One flat 4 GiB arena
A guest address is a 32-bit offset into one arena, so fastmem works without translating pointers on every access.
ARMv7 container for arm64 Android
Old games.New silicon.
Armbat runs 32-bit ARM games on phones that dropped 32-bit support. One app, real bionic, the device GPU. No root, no second Android, no virtual disk.
CapturesSwipe to browse
Rendered on the device, not in a mockup.
Four games, four engines, one container. Every capture below comes from the repository or from a compatibility report.
The archives
Every report. Every build.
The landing page stays short. The full archive and every release have their own pages.
Under the hood6
A container, not an emulator.
Guest Java runs on the platform ART. Guest ARMv7 machine code is translated to ARM64 by a JIT built on Dynarmic. Everything below is what makes that work.
Real bionic userland
The linker, libc, libm, libdl and libstdc++ come from an official armeabi-v7a system image. Armbat boots them instead of faking libc.
SVC #0, dispatch by r7
Every Linux ARM syscall traps into the container. The kernel layer keeps guest memory, threads and sockets in order.
SVC #0 / dispatch by r7HLE only where needed
JNI, AAssetManager, EGL, GLES, liblog, ANativeWindow and OpenSLES get host trampolines. GLES is forwarded to the device driver.
Input pass-through
MotionEvent reaches the guest surface with pointer id, action index, pressure and time intact, including multitouch and rotation.
loader
ELF32 loader
Segments, DT_NEEDED, dlopen and dlsym, ARM relocations and DT_INIT_ARRAY. Guest libraries load the way the platform expects.
DT_NEEDED → R_ARM_GLOB_DAT → DT_INIT_ARRAYRequirements4
What you need before the first launch.
Armbat is small on the surface. The conditions below are not optional.
Android 12 or newer
API 31 and up on arm64-v8a. The device may have no 32-bit ABI at all.
EGL and GLES 2.0+
Rendering is forwarded to the host GPU driver, so the driver has to expose both.
armeabi-v7a APKs only
Only 32-bit ARMv7 archives are supported for now. arm64 packages are not translated.
All files access
The library, saves and OBB files live on shared storage. Without the grant the library stays empty.
Data can be placed before the first launch. OBB files go into android/obb/ inside the package folder, saves into files/ or external/files/.