Every pressure-capable button was fully digital. _rpcsx_overlayPadData ended with btn.m_value = m_pressed ? 255 : 0, and that value is what cellPad copies into the press byte a game reads for an analog button, so no half-press could ever reach one. Rpcs3Bridge.setPadButton threw the magnitude away before that, using `range` only for stick directions and calling applyButton -- pressed or not -- for everything else. Two features were silently dead as a result. A physical L2/R2 went 0 to 100 like a digital button, reported on Iron Man, whose level-two hover tutorial cannot be passed without a half-press; the trigger axis was read and scaled correctly all the way to the JNI boundary and discarded there, which is why remapping and recalibrating changed nothing. The touch overlay's pressure modifier had the same end: it computes a range through pressureRangeFor and hands it to the same call. Pressure now travels as its own export rather than widening overlayPadData, whose signature is frozen -- the core is dlopen()ed and updated independently of the JNI glue, so a wider existing export would have older glue passing a garbage argument. Glue or core predating _rpcsx_overlayPadPressure keeps the old digital behaviour. 0 means "nothing analog drives this button", which is a safe sentinel rather than a lost level: an unpressed button already reports 0, so a pressed button at 0 cannot occur, and the zero-initialised array is exactly the previous behaviour. Pushed only when it changes, so an all-digital pad adds no JNI call per event. All twelve buttons the PS3 pad reports pressure for, not just the triggers, since the offsets are contiguous and cellPad already routes each one. sendTrigger also floors to at least 1: the lightest real squeeze truncated to 0, which is the input layer's "full press" convention and would have delivered the opposite of a half-press.
ARMSX3
Proof of concept Android port of RPCS3.
Uses the latest RPCS3 upstream code (the recent ARM64 improvements included).
Status
From my testing, I only tried Skate 3. It boots, loads and reaches gameplay at roughly 20 to 30 fps on a Snapdragon 8 Gen 2. Rendering, audio, touch controls and physical controllers work. Almost nothing else has been tested. So the main stop gap at the moment is performance/speed.
Differences from upstream RPCS3
Some of the fixes here are not in upstream and affect any ARM64 build, not only Android:
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Shaders declared runtime sized arrays inside uniform blocks, which requires VK_EXT_shader_uniform_buffer_unsized_array. Adreno does not support that extension, so every game pipeline failed to compile and nothing rendered. Concrete array bounds are emitted when the extension is missing.
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The ARM64 SPU block verification checksum folded two thirds of every block through an absolute difference. That collides on the near identical job binaries an SPU job manager streams through the same local store address, so a cached block could end up running against another job's code. It sums now.
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Thread affinity was compiled out on Android, and the core had no ARM big.LITTLE topology, so SPU and RSX threads were never placed on the fast cores.
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The LLVM JIT target was pinned to cortex-a34, an in order core from 2016. It detects the host now.
Building
Only arm64-v8a is supported. You need the Android SDK with NDK r27 or newer, CMake 3.30 or newer, and a JDK 17. Android Studio ships all of these.
Clone with submodules, then fetch the two third party checkouts that are not submodules:
git clone --recursive https://github.com/ARMSX2/ARMSX3.git
cd ARMSX3
git clone https://github.com/SnowflakePowered/librashader 3rdparty/librashader
git clone https://github.com/bylaws/libadrenotools android/armsx3-ui/app/src/main/cpp/libadrenotools
Build the core. This is the long part and produces an unstripped library of around 1.3 GB:
export ANDROID_HOME=$HOME/Library/Android/sdk
cmake -B build-android -G Ninja \
-DCMAKE_TOOLCHAIN_FILE=$ANDROID_HOME/ndk/<version>/build/cmake/android.toolchain.cmake \
-DANDROID_ABI=arm64-v8a -DANDROID_PLATFORM=android-31 \
-DCMAKE_BUILD_TYPE=RelWithDebInfo
cmake --build build-android --target rpcsx-android -j8
Strip it and put it where the app expects it:
llvm-strip --strip-unneeded build-android/android/libarmsx3-core.so
cp build-android/android/libarmsx3-core.so \
android/armsx3-ui/app/src/main/jniLibs/arm64-v8a/
Then build the app:
cd android/armsx3-ui
export JAVA_HOME="/Applications/Android Studio.app/Contents/jbr/Contents/Home"
./gradlew :app:assembleRelease
The apk lands in app/build/outputs/apk/release/.
Note that the core library has to be rebuilt and copied again whenever anything under rpcs3/ or android/src/ changes. Gradle does not build it for you.
The Discord Social SDK is proprietary and is not redistributed here. Get it from Discord's developer portal and drop it in app/libs/ and app/src/main/cpp/discord_sdk/ if you want that feature. The build skips it otherwise.
Running it needs PS3 firmware, which is not included. License
GPL-2.0-only, the same as RPCS3. See LICENSE. Some files may be licensed differently, check the file headers.
Based on RPCS3, https://github.com/RPCS3/rpcs3