Bannerlator 2.9.6

   

Bannerlator 2.9.6

Run Windows apps and games on Android — no PC and no root required.

2.9.6 is a feature-and-fixes release over 2.9.5, headlined by a rebuilt in-game Task Manager (per-process CPU affinity + live telemetry), a new D7VK wrapper that runs old DirectX 7 / DirectDraw games on Vulkan, a container-editor layout that stops wasting portrait space, and games that no longer get killed when you switch away. Everything from 2.9.5 is included. As always it's entirely app-side — no ImageFS reinstall — your containers, themes, custom accent and per-game settings carry over untouched. Install straight over 2.9.5.

🧰 In-game Task Manager — now a real control panel

The in-game Task Manager grew from a plain process list into a proper control panel:

• Per-process Processor Affinity — a Windows-style "Set affinity" on any running process's ⋮ menu. Pin a process to specific CPU cores live, mid-game, exactly like Windows Task Manager. The core toggles match the container/game core-picker (bordered tiles in one shaded panel), and it applies instantly via the guest's real affinity path — no relaunch.
• A live telemetry header — CPU & GPU usage and temperatures, GPU clock, FPS (+ minimum), RAM, swap, and battery (level / watts / temperature / charging), laid out as a clean stat-tile grid, plus a per-core clock strip (full MHz). The readings use the same cross-vendor sensors as the performance HUD.
• A container panel — a collapsible summary of the running container's Wine/Proton, DX wrapper, renderer, graphics driver, resolution and device.

ℹ️ Which readings are available varies from device to device. Several values (GPU load / clock, the temperatures, and battery watts) depend on the sensors your manufacturer chooses to expose — on some hardware a few of these are locked down and will simply read "—". That's a device/vendor constraint, not a bug.

🎮 D7VK — DirectX 7 / DirectDraw games on Vulkan

Old DirectDraw / Direct3D 3–7 titles historically took a slow OpenGL path. D7VK (WinterSnowfall's Vulkan implementation, a DXVK cousin) runs them straight through Vulkan instead:

• New D7VK option in the DDraw Wrapper picker — available per-container and per-game.
• Ships bundled and offline-ready as the default, and is now catalog-backed: select D7VK and a "D7VK Version" dropdown + download button appears, letting you pull bleeding-edge nightly d7vk builds straight from the catalog and switch between them.
• Entirely app-side — the wrapper drops into the container at launch, no ImageFS reinstall, and existing containers can use it immediately.

🧭 Container editor — tabs back on top in portrait

The landscape rail was great in landscape but cramped in portrait. Now the editor adapts to the orientation:

• Portrait — the tabs (General / Environment / Drives / Win Components / Advanced) sit in a single icon bar across the top, spread evenly across the full width, with the ? help (and Reset on the defaults screen) tucked at the end of that row. Content gets the full width underneath, and the wasted band at the top is gone.
• Landscape — unchanged: the collapsible left rail you already know.
• Applies to all three container screens — New Container, Edit Container, and New Container Defaults.

🛡️ Backgrounded games stay alive

Switching to another app (or getting a call) mid-game used to let Android quietly kill the container. 2.9.6 runs the game session as a real foreground service with a persistent notification, so a backgrounded game or container keeps running instead of being evicted. Come back and it's still there.

🎛️ Deeper graphics tuning (Turnip)

• GMEM control (Auto / On / Off) for Adreno (710 / 720 / 722) — force tiled rendering on or off, per-container and per-game.
• Advanced TU_DEBUG tokens (concurrent-binning force/off, deck-emu, and more) for squeezing out compatibility and performance on tricky titles.
• Every option carries a "?" explanation and a glossary entry so you know what it actually does before you flip it.

📟 Performance HUD — wider device support + honest API labels

• Cross-vendor metrics — the HUD now reads GPU load / clock and charging state on MediaTek (GED) and other non-Adreno devices, not just Adreno.
• App-declared graphics API — apps that report their active API (e.g. the bundled AIO Graphics Test's per-backend tests) now show the correct API in the HUD instead of a best guess.

❓ "?" help everywhere + glossary

Per-option "?" help buttons now cover every technical setting across the container editor, the per-game shortcut editor, and the Turnip / Wrapper driver config — each backed by a plain-language glossary ("What is all this?"). No more guessing what a toggle does.

📦 Bundled in every container

New and existing containers pick these up automatically (no reinstall):

• AIO Graphics Test 2.0.1 (repo) — a single-window multi-API graphics test / benchmark with an automatic OpenGL fallback for Mali / broken-DXVK setups (a separate "AIO Graphics Test (OpenGL)" Start-menu entry is there as a safety net).
• Banner File Manager 1.2.0 (repo) — faster on large folders, with version metadata.
• Pale Moon — a lightweight browser, launchable from the container Start Menu.

🌐 Container networking fix

Containers now get a usable IPv4 DNS resolver, fixing games and launchers that couldn't resolve hostnames.

🐛 Fixes

• New containers show up immediately in the Games "add a game" container picker — no more launching or restarting the app first to make a just-created container appear.
• Pale Moon no longer clutters the container desktop or the Games tab — it lives in the Start Menu only.
• Assorted stability and UI polish.

➕ Everything from 2.9.5, carried forward

All of 2.9.5 is included — Unpack Archive (ISO/RAR/7z/GOG-installer/native FreeArc repack extraction right in the File Manager), the landscape UI overhaul (collapsible rails + App Orientation), frame-generation present modes (auto-mailbox during FG, live Present Mode selector, bionic-fg re-enabled), and the GL/Zink perf-HUD FPS fix.

🔜 Coming soon

Already scoped and on the way in an upcoming update:

• Controller hot-plug & reconnection — controllers that drop mid-game (Bluetooth sleep/wake, a knocked-loose cable, a flaky dongle) will reconnect cleanly on their own instead of going dead until you relaunch the game. This targets the reported controller disconnect / drop issues (#221).
• More D7VK nightlies — bleeding-edge d7vk builds keep landing in the in-app catalog as upstream evolves.

📦 Where to get Proton 9

The APK does not bundle Proton 9 — Wine installs from the in-app catalog on first run.

⚠️ A fresh install ships with no Wine at all. On first run, open Containers → the download icon and install a Proton before creating a container. Updating from 2.9.5 changes nothing — your existing containers and Wine installs are untouched.

Proton 9.0 arm64ec — not bundled, download it if you want it:

https://github.com/The412Banner/Nightlies/releases/download/Proton/wine/proton-9.0-arm64ec.wcp

66.7 MB · sha256 f8a99fed387f1b097009129dc49368c8f500927640a9d4c7a192d850b1b2068c
Install it via Containers → download icon → install the .wcp. It also appears in the in-app catalog. (Compiled as a wcp by Xnick417x.)

Proton 9.0 x86-64 — for x86-64 containers, not bundled:

https://github.com/StevenMXZ/Winlator-Contents/releases/download/1.0/Proton.9.0-x86_64.wcp

50.7 MB · sha256 ec90286b2b266aaa9dd4c5265383a48f05ccc96890d078cb3529e78b89cba2ea
Install it the same way via Containers → download icon → install the .wcp. (Provided by StevenMXZ — Winlator-Contents.)

 

🙏 Credits

• WinterSnowfall — d7vk — the Vulkan implementation of D3D3–7 that powers the new D7VK wrapper.
• GameNative — the frame-generation groundwork and present-pacing lineage Bannerlator's FG rides on.
• isygold — Vegas DXVK, the community DXVK builds so much of our performance rides on.
• Xnick417x — the working Proton 9.0 arm64ec .wcp linked above.
• StevenMXZ — the Proton 9.0 x86-64 .wcp linked above.
• Everyone filing Mali reports and issues with logs attached — the Mali BCn path and cross-vendor HUD were both proven out on real hardware.
• And everyone reporting, testing build after build, and adding games and configs to BannerHub & Bannerlator. ❤️

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ℹ️ Root is only needed for the root-gated performance tier (governor / CPU-clock / thermal / fan). Everything else — including non-root GPU max-clock on Adreno — needs no root. The root tier stays opt-in, gated behind an explicit "use at your own risk" agreement, and every change auto-reverts when you leave the game.

Entirely app-side — no ImageFS reinstall. Install over 2.9.5; everything carries over.