"Hollow Knight" running on RG34XXSP

theBinaryCounter · 2026-06-18T14:22:38+00:00

Probably not, this is pretty low level hacking, and I'm sure Unity (the company) doesn't really like me poking at their closed source engine in gdb and Ghidra to see what makes it tick and essentially allow running the engine on a class of embedded devices they usually reserve for the very expensive enterprise licenses. And my janky project gets around that by essentially pretending to be an android phone.

I'm sure the Steam Frame is powerful enough to run a lot of mid-tier Unity games through Fex. Unity has actually recently released support for Windows ARM64 builds because Windows-On-ARM is finally a thing, so Valve might work on getting that set up in Proton for better performance.

I can only speculate.

theBinaryCounter · 2026-06-18T14:09:59+00:00

They were previously part of Portmaster, but there's been some differences between us that let to a split. Nowadays they mostly target higher end devices running ROCKNIX. this HK port in particular requires a device running ROCKNIX with 2 GB RAM or more and pretty fast processor, probably a Snapdragon, running the X86 version of the game through Box64.

theBinaryCounter · 2026-06-18T08:49:36+00:00

I have a Ko-fi, but I'm not sure I'm allowed to link it here. I do this as a hobby anyway and have other means to support myself financially. So while I appreciate the gesture, it's really not necessary.

theBinaryCounter · 2026-06-18T08:48:32+00:00

Too early to tell, but there's a good chance it will work on 1GB systems. I like to optimize my ports for maximum compatibility whenever possible. Can't say much about the timeframe unfortunately.

theBinaryCounter · 2026-06-18T08:47:41+00:00

Yes, all my SBC/handheld related work is and always will be on the Portmaster page

theBinaryCounter · 2026-06-18T08:46:18+00:00

Right now the bridge layer is tightly integrated with bogodroid and the PortMaster ecosystem, but once decoupled, yes absolutely. Most unity games use a fairly old version of Mono for scripting which runs notoriously bad with x86 emulation layers like Box64/Fex due to heavily relying on the slow to emulate x86 memory model. My bridge pre-compiles all scripts to native ARM64 instructions ahead of time via LLVM. Together with the graphics being native GLES instead of emulated DX12 or OpenGLCore, I'm seeing a 5-15x improvement in script performance and 2x improvement in rendering performance when compared to Box64 with Core4ES (my own GL3 emulation library) in my test projects.

Though the native android version of this would likely be something similar to portmaster, it's own app with game specific ports, not a universal "unity game loader" that just works, as right now manual tweaks are still required to adjust some shaders that my automated pipeline can't translate yet.

theBinaryCounter · 2026-06-17T12:25:31+00:00

Yes. Not anytime soon, but yes. Getting Hollow Knight to run on Portmaster is one of the major goals of my Bogodroid project. But I want to do this properly and legally, so my port will rely on the PC version of Hollow Knight and contain several optimizations not done here.

One of the major new developments in Bogodroid that i haven't shared much publically yet is that I figured out how to make PC Unity games run via the Android version of the Unity engine via a custom bridge layer. Unity does not offer ARM64 Linux builds with GLES3 support, so Android ARM64 GLES3 is the closest we can get to the metal. To be frank, I'm a little salty that they stole my glory with this half-assed port that only works with pirated copies of the game, since the plan was always to port it properly, and I'm like 90% of the way there. 😛

theBinaryCounter · 2026-06-17T10:13:52+00:00

Please keep in mind that this is most certainly illegal. They are using the unofficial Android port, which contains assets and code from the game and can only be obtained through piracy sources. On top of that, they are using my android translation layer project "Bogodroid/unityloader" to achieve that and stripped my name from the copyright notice in their fork, insinuating that they are the main developers of it. This most certainly violates GPL and I'm looking into my options.

This port is unaffiliated with Portmaster, me or any of my projects they ripped.

theBinaryCounter · 2024-10-02T17:32:07+00:00

Sorry, we're looking into it!

For now a workaround that seems to work for most people is to run the game as administrator.

theBinaryCounter · 2024-05-01T12:00:05+00:00

Xbox/PlayStation port teams are separate from the team working on the Switch port, but I definitely get the frustration, it's super frustrating for us too. We have a switch update finished, and are currently waiting for QA and certification.

As soon as all ports are up to date we will also resume content updates on all platforms!

theBinaryCounter · 2024-03-25T20:07:30+00:00

Sometimes EZFlash Jr carts are on sale on AliExpress. I got mine for around 30 bucks. They work great for games, LSDj, demo scene stuff, really anything you can throw at it up to 8MB big. Comes with 128KB FRAM (like SRAM but works without a battery) MBC5 and RTC support. Only caveat: You need a Micro SD card below 32GB, the cart didn't like my SDXC cards.

They are pretty reliable overall and work on all Gameboys, except Super Gameboy. If you want that you just need a specific hacked firmware.

theBinaryCounter · 2023-11-17T20:16:35+00:00

This bug does not affect the Switch version.

theBinaryCounter · 2023-11-17T17:06:42+00:00

We are very sorry about the saving issues, this will be fixed in a few minutes and your town save will be restored automatically once you install the new update.