Well that certainly won't work then because the HAXM technology requires direct access to the underlying Intel hardware. Running High Sierra in a VM will prevent that as VirtualBox won't expose the right instructions. What is the reason behind this really non-standard setup?
You could try installing one of the ARM-based images via Android Studio and see if that would work instead since the ARM instruction set is emulated rather than virtualized with HAXM in the case of the x86 images.
My students for their tests have to develop (simple) App Inventor projects. The standard setup is the offline AI2Live with the Emulator running on Windows PCs in a lab. However, during this lockdown year, tests are remote so that students have to use their computers at home. During tests students are not allowed to use their smartphones, so the Companion is not an option. The Emulator runs fine on Windows 10 and on macs running Catalina and BigSur. I don't know much about HighSierra and Mojave, except for one single student unable to install it. My fear is that, when the exams will get closer, many more students will raise the same problem. Upgrading to BigSur is not an option to them, as the other app they need to use for their test is Scratch 1.4, a 32bits app. This is not an issue for students that have already upgraded to Catalina/BigSur, as they have more powerful macs where they can run a HighSierra VM I setup to them to run Scratch 1.4. I tried to install the Emulator in this VM but, as you said, it doesn't work.
My MacBook Pro (early 2013) is running High Sierra and runs the emulator package without issue. I think the key thing here is that this comes down to the HAXM support, which based on the information you sent from the iMac seemed like it should work without issue. Clearly that's not the case though. Please have them try the ARM support instead via Android Studio and see if using ARM (which needs to be emulated) provides a sufficient workaround for the lack of HAXM support.
I'll do that for sure tomorrow. I would also like to point out that when I say that, when I select "Connect > Emulator", nothing happens I mean that a folder shows up for a split moment in the dock but then it immediately closes.
Right, that's the emulator starting and then crashing before its icon is properly rendered. When you use Android Studio you need to start the emulator first otherwise App Inventor will try to start its own copy of the emulator.
I tested the installation of the ARM AVD (nexus 5, Android 6.0, Google). It worked fine on my Catalina mac. It successfully installed on the HighSierra mac of my student, but when I click the green flag to start the emulator I see for a split second its icon in the dock (see video) and then it closes immediately. Also, when I closed Visual Studio on the PC of my student, I got the following error log
It's possible that newer versions of the emulator don't work on High Sierra (that's originally why we released the 3.x branch for macOS because Apple removed APIs needed by the 2.x version). Looking at the crash log, it appears that an API called by the latest version of the Android emulator is returning an unexpected empty value, which is dereferenced causing the crash. One thing you could try with this configuration though is the following:
ls ~/.android/avd to list the AVD directory.avd)/Applications/AppInventor/from-Android-SDK/emulator/emulator @AVD_NAME where AVD_NAME is the name found in step 3, without the .avd partIf this doesn't work, please include any log information you get.
The terminal complained about ANDROID_SDK_ROOT not being set, so I set it to
export ANDROID_SDK_ROOT=/Users/emanueleilaria/Library/Android/sdk
Now, when I run
/Applications/AppInventor/from-Android-SDK/emulator/emulator @Nexus_5_API_23
I get
emulator: ERROR: can't find the emulator executable.
The "emulator" executable file is correctly in the /Applications/AppInventor/from-Android-SDK/emulator folder.
Hello, I am having this same problem. Did you ever resolve it?
Unfortunately not yet