Alternatives to android default emulator
You can speed up emulator by using hardware acceleration feature.
In order to make the Android emulator run faster and be more responsive, you can configure it to take advantage of hardware acceleration, using a combination of configuration options, specific Android system images and hardware drivers.
To use Virtual Machine Acceleration you need,
- x86 AVD
- processor which supports virtualization extensions
- Android SDK Tools, Revision 17 or higher
and to configure graphics acceleration, you need
- graphics processing unit (GPU)
- Android SDK Tools, Revision 17 or higher
- Android SDK Platform API 15, Revision 3 or higher
See the android documentation - Using Hardware Acceleration - for instructions on how to configure your system.
UPDATE:
Genymotion is great, since BlueStack App Player now forces you to install some apps to continue using free version. I tried Genymotion and quite happy with speed for App development, haven't tried gaming yet. Happy coding :)
You can make the booting of emulator fast using option Emulator snapshots You can also use Genymotion emulator that is much faster than android