Microsoft's 365 Developer Day has ended up giving us the Windows 10X emulator. Designed for dual-screen devices, Windows 10X will be powering devices like Microsoft's Surface Neo.
The company has today launched an emulator for Windows 10X and Surface Neo to give developers an early experience of how the operating system would work on the Surface Neo to design their apps for dual-screen devices scheduled to be released in holiday 2020.
How to run Microsoft's Windows 10X Emulator
- Sign up as Windows Insider (if you aren't already an Insider).
- From a Windows 10 device running the latest Windows Insider build, download and install the latest Visual Studio 2019 Preview and the Windows 10 SDK Insider Preview.
- Next, install the Microsoft Emulator and the Windows 10X Emulator Image from the Microsoft Store.
To be able to run the emulator, your system needs to meet the following requirements:
- 64-bit Windows 10 Pro, Enterprise, or Education
- Windows Insider Preview build 10.0.19555 or later
- Intel CPU with at least 4 cores you can dedicate to emulator (or multiple CPUs with a total of 4 cores)
- 8 GB of RAM or more, 4 GB of RAM for emulator
- 15 GB of free disk space for vhdx + diff disk, SSD recommended
- Dedicated video card recommended (DirectX 11.0 or later | WDDM 2.4 graphics driver or later)
- In the BIOS, the following features must be supported and enabled:
- Hardware-assisted virtualization
- Second Level Address Translation (SLAT)
- Hardware-based Data Execution Prevention (DEP)
- Enabled Hyper-V feature Control Panel > Programs > Programs and Features > Turn Windows Features on or off > "Hyper-V" should be selected for the Emulator installation to be successful.
Microsoft says that AMD processors are not supported at this time. "Nested virtualization is required to run Windows 10X in the emulator and Windows does not yet support this on AMD processors," the company added.
Once you have made sure to meet all the requirements and have downloaded and installed everything, you can use this document to see how to use Microsoft Emulator to test your apps.