I would have thought this would be easier to get going, but I guess I missed something in my setup. Then when I close the emulator it simply gives me a numeric error. Windows Phone - it's weird, I launch the emulator and it says, 'Windows Phone OS is starting.', but it never starts. I've run out of things I can think of to fix this. I've made sure that the Windows Firewall has the port opened. And then it says the OpenGL is not reachable. There is no other virtualization option that I can find. I tried that and it says Virtualization is enabled. Android error - I installed the Xamarin Android Player and when I launch it, it tells me that Hyper-V should be enabled in the bios.
I'm able to build my app and have it compile on the networked Mac-mini and the iOS emulator works, but neither the Android nor Windows Phone emulators work. I have a brand new machine, Windows 8.1 Pro (received ) and I've installed Xamarin, Visual Studio 2013, SQL Server 2012 and some other components.