N.O.V.A. 3: Near Orbit Vanguard Alliance — PortMaster port

Native Android→Linux port of Gameloft's 2012 science-fiction shooter for ARM handhelds (R36S and family). Bring your own game: install the release ZIP through PortMaster's autoinstall, drop your own v1.0.7 APK plus both OBB expansion files in ports/nova3/, and the first launch imports and validates them automatically. The OBBs are accepted as loose files, as an Android/obb backup zip, or as that backup's extracted package-named folder — whichever your copy came as. No game data is ever distributed.

This README's controls section is the authoritative map — the game was designed for a touchscreen plus the Xperia Play's and MOGA's controls, and this port spells all of it with buttons.

Controls

Combat

Control	Action
Left stick	Move
Right stick	Camera / aim
R1 or R2	Fire
L1 or L2	Aim down sights
A	Throw grenade / throw the selected item
B	Jump / interact / fly
X	Cycle items
Y	Use power
D-pad Up	Sprint
D-pad Down	Quick weapon change
D-pad Right	Reload
L3 (left stick click)	Weapon change
R3 (right stick click)	Action
Start	Pause menu

The engine ignores a button whose action does not apply right now — no grenades carried, a full magazine, nothing to interact with. That is the game, not a missing binding.

D-pad Left sends a key the engine accepts but whose effect has not been identified on hardware yet. It is left bound rather than removed, so that a player who works out what it does can say so.

Menus

Menu screens are touch-first, so the port raises a pointer there automatically — no modifier to hold. The engine itself is asked whether it is in a menu, so the switch happens on its terms, not on a guess.

The one thing to know: menus work like a touchscreen, not like a console UI. Move the pointer over a button with the right stick and tap it with A. A only acts on what is under the pointer — if the pointer is parked in a corner, A looks dead. R3 answers the engine's own "accept", which is why it seems to select things A doesn't.

Control (in menus)	Action
Right stick	Move the pointer
A, L2 or R2	Tap at the pointer
D-pad	Menu navigation
Select / R3	Accept (the engine's own)

Tuning (launcher environment variables)

Variable	Default	Effect
NOVA3_RPAD_SCALE	100	Camera speed, as a percentage of the engine's acceleration ramp (25–400)
NOVA3_SCALE	fit	Panel scaling: fit keeps 4:3 and letterboxes, stretch fills the panel, integer scales by a whole number
NOVA3_GL_SINGLE_DISPATCH	1	Resolve the interposed GL calls through SDL's own dispatch

On a real 640×480 panel NOVA3_SCALE is identity — nothing is scaled.

The first launch takes a while

The engine never reads its own OBB containers: on Android the store installer unpacked them, and that installer is not part of this port. So the port opens the containers itself and unpacks each asset the first time the engine asks for it. The consequence is that the first boot, and the first minutes of a level you have not played yet, are noticeably slower than later ones. The containers stay where they are; only what the game actually touches is unpacked beside them.

Status

Playable on hardware: the campaign runs, the control map above is settled from hardware sessions, and the eapx first-boot import is in place.

Known and honest about it:

• D-pad Left sends key 122, which the engine accepts and whose effect is still unidentified.
• The audio mixer logs OpenSL buffer underruns ("device draining at 100%") while sounding correct on the device. The watermark has not been retuned.

ROCKNIX

Set the device's GPU driver to libmali (ROCKNIX's own setting; gpudriver reports the current one). The port has been confirmed running that way on an RG DS.

In panfrost mode it now reaches a live GL context — earlier releases could not, because the port's bundled libraries shadowed what Mesa's driver needed and glvnd then loaded no driver at all — but it renders black and crashes shortly after. That is a fixed-function GLES 1.1 path on Mesa/Panfrost, which is a different problem from this port's; the crash lands on an address that is really the value of GL_NEAREST, so somewhere a call goes through what the engine stored as an enum. Recorded here in case anyone wants to pick it up.

Tested devices

Device	CFW	Result
R36S	ArkOS-based	Developed and tested here — campaign playable
RG35XXH	Knulli Gladiator II	Works great (community report; first load is slow — it is a big game)

Reports from other devices are welcome: open an issue with device, CFW and version, and ports/nova3/log.txt attached.