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.

How does a 2013 Android binary run natively on ARM Linux? The loader, the hand-built Android surface, the runtime-dlsym trap and the verification method are documented in TECHNICAL.md.

Which APK — read this first

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.

Install

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.

Read this before deciding the port is broken

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.

Controls

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

Control	Does
Left stick	skate
A (right-hand button)	shoot, check, accept
B (bottom button)	secondary / back
L1, R1	shoulder buttons, also act in the menus
Start	the game's own menu
X, Y, L2, R2, stick clicks	passed through as Android gamepad keys
Select	nothing — the engine has no entry for it

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}"

Requirements

• 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 2.38+.

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.

Reporting a problem

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:

In the log	Meaning
missing game file on screen	the APK is not where the port expects it
GL: no Mali blob found	no 32-bit GPU libraries on this CFW — the port cannot run here
unresolved symbol	the loader is missing a shim; please report it, it is fixable
stopped presenting after N frames	the game froze; include N

Building

Everything builds in a container, so the only dependency is Docker (or colima on macOS). The image is Debian arm64 — native and fast on Apple Silicon — cross-compiling to arm-linux-gnueabihf.

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 tools/collect_libs.sh

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.

Verifying without the console

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.

Known issues

• 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.

Credits and licence

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.