The guys at NullWire have put together a nice and neat way to get the Cupcake branch of Android running on your personal copy of the Android Emulator.  But before you can do that, you need to download and install the Android SDK.

[Step 1] Download the SDK from here and install it.  Once you have it installed, which is pretty painless, you can then [Step 2] download the Cupcake image files ZIP for the emulator.  Make a note of where you install the SDK (ie. “C:\android-sdk\”).

[Step 3] Backup your <sdk-directory>/tools/lib/images directory first, then [Step 4] extract the 3 files in the Cupcake ZIP file to that same directory (they will overwrite 3 of the existing files).

[Step 5] Then start the emulator by running <sdk-directory>/tools/emulator.exe from a command prompt or from Windows Explorer and wait for Android to boot.  You can see that part for yourself in the video, below.

That’s it.  In a few seconds you will have a virtual copy of Cupcake running so that you test out how the virtual keyboard and other new features work.