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Winlator is becoming a great way to play PC games on your Android smartphone or tablet. However, there’s a question that keeps popping up as many people do not understand how to acquire these games. So today I want to highlight three different ways to obtain classic PC games so they can be installed within Winlator.
Note: All methods mentioned in this article are considered legal in many parts of the world. As always, please be sure to check your local laws as I am not responsible for your actions.
The goal of this article is to highlight legit sources for obtaining DRM-free PC games. These could either be completely free to download, games that you need to purchase for yourself, or games that you own that need to be patched. Either way, I am in no way recommending you go out and pirate a video game. These developers deserve to be paid for their time.
Good Old Games
The best place to download games that can be installed via Winlator is a website called Good Old Games. Also known as GOG, this is a video game store front owned and operated by CD Projekt Red. If you’re not familiar with this studio, you may know some of their popular PC titles like the Witcher and Cyberpunk 2077. Similar to how Valve started Steam in an attempt to help people download their own games (Half Life, Portal, Left 4 Dead, etc.), CD Projekt Red sells all of their games (and many more) on Good Old Games.
They do a lot more, though.
As they often work with the developers and the community to help create patches for games that will get them up and running on modern PC hardware. This is how classic PC games are able to run with ultrawide monitor support. . .and without the need of installing DOS. Every game listed on the GOG website is DRM-free. This means you can download an offline installer and play these games on any device.
I highly recommend checking out the Good Old Games website, creating an account, and looking through the titles they have for sale. The company hosts a plethora of discounts throughout the year where you can purchase some amazing games for only a buck or two.
DRM-Free Games
That’s really the key to finding games that can be installed on Winlator – DRM-Free. And while popular store fronts like Steam and Epic Games Store are mostly filled with titles that are protected with DRM, there are a number of developers who choose to not go down that route. There are some websites out there that list games on Steam that are DRM-Free while there are others that will list Epic Games Store games that are DRM-Free as well.
So, you could technically purchase games on that list, install them to your PC, and then copy the files over to your Android smartphone or tablet.
Make sure those game files are in a container that has been setup within Winlator, and run the exe file for the game like you normally would. Granted, there are some instances when this method will not work. But more often than not, the game will run like normal since it doesn’t have any DRM that has been implemented. You may just see an error or two for games that require certain dependencies (like DirectX or something).
But that can be solved by manually installing them yourself.
Patching Individual Games
The last method that I’ll mention here may or may not be legal for you to pursue. Then again, it might be perfectly fine in your country. There are some regions which have laws that allow you to play games you purchased on any device you’d like. This is where emulation shines as many publishers these days are trying to limit such a thing. However, that still doesn’t prevent them from putting DRM on the games that they have released.
So to get around there, there are programs out there that can patch a game that you have installed on your computer.
These are generally referred to as noCD patches, or no-CD software, that was originally meant to let you play a game without having the CD in your drive. These have evolved over the years and many of them now offer a way to remove the DRM that store fronts like Steam and Epic Games Store uses.
I’m not able to link to any of these since I live in a country where this is frowned upon. But a quick web search should be able to help you locate one that will work for you. Just find an option that is made for Steam or the Epic Games Store and then point it to an install directory that you have a game in. Once it has been “patched” you can then treat it like any other DRM-Free game out there.
Conclusion
As you can see, there are a number of options for you to choose from. I have been amassing a collection of games over on GOG throughout the years. It pales in comparison to my Steam library, but the prices are so cheap that I like having DRM-Free copies of my favorite games from back in the day.
You still have to worry about the compatibility issue, but YouTube is a great resource to find out if a certain game runs well on Winlator or not.
I recommend you check out this video as it can help you to figure out which settings you will want to change when trying to get a game working with Winlator. It usually just takes a few settings to get things up and running as long as the hardware is able to play said game.
