Windows May Be The Best Platform For Visual Novels, But You Can Still Play Them On Other Platforms

Visual novels have been seeing an increase in popularity in the recent years, and while they have been increasingly appearing on other systems like the Nintendo Switch & the iPad, most of them are still released on Windows, so it’s likely there’s at least one visual novel you want to play that may not be available on your favorite system. While that can’t be helped, we can still get around that, by streaming the visual novel to your device of choice.

This method still requires a Windows PC. It doesn’t have to be a powerful PC at all, as visual novels will easily run on a potato (or maybe an orange XD). To ensure things works well, I highly advice you to connect that Windows PC to your network via Ethernet for better performance.

Generally speaking, this method allows you to play visual novels on the following devices:-

• • Windows 10, 8, 7, XP
  • Windows Phone
  • Mac OS 10.7+
  • iPad
  • iPhone
  • Android devices
  • Amazon Kindle Fire

The method is roughly the same across all devices, you basically install the streamer on your target windows machine, then install the client/app on the device you want to play your visual novels on. To make things easier, l will include screenshots of multiple devices I own to help with that.

Why Should You Use This Method?

• • You use Mac OS or some other system and are satisfied with it, and only need Windows to play visual novels.
  • No need to wait for your favorite visual novel to come out on your device of choice.
  • While you could do a similar thing using Steam Link, it doesn’t support the same amount of operating systems. The method here is more straightforward for our purpose:- playing visual novels on any device. Having more options to do the same thing is always welcome.
  • Playing visual novels that way takes much less resources compared to running a Windows virtual machine, and while still using your favorite computer.
  • Allows you to play any visual novels on all sorts of devices, including tablets like the iPad.
  • Streaming visual novels on a tablet like the iPad or ChromeBook can be more convenient, as these devices can be taken anywhere around home, and have much better battery life than most laptops.
  • It’s completely free.
  • Unlike regular games, where latency could be an issue. Visual novels, for the most part, only shows a bunch of text or pictures, and don’t require much responsive controls, so having some latency won’t be a big issue (it was fairly responsive for me most of the time).

The only times when this method is bad is if you have a bad local network, or you want to play visual novels outside your home. For the latter case, I plan to write another post about various flexible methods to get around that.

First, Create A Splashtop Account

As a first step, you need to create a free account, you will use this account to log to both the target & client machine.

Click here to create your account

Install Splashtop Streamer On Your Windows Machine

Now, we need to prepare your windows machine to be used remotely. For that, you need to download Splashtop Streamer from here. Make sure to download the personal version, as we don’t need the other versions here.

Install the streamer like you do with any program. Then run it. In the Status Tab, enter the e-mail & password of the account you registered in the previous step in the login form, then click “log in” (You may need to verify your E-Mail before you are able to log in successfully):-

Once you log in successfully, the streamer will look like this:-

Now we have the Splashtop Streamer up and running.

Installing Splashtop Client On Your Favorite Device

Now, on the device you plan to play your visual novels on, you need to install the client for the streamer. First. download the client for your device of choice from the following links:-

• • Windows 10, 8, 7, XP
  • Windows Phone
  • Mac OS 10.7+
  • iPad
  • iPhone
  • Android
  • Amazon Kindle Fire

Run the app once you download & install it. you will greeted with another log in form, enter the account username and password then click on “Log In”. Again, you may need to verify your E-Mail address the first time you log in:-

If things went right, you will find it in the list of computers with streamers installed:-

Double click on the target machine and Splashtop will connect to it.

Why Splashtop? Aren’t There Other Apps?

For years to end, I always used the standard remote Desktop to remotely control my Windows machines, and RealVNC to connect to Mac OS machines. I had to look for alternatives when I wanted to do similar things on the iPad, and Splashtop happened to work the best for me. It doesn’t require much configuration, so it seemed to be the best solution to suggest in this post. If you’re tech-savvy, you will be able to do the same thing in many other ways. I am not saying my method is the best for everyone. o(≧▽≦)o

And Finally

I find it quite fun to use a device like the iPad in a way that wasn’t intended for. While I don’t think I will use solutions like that to work remotely, as the occasional latency can get in the way. For viewing things like visual novels, or running simple applications, this method works very great. I hope this method helped you read a lot of visual novels, and maybe do other cool things.

See Also:-

• • Lolita Caramel (visual novel skits)