Emulate a ROM

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Is it possible to emulate an android ROM on a computer?

If you grab the SDK, you can run any version of Android in the emulator. If you want to run an actual ROM you will need to create an image of /system (as system.img) and replace that with those in the SDK folder.

thanks alot! that helped me alot
and yes, i want to run an actual ROM. what filesystem does it have to be?

was thinking about something like...
(cd PATH)
dd if=/dev/zero of=system bs=1024 count=#KB_needed
losetup /dev/loop0 system
mkfs -f FS /dev/loop0
(mkdir /mnt/system)
mount /dev/loop0 /mnt/system/
cp -a system /mnt/system/
umount /mnt/system/
losetup -d /dev/loop0

do you know any good tools for this exept for dd?

Never tried so I honestly don't know, you sound like you know a lot more than me about creating/mounting images than me, so it's probably best to use your judement. The easiest way is just to make a nadroid back backup, flash the ROM you want to test, nadroid that and grab system.img, revert to your old nandroid backup. It's tedious, and it doesn't help if you want to test a ROM before flashing, but that's the only method I've heard people use.

okay. thanks

HTC Sense UI system.img

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Does anybody know where I can download a system.img for a HTC with Sense UI (Hero for example)? I have been looking for ages with no luck.

My app is not working on a customers Hero and I am trying to find a Hero system.img to run in the emulator so I can work out why it fails on this phone.

I dont own a Hero, so am unable to extract my own system.img.

You can get HTC official ROMs here:
http://forum.xda-developers.com/showthread.php?t=559622

if you've got a windows computer you probably could extract the content of this exe file and then try to follow my previous instructions to make the system.img.

And if you don't have an unix/linux box.. You could send the content of the exe file to me, if you are able to extract the data in it. (I'm in China with a netbook atm and not able to extract the exe file with my limited tools). Then I could try to make you a system.img

I tried that, but without an HTC phone connected to the PC USB the exe wont extract.

I take that back. I found the files in my temp folder. I have extracted ROM.zip including the system.img into the avd folder, but the emulator is failing to bring it up.

could you upload that zip file here or on rapidshare? then i could have a look at it