With users across the majority of a world, the BlueStacks gamer community continually blurs the lines between mobile and PC gaming. BlueStacks is not an Android Emulator. BlueStacks is the best Android Gaming Platform on Earth and it can turn your PC into the best mobile gaming device – period.
13-inch, Late 2009 Hmm, there's a good chance that that CPU does not have enough virtualization features for the full experience:/ It has VT-x, which is the base virtualization support, but it does not have Extended Page Tables, which is needed for fast memory operations. When you don't have them, all memory access go through the entire stack of page tables from guest through to the host every time, which is super slow. I would also try to boot AVDs with their # cores setting set to 1 core (or -qemu -smp cores=1 on command line). It is a known issue that AVDs with more than one virtual CPU set will hang on boot with older CPUs like yours. FYI: The virtual iPhone that comes with Xcode is actually a simulator, not an emulator; it runs as a plain old program with code running directly on your CPU, except that iOS framework API calls are simulated in terms of macOS ones, so there is no need to run the iOS kernel or translate iPhone SoC instructions to your laptop's CPU instructions. Simulators can be faster than virtualization, but full virtual machines like the Android Emulator can be as fast with CPUs that have sufficient virtualization features (VT-x + EPT + UG), which appeared starting in the Westmere architecture (2010).