If you’ve been following the x86 emulation scene, the community has essentially landed on two main competitors; Gamehub and GameNative, with the OG Winlator and its forks still growing in the background. GameNative, originally forked off of Pluvia, has been a major community effort to bring x86 emulation to the mainstream with ease on Android, and May 30th, marks the pre-release of version 1.0, and a lot of changes with that.
The full changelog on their GitHub can be found here, but some notable standouts for GameNative 1.0 include:
- Vulkan Renderer: The Vulkan render has been brought over from Winlator Ludashi to help improve performance in game, and reduce latency.
- Modern GameNative App for Android (and Play Store): There is now a build of GameNative for Android 11+ that will be supported by the Google Play Store (hopefully in the near future). The downsides to this Modern APK include No D Drive Access, No Custom Game Support, no glibc support, and the external storage location has been moved. The Older APK for GameNative still remains.
- Updated Controller Implementations to improve performance reduce latency further
- Improved Shortcut Icons: using clientIcons instead of icon for Steam Shortcuts.
- Fixes for Steam Playtime Not Being Tracked after Sleeping the Device: Pretty self explanatory.
Again. Here’s the full changelog, with these highlights being bolded again:
- Brought in Vulkan Renderer from Winlator Ludashi (thank you @StevenMXZ) – improves performance and input latency
- Updated controller implementation by @AndreVto – improves performance and input latency in #1471
- Improvements to LSFG-vk framegen – should work more reliably. @xXJSONDeruloXx brought in lsfg-vk Android layer v1.0.2
- Added modern build of GameNative app for latest version of Android – for Play Store release Added beta bionic Steam implementation for online play with no Steam client overhead (back up your saves before using it) – by @joshuatam and me
- Updated controller implementation – fixes Kingdom Hearts 1.5 + 2.5 ReMIX by @AndreVto
- Several pulse audio fixes, reduced latency, reliably pause and resume by @joshuatam
- Improve perf HUD temperature sensor accuracy and GPU usage coverage by @xXJSONDeruloXx in #1406
- Automatic frontend sync for installed/uninstalled games by @vitormf in #1454
- Fix: Stuck loading screen during Mono/XAudio install by @Catpotatos in #1395
- Improve shortcut icons – use clientIcon instead of icon for steam shortcuts by @Raxcoms in #1402
- Faster boots – cache Steam save file hashes between syncs by @kiequoo in #1227
- Fix steam playtime not being tracked after sleeping the device or going offline – resend steam presence after reconnect by @xXJSONDeruloXx in #1278
- Cap Steam DL size to installSize to avoid gigantic dl size reporting. by @phobos665 in #1482 Allow sign in with Steam Guard TOTP code by @peanut250 in #1241
- Fixed stylus handling in TouchpadView by @ppsz in #1334
- Steam cloud save fix – Two Point Museum works by @kiequoo in #1465 Epic Offline Mode for offline launches by @phobos665 in #1467
- Fixed Steam games showing account name instead of user name by @utkarshdalal in #1492
- Fix games sometimes continuing to run threads in background when paused and eating battery by @Catpotatos in #1491
- Fix simultaneous dpad and left stick input by @Nightwalker743 in #1445
- Fix range button scrolling in touchmode by @Nightwalker743 in #1446 Fix touchscreen click-drag cursor tracking by @Nightwalker743 in #1449
- Fix hold gesture mouse click timing by @Nightwalker743 in #1450
- Fix: clear persona state and hide status picker on sign out by @ben-pearson in #1312
- Show remaining storage space in Storage Manager by @ben-pearson in #1321
- Fix: Exclude custom games from compatibility filter by @joshuatam in #1412 chore: fexcore-2605 by @phobos665 and @linkq in #1422
- Don’t block local launch when remote runs a non-Steam shortcut by @ben-pearson in #1396
- Fix: update child windows when parent geometry is changed by @AndreVto in #1436
- Fix graphics glitches – Remove TU_DEBUG=deck_emu default. by @phobos665 in #1481
- Fix: add Korean and Romanian to language switcher, sort by ISO code by @linkq in #1349
- i18n: extract booting splash tips into translatable string resources by @linkq in #1350
- Fix RenPy workshop mod duplication by @Ivantyaj in #1394
- Fix: add game fix for Danganronpa 2 (STEAM 413420) by @tlt21 in #1301
- Fix(envvars): escape spaces on round-trip; fix crash on save by @jeremybernstein in #1429
- Sync offline achievements on reconnect by @xXJSONDeruloXx in #1268
- Fix: Cleanup/remove unused functions etc. by @phobos665 in #1362
- Japanese translation by @utkarshdalal in #1475
- Fix: Improve process handling for reliable suspend/resume by @joshuatam in #1457
- Fix: Pause and resume PerformanceHudView with lifecycle by @joshuatam in #1463
- Attempted added support for USB external storage by @utkarshdalal in #1476
- Fix Steam ForegroundServiceDidNotStartInTimeException crash by @phobos665 in #1485
- Fix Steam achievement timestamps by @phobos665 in #1473
- Fix(steam/download): close race that hangs Update/Verify at 0% by @jeremybernstein in #1434
It’s impressive to see just how many people are helping with the GameNative App, and with developments for Play Store support underway, we can only hope to see the improvements continue to come down the line.
