UFO: Enemy Unknown on Android

Watching the video for the most recent and promising remake of UFO: Enemy Unknown I decided to see if you can get the game running on Android.

Turns out it is pretty easy.

Emulator

I have tried two emulators for this now:

• aDosBox Free and works well enough. Performance is not great and the app crashes when you lock the screen which means you can't pause play to do anything else. There is a niggle with the mouse in that the game locks up until you move the mouse sometimes.
• DosBox Turbo £2.49 and is excellent. The performance is flawless and the mouse trackpad is arguably better than aDosBox (which I thought was pretty good already). The screen can be locked and the game resumed later when you're ready. Worth the money.

Get the game

Find a copy of the DOS version of UFO maybe?

Unzip it to your SDCard. e.g. /sdcard/games/UFO

DosBox conf

aDosBox

If you are using aDosBox, then edit the DosBox configuration file _/mnt/sdcard/app-data/org.hystudio.android.dosbox/.dosbox/dosbox-0.74.conf_ and changing the end of the config file to the following:

• mount c: /sdcard/games/UFO
• c:
• UFO

DosBox Turbo

If you are using DosBox Turbo you can find the Autoexec configuration in the DosBox Manager App. Create a configuration for the game, then long press and select Edit Config. DosBox Settings -> Autoexec. This will give you a text field to enter your autoexec config into.

For more details see the authors website

I would also recommend use the Absolute Touchscreen Mouse. After a little practice I found this to be much quicker than relative mode.

Play

There you go, DosBox will start and load XCOM automatically.

The keyboard and mouse interface works nicely, again not as responsive as a real mouse and keyboard but enough to play.

Dropbox Sync

Finally I went one stage further and used Dropbox synchronisation to ensure that I had my saved game regardless of the system I played on. In particular an app called DropSync is perfect for this job.