There are a range of ways to test android apps and mobile websites, one of which is to install a Virtual Device onto your computer and run a fresh android installation. Though the Android SDK comes with it's own emulator we have found it can be slow to load and sometimes buggy. As a result, this week we chose to test out a great new Android emulation tool called Genymotion.We were having some issues this week getting testing android virtual machines set up on some of our Windows 8.1 environments, the solution to the problem wasn't simple to find so should you be having the same issue here is a quick outline of what we did to fix the problem:
The computer in question is running Windows 8.1 and has an older ATI Radeon 4800 series graphics card. Whe we installed Genymotion and attempted to run an installation we would get the following error "unable to initialize opengl renderer" and the application would crash.
Naturally we figured this was probably down to the graphics drivers so we visited the ATI websites, downloaded the latest Catalyst Control Centre for this card and installed it. Unfortunately this did not work, windows seemed to refuse to recognise it even when we tried to manually set the driver to be the one we had just installed.
In the end we stumbled upon a forum post where someone had a similar issue but with playing the game Minecraft.
It turns out that the solution was just to download and install a specific set of older drivers for this card. Here is a link to the download location:
Download the ATI drivers that fixed our issue
This is a very specific issue that only happens on old hardware, however hopefully writing the solution here should help at least one other person out!
