the game's image files on a mobile device, please feel free.

(One route that I haven't yet explored would be to run iExplorer to access the game's files on a synched copy of an iPhone.  One of these days...)