Android Question AVDManager, Intel HAXM, Virtualization (1st day with B4A)

[wengang1]

Hi all.
I've been at this for about a day now.
Bought B4A last night and did all the installs.

So first off, I am on my laptop. It has an AMD A6 cpu. I have a VirtualBox set up on this machine, with several virtual machines (DOS, Win95, Win98), so I think that means I can do virtualization with this computer.

When I first got everything set up, I ran the SDK manager and installed all recommended.
From there, I was able to launch AVD manager, where I had essentially four choices of Android devices I could set up. I successfully set up a phone and a tablet. But I could not open them. It was just one error message after another. I worked through most of the errors, but eventually got to the point where it said visualization was not set up on my computer (or sth like that). I tried to manually run the Intel HAXM exe and it said that either my computer did not support it or Hyper-V was using it exclusively. After much Googling, I attempted to locate this in my BIOS and turn it on, but the BIOS is InsydeH20, and it simply does not have that setting. I ran MSINFO and saw that Hyper-V virtualization was not enabled. I also saw people had conflicts with Avast, but I don't use Avast.

After messing around since last night, and after a few restarts, I now can get the SDK manager to open, but when I try to launch the AVD manager, it appears after a few seconds, I see that little intersecting orange rings thing moving for a few seconds, and then it totally stops and appears to freeze. If I try to click anywhere, I immediately get "Not Responding" on the AVD manager. It never comes back to life from that point. When I click to close the AVD manager, i get an error "Java Platform SE binary is not responding". I opened task manager and saw that the Java Platform is using more RAM than anything I've ever installed on this laptop. I don't know what I did to make this start happening, but I guess my bigger concern is overcoming the HAXM issue so I can start writing the next Candy Crush game.

Any help is greatly appreciated.
Thanks.

 

[Peter Simpson]

The new AVD manager does not work with AMD processors, so there's no need for Intel HAXM as that's for Intel processors only.

You should I sign up for and use Genymotion instead, if a free Android emulator and it's seriously fast too. Better still, do what most of us do on on this forum and use B4A-Bridge and a real Android device instead.

 

[wengang1]

I have a Galaxy S8, and I was thinking I could get around all this if I just used the B4A Bridge but I guess it just felt like going down a wrong road running away from the first adversity in a new system. So you're saying most people work right on their own phones?

 

[mangojack]

So you're saying most people work right on their own phones?

Correct .. or at least a spare cheapy. Personally I use my S4 and 10" tablet pared with B4A Bridge .. I find this to be the fastest and best method.

 

[Peter Simpson]

So you're saying most people work right on their own phones?

Yes, most developers on this forum use a real device as it's quicker than an all the emulators out there. There are things that just don't work on an emulator correctly either, or at least are difficult to get working on an emulator, where on a real device you will not have that problem.

 

[wengang1]

As it happens, I also have an old S4 and an old S6. Since I'm new to this, I'm wondering if writing for one of the older phones will result in apps that don't do well on newer or larger devices. I don't have any kind of tablet to run on. I bought the book B4A Rapid Android App Development Using Basic, and I'll be getting into that soon, but generally speaking, do you have to give a lot of consideration to the spectrum of devices that will run the app when you code, or does this environment have ways of making appearance and performance universal?

 

[Erel]

Once you learn how to work with the designer, this means using anchors and designer script correctly, it is not too difficult to create apps that adapt to all screen sizes. Performance in most cases is not an issue.

I recommend to use a device running Android 7 or 8 during development. There are restrictions that you can only test with newer versions of Android.