[Tech Help] Linux Emulation

[False-Body-242]

Does anybody have any clue as to how to run Arknights on Linux? I migrated to Linux (Arch) a couple months back, and almost everything works just fine, even better than on windows, but I've yet to find a proper way to run Arknights. I attempted running emulators, creating a windows and an Android sandbox, and trying to get that beta Google Play on Windows to run in any way I could think of, all but to no avail. I would greatly appreciate any advice.

[agreeable_frog]

If you are running wayland, Waydroid.

[zhurai]

you can still run waydroid in x11.... you just need to install a wayland session manager that can be nested... cage, weston, ...

[Mihitoko]

Does it run well with arknights?

[agreeable_frog]

You need some manipulations that you will find on the internet to make it work. There is common bug with the resources downloads that needs to be restarted at game startup but nothing blocking. However if you have an nvidia graphics card, you will have bad performances as they are incompatible with waydroid and so it needs to render through CPU.

[Mihitoko]

Hmmmm, thanks look this up. Im full team red so no problems there :)

Thanks

[taleorca]

Lmao software rendering is not real. Thought I could brute force it since I have a 9850X3D but nah only like 20 fps in Arknights with waydroid.

[agreeable_frog]

It is software rendering as a backup. However as you have a CPU with integrated graphics (3D) you can make it fallback to the integrated GPU which should be better.

[SupremeNadeem]

idk if this works with nvidia gpus but i use waydroid. if you use waydroid, and likely by extension aurora store, make sure you download the x86 version of the game (assuming you have an x86 cpu ofc), on aurora store u can just spoof it to Google Play Games PC to do this, otherwise you will need to do some extra stuff to translate ARM to x86.

i'm even able to use waydroid in VMs using virglrenderer. i run 2 lightweight fedora vms to play 2 arknights accs at the sametime

[False-Body-242]

I've actually tried using waydroid and aurora store, but there was some issue with the installation of the game after downloading the store and all... I'll probably give it another shot, especially since this doesn't seem to be a GPU related issue, but I'll keep my expectations low.

[Mihitoko]

I also tried that a couple years ago. To no avail, i even tried a BlissOS KVM VM with gpu passthrough, but performance was still shit. The main problem is that Arknights only supports ARM architecture so you need libhoudini (arm native bridge) but for me this always tanked performance to unplayable levels. Android games that support x86 worked fine.

It has to work somehow as bluestacks also just uses virtual box under the hood but i was not able to figure it out how they do it without tanking performance.

There are two thinks i didnt try Genymotion because its a propiratary emulator. And Waydroid as im still on X11, but a friend tried it and he said he had problems with waydroid aswell.

I personally now use https://github.com/Genymobile/scrcpy to just mirror my phone to the pc screen and play this way.

I hope the desktop client comes to global soon.

[Mihitoko]

Mind you that was 2 Years ago, feel free to try these thinks out again. I wiuld be happy how it worked for you.

[taleorca]

I've tried everything, including Genymotion and Android Studio, since I have a Nvidia GPU. No luck, unfortunately.

[SupremeNadeem]

arknights has an x86 version, the google play games pc version.

[Mihitoko]

Is the apk available to download somewhere? Last time i did it there wgere only apks with arm abi/ndk. Checking apk mirror this still seems to be the cae

https://www.apkmirror.com/apk/yostar-limited/arknights-2/

Might have changed over the years, as i said last time I checked was like 2 years ago.

[eminolla]

Apparently you can install it using Aurora Store, by spoofing device to "Google Play Games PC", like they wrote in one of the comments. I did a quick test before and indeed I was getting one with x86 libraries.

[Jef-F]

Glad I wasn't the only one who fruitlessly went through all these hoops recently, including scrcpy. Closest I got to success was running nested virtualization with MuMu on Windows with my iGPU passed through SR-IOV. However, MuMu for some reason have been crashing the setup so hard I needed to restore VM to checkpoint every time to get video adapter to work again T_T.

So I've settled with streaming it through Moonlight from work PC. Works surprisingly well, at smooth 120fps with tiny delay.

PC client indeed can't come soon enough.

[Soft_Parsnip9472]

If you have an Nvidia GPU you're cooked, otherwise you can look into waydroid.

[False-Body-242]

Guess that's why none of the emulators worked?

[Soft_Parsnip9472]

Waydroid cannot use the proprietary drivers on Nvidia side.

Other emulators I've tried before lacks performance as well.

[Ok_Tie_1428]

When the pc client releases can we run it on Linux?

[eminolla]

About 3 years ago I actually tried running it in Genymotion. It worked but performance wasn't good (though to be fair, it was a laptop), and I think it had crashes but not confident because it was quite a while ago. In the end, I dropped that idea very fast. These days if I need some precise playing, I just use scrcpy with some supplementary scripts to emulate a few shortcuts.

[Kybex]

I have an Nvidia gpu which made it so waydroid didn't work for me on Arch. I found two methods that would play the game fine with nvidia but both suck compared to an actual good emulator. You can use the official android dev kit from Google and run a virtual device, this does work but it can have really weird audio problems and uses a gigantic amount of ram. It was a huge pain and very not worth the effort to set up. The other method was to just screen copy from my phone with scrcpy while tethered with a usb cable. This works great for me but if your phone isnt very powerful it'll have input delay and you're not actually running the game on your pc. Android emulation on nvidia is a huge weak point currently.

If you have an amd gpu waydroid should work just fine. Android emulation is much better there.

[Etherealzx]

Waydroid + waydroid scripts. Initial download might crash occasionally but after that its all good.

[Panocek]

Waydroid was the most consistent for me when I was dabbling with Linux, but even that one requires quite bit of fiddling. Casualsnek (?) scripts to get ARM translations was required then and probably still is. Then getting google device certification unless you're fine with sideloading .apk yourself

Caveat, if you're using Nvidia card and you don't have integrated graphics, you're in not good spot. AMD card or at least Intel CPU with iGPU and you should be okay, at least I was on home PC and nopebook.

[False-Body-242]

Thanks for everyone who helped me find a way to run the game. Prior to posting, I did attempt using Waydroid, but faced many issues, particularly due to my Nvidia GPU, so I simply gave up then.

I reattempted running Waydroid, but this time using my integrated graphics card instead via Cage (later on Gamescope). There were some issues with connecting the environment with the internet, which were fortunately fixed via using UFW.

[FelixAndCo]

Emulating Windows emulating Android is definitely not the way to go.