Ice Rage — native port for Linux ARM handhelds

Runs Ice Rage (Mountain Sheep, 2012) natively on the R36S and similar handhelds. No emulator and no Android runtime: the game's own armeabi-v7a library is loaded straight into a Linux process by a bionic ELF loader, and the pieces of Android it asks for are implemented here by hand.

Bring your own game. This repository and its releases contain zero game content. You supply an APK you own; nothing is downloaded and no protection is circumvented.

Download the ready-to-use zip from the Releases page.

You need the OUYA build of net.mountainsheep.icerage, version 1.8 (October 2013).

The Google Play build will not work, and not for a reason any amount of button remapping can fix: it is touch-only, and the engine in the controller build rejects touchscreen events outright —

[W/native-activity] WARNING: Unknown input source (4098)!

4098 is AINPUT_SOURCE_TOUCHSCREEN. Feed it synthetic fingers and the menus never respond no matter what you press. That cost a full round of testing to work out, so it is here rather than buried in a troubleshooting section.

Do not unzip this into ports/ by hand. PortMaster's own FAQ warns that doing so can leave a port that never starts — it is how you end up without the execute bit and without the menu entry. Let PortMaster install it:

1. With the card in your computer, drop icerage.zip into PortMaster's autoinstall/ folder, unchanged:

   CFW	Folder
   ArkOS, dArkOS	/roms/tools/PortMaster/autoinstall/
   AmberELEC, ROCKNIX, JELOS, uOS	/roms/ports/PortMaster/autoinstall/
   muOS	/mmc/MUOS/PortMaster/autoinstall/
   Knulli	/userdata/system/.local/share/PortMaster/autoinstall/

2. Put your APK at ports/icerage/icerage.apk — same card, same trip, before it goes back in the console. Create the folder if it does not exist yet; the install will not remove it. That exact name, next to where the icerage binary will land:

   ports/
   ├── Ice Rage.sh
   └── icerage/
       ├── icerage            (the loader)
       ├── icerage.apk        ← yours, you add this
       ├── icerage.gptk
       ├── libs.armhf/
       └── assets/
   

   Watch the extension: some sites hand you something.5apk or .apk.zip, and it has to end in .apk.

3. Put the card back in the console and open PortMaster. It installs the port, sets the permissions and adds the menu entry. Close it when it is done.

4. Reboot the console. This step is not optional and it is the one everybody skips — see below.

5. Launch Ice Rage from the Ports menu.

The game will not appear in Ports until you reboot. PortMaster installs it correctly and then says nothing more: the autoinstall path never triggers the frontend refresh, so EmulationStation keeps showing the list it loaded at boot. Everything is on the card, it is simply not being listed yet. Reboot and it is there.

Do not use Reinstall or Uninstall under Manage Ports. Both re-download from PortMaster's own catalogue, and this port does not live there, so you get "unable to find a source for icerage.zip" — after the port has already been removed. That is how a working install turns into an empty Ports menu, and it is easy to do twice in a row while trying to fix the first one. To reinstall or update, drop the zip into autoinstall/ again.

Uninstall is also worth avoiding for a second reason: it deletes the whole port folder, your APK included.

"No internet connection" right after installing is harmless. PortMaster is trying to refresh its catalogue and fetch box art from its servers; this port is not in that catalogue, so there is nothing to fetch — the artwork ships in the zip. The install already succeeded.

If the APK is missing the port says so on screen, with the path it expects, instead of dropping you back to the menu with no explanation.

The OUYA build expects a controller, so the port hands it one — the pad goes through as a real gamepad, not as synthetic fingers.

That last row is not an omission. The engine dispatches keys through a jump table covering Android keycodes 19 to 107, so anything outside that range is discarded without a trace — which rules out BACK (4), BUTTON_START (108) and BUTTON_SELECT (109). All three look like the obvious choice for Start and none of them reach the game; it sends MENU (82) instead.

If the buttons land wrong, your handheld is lettered Xbox style (A at the bottom) rather than Nintendo style (A on the right). SDL names buttons by position and the silkscreen disagrees, so set this in Ice Rage.sh:

export ICERAGE_FACE_LAYOUT="${ICERAGE_FACE_LAYOUT:-xbox}"

The loader opens its window at the panel's own resolution (SDL's desktop mode) and tells the engine that size through eglQuerySurface, which is where an engine of this generation reads its resolution from. Given 1280x720 it issues a full-screen 1280x720 viewport of its own accord and lays the game out for it — measured under the headless harness, not on a 16:9 handheld.

scaled is the fallback for an engine layout that turns out wrong on some screen. In that mode viewport_scale_init remaps the engine's one full-screen viewport and every scissor rectangle onto the panel; anything the port paints itself in physical pixels — the cursor — goes through viewport_scale_map or it would stay trapped in the logical rectangle.

The shipped 4:3 splash override is switched off automatically on a panel wider than 1.40:1, because it is a crop of the game's own widescreen image and on a wide screen the APK's original is the one that fits. ICERAGE_ASSET_OVERRIDE_FORCE keeps it on.

• armhf userland with 32-bit GPU libraries. The game ships only an armeabi-v7a library, so the loader is 32-bit. Your CFW needs CONFIG_COMPAT in the kernel and 32-bit Mali libraries — the same bar as box86 and GMLoader. Devices without them (the TrimUI Smart Pro, for instance) cannot run this.
• glibc 2.29+, enforced at build time by tools/check_glibc_floor.sh against a bullseye toolchain. It used to be 2.38, which excluded ArkOS and AeolusUX.

Tested on an R36S (G80CA-MB V1.2, RK3326, Mali-G31) running dArkOSRE. That is the only device this has run on, so anything else is unknown rather than unsupported — reports welcome either way.

The port writes ports/icerage/log.txt on every run, and it is the only diagnostic anyone gets off a handheld. Open an issue with:

• your device and CFW (e.g. "RG40XXH, muOS 2410")
• log.txt from the failed run
• what you saw on screen

Lines worth knowing about:

Everything builds in a container, so the only dependency is Docker (or colima on macOS). The image is Debian bullseye on arm64 — native and fast on Apple Silicon — cross-compiling to arm-linux-gnueabihf. Bullseye is not nostalgia: its glibc 2.31 is the ceiling the shipped binaries are allowed to demand, and building on anything newer produces a port that will not load on ArkOS or AeolusUX. Dockerfile.build explains the rest, including why it vendors and builds SDL 2.0.22.

docker build -f Dockerfile.build -t icerage-build .
docker run --rm -v "$PWD":/src -w /src icerage-build make -j4

The binary lands at build/icerage. To assemble the libraries that travel in the zip:

docker run --rm -v "$PWD":/src -w /src icerage-build make libs

collect_libs.sh is deliberately picky about what ships: glibc, the dynamic linker and anything GPU-related must come from the device, never from the zip. make libs then runs tools/check_glibc_floor.sh over the binary and every bundled .so, and fails the build if any of them needs a glibc newer than the floor. That gate is the only thing that catches the problem: the harness runs on a modern host and a too-new binary passes it perfectly, then dies on the device with GLIBC_x.y not found.

harness/verify.sh runs the armhf binary under qemu-arm with Mesa llvmpipe and reports which milestone it reaches — loads, starts, gets a GL context, compiles shaders, opens assets, draws frames. It makes most iteration possible without touching the SD card.

It is not a substitute for the device. It has no joystick, no Mali driver and no KMSDRM, and it has produced convincing false results in both directions: a freeze that existed only under software rendering, and a framebuffer change that passed there and gave a black screen on Mali. Test on hardware as soon as the game draws anything.

• The log carries a warning that the music will be silent. Ignore it: audio works on the device, music included. The game asks OpenSL ES for a second player fed a compressed stream that the platform is meant to decode, and this port has no decoder for that path — but the game does not depend on it, and decodes its own Ogg elsewhere. The warning describes that unused player, not what you hear.
• The game asks for 1920x1080 on a 640x480 panel. It renders anyway, but the layout was not drawn for this aspect ratio. The port ships a 4:3 loading screen because the game's own is 16:9 and sat letterboxed.
• OUYA store integration is stubbed — purchases, receipts and the player-account lookups return empty, so the game behaves as if everything is unlocked and there is no network. getPlayerNumByDeviceId is part of that stub, so anything relying on per-controller player numbers is unverified.
• A few cosmetic textures are missing from this build of the game (Texture not found: ...Santa_Hat.png); they belong to content the APK does not carry.

Game by Mountain Sheep. Port by EapRules.

The ELF loader, the fake JNI and the bionic libc thunks derive from gmloader-next by JohnnyonFlame, itself descended from Andy Nguyen's Vita so-loader.

Released under GPL-3.0 — see LICENSE, and NOTICE.md for the full provenance of every borrowed part.