Bannerlator 3.1.9-pre1

Bannerlator 3.1.9-pre1

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

      

3.1.9-pre1 is a test build of everything since 3.1.8: a new file manager with a text editor for config files and logs, many more archive formats to unpack or open like folders, the XMB interface style, a per-game mod manager for REFramework and Special K, the Mali GPU support from the 3.1.8-mali-pre1 test build, and Epic and Ubisoft fixes.

• File manager: a Home page of tiles, a clickable path, two panes in landscape, archives that open like folders, compress, share and properties.
• Text editor: view, edit and save .ini, .cfg, .txt and .log files, keeping their encoding and line endings.
• More formats: lzip, lzop, LZ4, ECM, ALZ, EGG, ACE, LZX, Android OTA files and FreeArc repacks with extra layers.
• XMB style (by MGamer404): a console menu with an on-screen keyboard made for controllers, also inside games.
• Mods: REFramework and Special K per game, a program that starts with the game, and switching a mod off removes its files.

✅ Nothing to set up. Update the app; containers keep everything. Each container unpacks its extra libraries once more on its first start after the update (a few seconds).

⬇️ Small update. With Include pre-releases (beta builds) switched on in Settings, the in-app updater downloads about 65 MB on 3.1.8 and about 37 MB on the 3.1.8 Mali test build, instead of the whole app (about 589 MB). Older versions, first installs and this page give the full APK.

⚠️ A test build. The file manager, the text editor, the new unpack formats, the XMB style and the Mali changes were not tried on a device before this pre-release. Please report what misbehaves, with a screenshot.

What's New — everything since 3.1.8

🗂️ A new file manager

The File Manager is rebuilt, in the look of BFE (Banners File Explorer). It is the same screen under the File Manager tab, Deck's Tools › Files, the Log Manager's folder view, and every "choose a file / folder" screen in the app.

• Home: tiles for internal storage and SD cards (used / total), Downloads, Pictures, Documents, Games, each container's C: drive, the system drive (Z:) and your Favorites.
• Getting around: tap any part of the path to jump there; Back, Up and Home on the toolbar; list, compact or grid; folders and files each keep their own sort order (names with numbers sort in number order); search the folder, or every folder below it; hidden files on or off.
• Select with a long press, then copy, cut, move, compress (zip or 7z), share, rename or delete. Copying shows its progress, can be cancelled, and asks what to do when a name already exists.
• Two panes side by side in landscape (⋮ › Two panes), with Copy over and Move over.
• Archives open like folders (zip, 7z, rar, tar, iso and the other formats 7-Zip lists): open a file inside, or take out only what you select, next to the archive, into a new folder, into the other pane or anywhere. Password-protected archives ask for the password.
• Each file's ⋮ menu keeps Run (in a container), Add to Games, Fast Extract and Unpack, and adds Open as text, Open with, Compress, Share, Copy path and Properties (with the Windows Read-only and Hidden flags).
• Controller: X on a row opens its menu and Select ticks it; in the Deck and XMB styles X is the toolbar menu and Y is search.

⚠️ Not tried on a device yet. It compiles and installs; the screens have not been gone through on a phone.

📝 Text viewer and editor

• .ini, .cfg, .txt, .log, .json, .xml, .reg and other text files open in a viewer that stays smooth with big logs: find, line numbers, wrapping and text size.
• Edit (the pencil) for files up to 4 MB: undo and redo, a row of symbol keys above the keyboard, and colours for ini, cfg, json, xml and scripts.
• Save keeps the file as it was written: UTF-8 or UTF-16 (many Windows .ini files are UTF-16), its byte-order mark and its Windows or Linux line endings.
• A file inside an archive opens read-only.

⚠️ Not tried on a device yet. The viewer and editor come from BFE.

📦 More formats to unpack

• New formats: lzip, lzop, LZ4, ECM CD images, ALZ and EGG (Korean archives), ACE, Amiga LZX, and Android OTA payload.bin (choose the partitions). The 7-Zip formats Bannerlator didn't offer before (msi, arj, lzh, chm, deb, rpm, apk, vmdk, vdi, qcow, squashfs and more) work too.
• FreeArc repacks with extra layers: the Unpack screen reads the archive's layers before it starts and decodes the precomp ones itself. A layer it can't decode is named, and running the installer in a container is still offered.
• Unpack and delete as it goes (a switch on the Unpack screen, off by default): for a download too big to keep next to what it unpacks.

⚠️ Not tried on a device in this build. These are BFE's engines; they add about 16 MB of tools to the app.

🎮 XMB interface style

By community contributor MGamer404 (#638).

• Settings › Appearance › Interface Style now offers Classic, Deck and XMB: a console menu with a full-screen home, your games in a row and the tabs floating over every page (L1/R1 change tab).
• An All Games page (grid, list or big art, with sorting), the 6 most recent games on the home row, your own covers, and a store icon on each cover.
• An on-screen keyboard made for controllers (and touch) for every text field, which also types inside games (the keyboard button, or Select + X).
• A soft glow and frosted cards in the theme colour.
• Classic and Deck are unchanged.

⚠️ Not tried on our test devices yet.

🛒 Epic and Ubisoft

By MGamer404.

• Epic: downloads no longer stop with "Download failed" (#657).
• Ubisoft games from Steam and Epic: when the container has no Ubisoft Connect yet, Bannerlator offers to set it up before the game starts, downloading its installer when needed (#658).

⚠️ Not tried on our test devices yet.

🧩 Mods per game

• A game's settings have a Mods section: REFramework (for RE Engine games) and Special K, downloaded from Bannerlator's own ARM64EC builds, plus Start with the game for a program such as a trainer or Cheat Engine.
• The in-game drawer has a Mods tab with a card per mod (its build, its DLL, 32/64-bit and a button for its menu). REFramework's menu also opens with L3 + R3.
• Switching a mod off removes its files from the game folder right away (Special K's logs too; its .ini settings stay), so the game starts as if it was never there.

✅ Device-tested on the Pocket FIT: Special K on Ninja Gaiden Sigma (switched off: its files gone and the .ini kept; switched on again: back in place, 60 fps). REFramework and Special K together ran in Resident Evil 2 during development; not re-run on this build.

🟠 Mali GPUs

Everything from the 3.1.8-mali-pre1 test build, now in the regular app, plus a fix for its crash:

• PanVK driver downloads on Mali: PanVK-kbase by zenithblue-oss (made for Bannerlator), FristOneRR's PanVK and GunaCharanTeja's PanVK G615.
• Faster BCn layer (Fcharan's build of leegao's BCn layer), a checkbox in the container's graphics driver settings on Mali. New: with the default wrapper it crashed the container (#642 and testers' reports), so Bannerlator now uses the GameNative wrapper for that launch, as WinlatorMali does.
• A newer DX12 compat layer (leegao) for "Wrapper + compat + bcn".
• GPU % and clock in the HUD on the newer Mali GPUs (G310 to G925 and Immortalis) from the GPU's own counters, plus MediaTek and Tensor fallbacks.
• The X11 renderer uses a high-priority queue and a valid buffer format on Mali.
• Community configs show how many Mali devices tried a config.

⚠️ No Mali device here: none of this was tried on a Mali phone by us.

🖥️ HUD, cursor and drivers

• GPU load and clock in the HUD without root on Adreno phones where Android blocks the GPU files.
• Auto-hide Cursor switch and Hide After (ms) in the drawer's Controls › Mouse; with it off, a game can't hide the pointer either. A finger always brings the pointer back (Wayland).
• Driver cards in Contents › Download Components say which Adreno GPUs each driver is for, read from its name; no label when the name doesn't say.
• MIO: Memories in Orbit and UNCHARTED: Legacy of Thieves Collection get Turnip's SSBO emulation by themselves (they need it on Adreno 7xx).

✅ Device-tested: the HUD reader on the Retroid Pocket Duo (Adreno 722); the cursor switch on the Pocket FIT Elite; MIO on the Pocket FIT (Adreno 750). The driver labels and the automatic Uncharted setting were not checked on screen (Uncharted runs with the same setting made by hand).

🔧 Smaller

• FEX presets Unreal Engine 3 and Performance (full x87), from WinlatorMali, at the end of the preset list.
• The registry editor no longer crashes when a key can't be written.

⚠️ Carried over — still open

• GOG: the download progress bar and the sign-in check were not tried on a device in this release. There is no d3dx10 component yet, so a game that needs it still has to use GOG's DirectX installer.
• Xbox: Forza Horizon 5 does not start (its anti-tamper closes the game after the splash). The download notification updates too often (Android drops some updates). Some games need a long first launch while cloud saves download. Valor Mortis was not played past its shader compilation. DOOM Eternal stays on Bethesda's notice screen.
• Xbox Cloud Gaming: touch controls have not been tried; the native player is experimental. The Win-FG fix has not been re-tested in a Wine game.
• Steam (MGamer404's changes): switching between two saved accounts and a Goldberg Cold Client shortcut have not been device-tested yet.
• Download Manager: uninstalling a Steam game from its game page, or moving it, leaves its row in the library list until the list refreshes.
• Logs: Epic, GOG and Amazon user names are hidden by pattern only (the Steam and Xbox stores register theirs).
• Chinese / Japanese / Korean text: not yet tested with a game.
• Wine Mono: a .NET program has not been run on a Mono installed this way yet. Mono's setup steps that need its own code (Wine's placeholder .NET files) can't run outside the container.
• v16 layers: only DroidDeck-Proton 11.0-11.1 arm64ec was launched on the device.
• Deck style: broadly reworked — please report anything that looks or navigates wrong, with a screenshot.
• BANNERIN: if a controller misbehaves in a game, please report it with the game and the controller type. On Wine 9.5 and other older Wine builds, Game Controllers' DInput tab can't play effects (that Wine's control panel; games are not affected).
• Windows components: Steam games you added yourself but don't own can't be looked up on Steam yet; GOG and Epic games installed before 3.1.7 have no saved dependency list.
• Everything listed as open in 3.1.6 is unchanged.

📦 Where to get Proton 9 (tap to expand)

The APK does not bundle Proton 9 — Wine installs from the in-app catalog on first run. The Linux Steam client does not use these layers at all: its games run through Valve's own ARM64 Proton.

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.)

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🙏 Credits (tap to expand)

3.1.9-pre1: the XMB style and controller keyboard (#638), the Epic download fix (#657) and the Ubisoft Connect setup (#658) are by community contributor MGamer404 — thank you. The file manager, the text viewer and editor and the unpack engines come from BFE (Banners File Explorer, GPL-3.0). Its tools are by Bulat Ziganshin (FreeArc unarc), Christian Schneider (precomp, with preflate by Dirk Steinke and packJPG / packMP3 by Matthias Stirner), Antonio Diaz Diaz (lunzip), Markus F.X.J. Oberhumer (lzop, LZO), Yann Collet (LZ4), Neill Corlett and alucryd (ecm-tools), kippler (unalz, xunazo), Marcel Lemke (UNACE), Gareth Davidson (amiga-lzx) and Lasse Collin (XZ for Java); the EGG reader follows Andrew Kolman's EggDotNet, and the OTA reader AOSP's update_engine format (licences in THIRD-PARTY-LICENSES.md). The Mali work is GunaCharanTeja (Fcharan)'s WinlatorMali (MIT: the BCn layer build, the GPU counter reader, the FEX presets, the registry fix and the Mali count), on leegao's bcn_layer and compat_layer (MIT), with PanVK by zenithblue-oss and FristOneRR. Thanks to Lloyd and Norman (BannerHub Discord) and xdbz08 (#642) for the Faster BCn crash reports. The mod manager downloads Bannerlator's ARM64EC builds of REFramework by praydog (MIT) and Special K by Andon M. Coleman (Kaldaien) and the SpecialKO contributors (GPL-3.0).

3.1.8: the GOG sign-in fix follows DroidDeck #1500 by Diego Ramos (diegodru); the Xbox ticket fix is devSharaku's DroidDeck #1729, on Xodus Nexus 0.2.12 by Dominik Svoboda (domsvoboda). The prerequisites map GOG's dependency list to Windows components; those are Microsoft's redistributables (Visual C++, DirectX, .NET, XNA), NVIDIA PhysX and OpenAL Soft. The v16 layers re-apply Valve's Avoid delay importing rpcrt4 by Billy Laws (credits in the layer release). The Visual C++ / MFC fixes came from a DOOM (2016) crash on a Galaxy Fold.

The Xbox store runs on Xodus (GPL-3.0, Rust) by Paweł Lidwin (imLinguin), Vidi0, ChristopherHX and the Xodus contributors, built for Android here, and on Xodus Nexus by Dominik Svoboda (domsvoboda) (MIT; its Wine modules LGPL-2.1) for the Xbox runtime, sign-in, saves and the launch view. The Android build recipe and launch flow follow DroidDeck's Xbox work by Kurt Himebauch (xXJSONDeruloXx) (DroidDeck #1156, #1164, #1170). The container-launch approach comes from MGamer404's xbox-container fork (PR #623), and the ARM64 Visual C++ runtime for arm64ec containers is his too (#627, winlator-contents #28).

Xbox Cloud Gaming: the player's WebRTC client and stream protocol are Greenlight by UnknownSKL (Jim Kroon) (MIT), and the cloud-gaming sign-in follows his xal-node; the H.264 preference, bitrate cap, sharpening, Stop quality drops and the cloud title lists follow Better xCloud by redphx (MIT). The native player uses Google's WebRTC library (BSD, the webrtc-sdk Android build). The colour, deband, FXAA, Toon, CRT and NTSC effects are Bannerlator's own.

The Steam changes in #613–#617 are by community contributor MGamer404 — thank you.

BANNERIN (controller transport, force-feedback engine and the BANNERIN XInput DLLs) is original work written for Bannerlator. The evdev layer it plugs into comes from Winlator by brunodev85; Direct XInput's forward mode uses Wine's own XInput, and Wine's SDL bus and DirectInput carry the controller and its force feedback. The XInput DLLs are built with llvm-mingw (Martin Storsjö) and checked under Hangover and FEX-Emu.

The component recommendations and the revert-on-remove model follow DroidDeck's Windows components. Wine Mono is by Esme (madewokherd) and the Wine Mono contributors. Sora and Nunito Sans (SIL Open Font License) are the Deck style's typefaces.

The v15 layers carry fixes from GameNative's proton-wine (per patch, credited in the layer release); DroidDeck-Proton 11.0-11.1 is the Android build of DroidDeck-Proton on Valve's Wine with GloriousEggroll's GE-Proton and CachyOS fixes. The Chinese / Japanese / Korean text fix came from xxydbc's report in the BannerHub Discord.

The Wayland adapter is built on Pipetto-crypto's bionic Vulkan wrapper; the frame-pacing work came from reports and logs by Hot_Ice (Adreno 7c+ Gen 3) and Vermillion (Adreno 830). DirectAudio (winedirectaudio, AAudio) is The412Banner's.

Everything credited in 3.1.6 still applies: Headless Steam and the Steam bridge, the SSBS fix (Wine MR 12262 by Jacek Caban, found by Sonicadvance1), the Mali PanVK work (FristOneRR), winhandler.exe (Winlator by brunodev85), the cutscene fixes (NelloKudo, GloriousEggroll, Valve, GameNative, Wine), Proton-CachyOS (CachyOS, Proton-EM), box64 (ptitSeb), FEX-Emu, DXVK, VKD3D-Proton, Wine, Proton / GE-Proton, SDL, SteamKit2 and Wayland.

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Entirely app-side — no ImageFS reinstall. Install over 3.1.8; everything carries over.