Tobold's Blog
Sunday, May 26, 2013
 
Playing PC games on an iPad

I've been playing Cardhunter a lot this weekend. With its turn-based gameplay and not too demanding graphics I couldn't help but think that this would be a great game to play on an iPad. Only that Cardhunter runs in Flash, and the iPad doesn't run Flash natively. There are Flash browser apps, but all that I ever tried either worked not at all with newer games, or were extremely slow and buggy.

But then I stumbled upon a different suggestion on the Cardhunter forums: Splashtop, a program that you install on both your PC and your iPad and which then enables you to control your computer with your tablet. the $5 price tag appeared reasonable, and so I tried it out. And it works like a charm! It lowers the resolution of your screen to that of the iPad, and then you can play PC games on your mobile device. Of course that only works really well with games that are controlled mostly with a mouse, unless you use a Bluetooth keyboard for your iPad. But for things like Flash games it is a very good solution.

Comments:
If the developer wants it they can compile the game with Adobe Air and make it run easily on the iPad. They just need to invest some time.
 
The general solutions, either based off the ancient open-source VNC or proprietary things like GoToMyPC, also tend to get mentioned by people who want to crafting in their MMO at work.

Also this will hopefully be easier in the future since, regardless of the past and where you stand in the religious wars of Flash, it should be quite rare that people will start up new Flash products these days.
 
The Splashtop guys also made a app called "Splashtop THD" which was specifically made for gaming. I've only seen this on Android though, but what they did was add these on-screen buttons/toggles which you get on tablet games . You know, like the virtual joystick that replace AWDS movement and such (most 3D tablet games have this).

So Splashtop THD allows you to map keyboard keys to those virtual joysticks and allows you to add virtual buttons on the screen.

I managed to play something like WoW quite effectively , you add virtual keys on the left side (1-10 keys) and the virtual joystick for movement with your right thumb and voila. To type in a chat box, the usual virtual keyboard will appear etc.

So anyway, yes, there's alot of PC-Tablet things to be done to play on your tablet.
 
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